BLOOMSDAY, 16th June
James Joyce
Joyce wrote only a handful of books and they're all amazing! Here's the ending (4 mins.) of his short story, The
Dead (with the late, great Donal McCann, featuring Angelica Huston and
directed by her father, John): end of The Dead
But
why is Joyce world famous?
ULYSSES.
That's why. It's a mock-heroic title - the book being a parody of Homer's Odyssey - referring to his main
character, Leopold Bloom, whose heroic job is selling advertising space for a
local newspaper as he wanders around the streets of Dublin.
In
Eccles St., inner city Dublin, Bloom gets up in the morning, feeds the cat,
gives his wife, Molly, a cup of tea in bed and has his breakfast of fried
kidneys before he goes off to work. At around the same time, Stephen, a young
schoolteacher, gets out of bed at his accommodation in the bleak Martello Tower
in Dun Laoghaire, Dublin. (Today, it's the Joyce Museum).
The
year is 1904, June 16th. The huge novel is about a single day in the life of
Bloom and other Dubliners. Eighteen hours, eighteen chapters, each with a
different style. Each chapter also relates to a part of the human body and, of
course, to an episode in Homer's great Odyssey. There is no real plot and not
much happens. In fact, it's very ordinary.
Every year, on 16th June, Dubliners celebrate what they call Bloomsday. Actors and fans dress up in the elegant clothes that were worn in Dublin over a hundred years ago and with their admiring public, go through the activities that take place in ULYSSES, e.g. they start the day with the same breakfast as Bloom L and perform extracts from his works in Dun Laoghaire and all over Dublin throughout the day.
ULYSSES
is about ordinary people doing ordinary things on an ordinary summer's day in
Dublin.
But it is also extraordinary. Because of his ability to use language so well, Joyce brings these characters to life in a way that had never been done before. We suddenly find ourselves entering the constant flow of thoughts, not only in the main characters, but in other figures as well. The reader has to be very alert because we never know when the perspective is about to shift from one person doing something, to another person doing - or thinking! - something else. (This flowing technique is known as the 'stream of consciousness'. )
It is also a very human novel; there is no violence in it and each moment is ordinary and beautiful in its ordinariness.
Joyce
used a very large canvas to include all the ordinary details of everyday life
and in doing so, made them extraordinary.
Today,
when you walk through Dublin, you will see plaques in the footpaths marking the
spots where Bloom was, the shops and pubs he went into, and the extract from
ULYSSES which refers to that moment.
In the last chapter of the book, we see
Bloom at about 2 a.m. getting into bed with Molly after his 'Odyssey' in
Dublin. He sleeps on the other end of the bed because he knows Molly is
unfaithful. He knows that she had seen another man that afternoon - in that
very bed! But he loves her,
nevertheless. Then he falls asleep.
Then,
Molly starts thinking - she goes off on her own little mental Odyssey - about
her day and her past and her life in general. Her last thoughts are loving
memories about herself and Bloom when they were younger.
So for
the next sixty pages she thinks - six
very, very long sentences with no
punctuation whatsoever until the very last full-stop!
Here
are the last fifty lines on film! https://youtu.be/ii_aZ6djNkM
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