A Dublin Odyssey June 17, 2002
Bloomsday: The Legend
 If you were strolling through Ireland's capital city, Dublin, on Sunday, you likely witnessed some curious sights and activities. Women out walking with parasols, dressed in bloomers and Edwardian frocks; men in striped jackets with walking sticks and boater hats; fried sheep's kidneys served for breakfast; cyclists racing antique bikes through the streets; restaurants offering mock-turtle soup and gorgonzola sandwiches; politicians and actors standing at street corners, reading aloud from copies of the same book.

Every June 16, Dubliners take to the streets to celebrate the festival known as Bloomsday. Bloomsday marks the anniversary of a journey taken by Leopold Bloom through the streets of Dublin on June 16, 1904. It is celebrated in more than 60 countries worldwide, in cities from Nairobi to Rio de Janeiro, but nowhere with as much enthusiasm and banter as in Dublin.

Those who join in the festival retrace Bloom's steps and re-enact the particulars of his day: where he went, whom he met, what he ate and drank.

So who was Leopold Bloom, and why is his journey celebrated throughout the world?

Bloom's Day Out
 Like Hercules and Sherlock Holmes, Leopold Bloom is a fictional character who has assumed a larger-than-life status. As famous as he is, Bloom never existed — he is a creation of the Irish writer James Joyce.

In his most famous work, Ulysses, Joyce describes a day in the life of Leopold Bloom, from 8 a.m., when we witness him preparing kidneys for his breakfast, to 2 o'clock the following morning, when he returns home from his travels around the city.

  • Leopold Bloom is not the only fictional character who has assumed a life of his own outside the story he was created for. Can you think of any more? Read about some famous fictional heroes and heroines at Fictional100.com.

Joyce wanted Ulysses to serve as a blueprint of life in Dublin in 1904. While Joyce was writing Ulysses, he said to a friend, "I want to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city one day suddenly disappeared from the Earth, it could be reconstructed out of my book."

The body of Ulysses contains many detailed descriptions of the streets and landmarks, familiar smells, sounds, and characters that Bloom passes on his travels, all of which depict the Dublin of the day.

Reading these excerpts from Ulysses will give you an idea of how Joyce set about immortalizing his hometown through the eyes of Leopold Bloom:

By lorries along Sir John Rogerson's Quay, Mr. Bloom walked soberly, past Windmill Lane, Leask's the linseed crusher's, the postal telegraph office... past the sailors' home. He turned from the morning noises of the quayside and walked through Lime Street. By Brady's cottages a boy for the skins lolled... a smaller girl with scars of eczema on her forehead eyed him, listlessly holding her battered caskhoop.

As he set foot on O'Connell Bridge a puffball of smoke plumed up from the parapet. ...He crossed at Nassau street corner and stood before the window of Yeates and Son, pricing the field glasses. Or will I drop into old Harris's and have a chat with young Sinclair? Well-mannered fellow. Probably at his lunch.

Listen to a reading of a passage from Ulysses. (Requires QuickTime. Download now.)

  • Imagine that you were asked to map your city/town/neighborhood in words. What would you write?

  • Try writing a description of a journey you take every day in your area. Think of the smells, sights, sounds, and characters that make it different from any other place in the world.

  • Take a tour of some of the places in Dublin that Leopold Bloom visited and that are revisited by Joyceans on Bloomsday.
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Joyce's work Ulysses developed from his original idea of writing a modern version of Homer's Odyssey. The Greek poet Homer is believed to have written his epic poem in the eighth century B.C. The central character of Homer's Odyssey is the Greek king and war-hero, Odysseus, or Ulysses, as he is also known. The poem describes the 10-year journey of Ulysses, as he battles with many obstacles on his way home from the Trojan War.

Joyce's Leopold Bloom is a modern-day version of Homer's Ulysses. In Ulysses, Joyce transferred the action of the poem to modern-day Dublin, and rewrote the wanderings of Ulysses as a 'day in the life' of Leopold Bloom as he journeys through Dublin.

The Banning of Ulysses
 Joyce wrote Ulysses between 1914 and 1921, during which time he lived in Italy, France, and Switzerland. In 1919, before the book was completed, he agreed to sell the manuscript to John Quinn, an Irish-American lawyer and patron of the arts, who lived in New York. Between 1920 and 1922, Joyce sent segments of the manuscript to Quinn, for which Joyce received a total of $1,200. The final draft was published in France on February 2, 1922 — Joyce's 40th birthday.

Sentimental Journey
 Joyce began to write Ulysses in 1914, but he chose to set the action of the book on June 16, 1904, to mark the day he met his future wife, Nora Barnacle, in Dublin.

The couple eloped to Italy in 1904 and lived for the rest of their lives outside Ireland.

Writing by Hand
 James Joyce wrote Ulysses by hand. In the year 2000, the original manuscript of Ulysses, consisting of 837 handwritten pages, was brought to Dublin and exhibited there for the first time since it was written.

The manuscript has been on display since 1952 at the Rosenbach Museum in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. You can visit the Museum's Web site.

Modernizing Myths
Joyce used many different devices to 'translate' Homer's Odyssey to a modern urban setting:

The main characters of Homer's Odyssey each have counterparts in Ulysses. Besides Leopold Bloom, who represents Ulysses, Molly Bloom (Bloom's wife) and Stephen Dedalus (Bloom's friend's son) represent the characters of Penelope and Telemachus, who are Ulysses' wife and son in Homer's Odyssey.

There are 18 chapters or "episodes" in Joyce's Ulysses. Joyce gave each chapter a name that reflects the voyage of Homer's Ulysses.

"Circe" is the title of Chapter 15 of Joyce's Ulysses. In his poem, Homer describes how Ulysses encountered the goddess Circe, who cast a spell over his crew that turned them into pigs. Joyce makes a connection between this episode and the slovenly behavior of his characters in the "Circe" episode of Ulysses.

In his poem, Homer describes how Ulysses and his crew come across the cave of the Cyclops — a mythological one-eyed giant. And in the "Cyclops" episode of Ulysses, the bar in which the action takes place is the urban equivalent of the Cyclops' cave.

However, the story of Ulysses does not end there. After it was published, a small number of copies of the book were shipped to New York for distribution. These copies were held by the postal authorities, and the book was banned in the United States shortly afterward on the grounds of obscenity. The case of Ulysses went to court. In 1933, a District Court judge lifted the ban, allowing Ulysses to be published in the United States in 1934.

Joyce's Ulysses has been named as one of the greatest 10 books to be published in the twentieth century. For a book that caused much scandal when it was published, Ulysses is now translated into more than 30 languages and is one of the most widely read books in the world.

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