On June 16, 1904, James Joyce had his first date with his future wife, Nora Barnacle. Perhaps as a tribute to her, he chose to set the action of Ulysses, his monumental novel depicting a day in the life of Dubliner Leopold Bloom, on that date, and almost ever after June 16 has been celebrated by Joyceans as Bloomsday.
My legions of loyal readers know that formerly I marked Bloomsday each year by rereading "The Dead," the story that closes Dubliners. But it is more than 50 pages long in my paperback Portable Joyce and I am pinched for time, not to mention happily sunk in Bleak House, so today I read again the third story in the book, "Araby," about a young boy who realizes something about himself and life when he goes to a deserted bazaar to buy a gift for a girl he likes. The story, only 8 pages long, is available online here.
Certain sentences seem set off from the prevailing gray of the story. For example, the boy, surrounded by the hurly burly of a Dublin street, reports: "I imagined that I bore my chalice safely through a throng of foes." Chalice. It reminds you that the house the boy lives in was formerly inhabited by a priest, now dead, and has a "musty" smell. The whole notion of the sacred takes a beating in the fiction of James Joyce. What he puts up opposite it is on display in Ulysses, nowhere more brilliantly than in Molly Bloom's closing ruminations.
Happy Bloomsday!
Comments