(Yes Bloomsday is technically June 16 but linear time is a bourgeois conceit anyway)

Bloomsday is a commemoration and celebration of the life of Irish writer James Joyce, observed annually in Dublin and elsewhere on 16 June, the day his 1922 novel Ulysses takes place in 1904, the date of his first sexual encounter with his wife-to-be, Nora Barnacle, (read Joyce’s extremely NSFW but hilarious letters to his wife here) and named after its protagonist Leopold Bloom.

Ulysses is the quintessential modernist novel, taking place during a single day of two men traveling around Dublin in early 20th century Ireland. Through its stream of consciousness writing and crazy stylistic components, Joyce touches on a number of subjects, including the state of Irish nationalism and the crushed Irish spirit languishing under the English and the Catholic Church, relations between men and women, the cacophony of sounds and sights in an urban environment that seems to encompass the entire world, shitting and then wiping your ass with the newspaper you were just reading, and the total impossibility of escaping from history.

One line I particularly like is “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake,” which to me sounds very reminiscent of Marx’s famous proclamation that “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”

Ulysses is a joy to read, and has been (imo) vastly overanalysed by scholars the world over attempted to pry every bit of meaning out of a work that is certainly overstuffed with meaning, but is overall an attempt at fun experimentation in literature. Ulysses is meant to be enjoyed first, analysed second. If the book at all sounds interesting to you, I would recommend giving it a go. Know that you don’t need to understand everything (or even 30%!) to have a good time. It took a few rereads before I really got a lot of what the book was trying to do.

Literature is not supposed to be this big pretentious thing, it’s supposed to be universal and enjoyable and liberatory. Ulysses is the perfect example of that spirit: the book is about Leopold Bloom, who’s just an everyday sort of guy. His wife is fucking other men, he likes talking to people and eating sandwiches, and who doesn’t love a nice masturbation session on the beach? But in making Bloom the main character, and the book taking course over one day, Joyce shows that even the most banal and ordinary of days can be something that is indicative of the human spirit towards life, something extraordinary because life itself is extraordinary. It’s a liberatory novel that celebrates the everyday, the here and now, and it’s totally worth reading.

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