Celebrating Ulysses: Bloomsday 2012

June 16th, Dublin. It is 8am and rain is teasing a small group gathered outside 7 Eccles Street. On the portico of the Georgian house two men in simple black suits emerge from the shuffling crowd and casually start speaking the opening lines of Leopold Bloom’s section in Ulysses:

“Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liver slices fried with crustcrumbs… most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine…”

June 16 is the date in 1904 that is depicted in Ulysses, James Joyce’s notorious novel, and that has occasioned a celebration known as ‘Bloomsday’ after the book’s protagonist, Leopold Bloom…Paul O’Hanrahan with his Balloonatics Theatre Company has been performing Ulysses as Bloomsday street theatre for 25 years.

O’Hanrahan is a trained actor and scholar, but his Bloomsday performance, like the contributions of so many others, is born from a pure love of the words and purpose of James Joyce. Each committed reader will develop their own theme: for some, Ulysses is a call for artistic and personal freedom, for others it is a love story set against the betrayals and flaws of the human heart, others hear it as a cry of despair for an exhausted culture whose backward-looking revival threatened artistic paralysis.

But for the many of the group gathered outside Eccles Street, watching as Leopold speaks cat language and considers the world from the eyes of his “pussens”, it is a book of connection. This connection, the rare and poignant meeting of beings in a world of consumerism, struggle and hatred, is what brings Joyceans together from all over the world to celebrate and honour (and perform in) this epic novel revealing one day in the life of an ordinary man.

I cannot tell you here what the book is about: to reduce 1,000 pages of narrative to a pithy summary invokes just the kind of superficiality that Joyce’s writing revolts against. Ulysses is a virtuoso exploration of the power of language, playing with style and form to reflect the book’s events and characters. This is part of what makes Dublin’s Bloomsday so exquisite: for the reader to hear the words performed, to see anew the patterns and images and artifacts of the book, increases our understanding. We eat the words with relish.