Dubliners celebrate Joyce epic 'Ulysses' through Bloomsday

DUBLIN, Ireland -- Dubliners are celebrating the centenary of Bloomsday and are showing their appetite for James Joyce and his masterwork, "Ulysses." But most agree that it's a taste more challenging than the novel's stomach-churning kidney breakfast.

Tens of thousands from Ireland and around the world are taking part in weeks of events climaxing Wednesday with the 100th anniversary of June 16, 1904, the fictional setting for Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus' epic odyssey through inner-city Dublin.

Joyce's use of myriad literary styles, Homeric allusions and revolutionary stream of consciousness combined to make "Ulysses" one of the most highly praised but inaccessible of books.

For the first time this year, annual celebrations of "Bloomsday" have mobilized thousands of ordinary Dubliners to celebrate a literary achievement that few fully appreciate. More than 10,000 locals at a Sunday outdoor breakfast on the capital's major thoroughfare, O'Connell Street, dined on fried kidneys in honor of the meal Bloom himself cooked up featuring "grilled mutton kidneys" with "a fine tang of faintly scented urine."

"It's time, finally, for Dubliners to take back ownership of Joyce," said Helen Monaghan, a grandniece of the Nobel-winning author, who acknowledges she has found her great-uncle's writings "hard work" and require much study.

Banned bookPublished originally in Paris in 1922, "Ulysses" was banned in Britain and the United States until the mid-1930s because of its vulgarity, mocking of religion and vivid descriptions of intestinal functions, masturbation, adultery and Dublin's red-light district. It wasn't freely available in Ireland until the 1960s, two decades after Joyce's death in 1941.

Monaghan, 33, recalls how her relatives long downplayed their connections to Joyce, who emigrated from Dublin in October 1904. After a brief visit home in 1912, he spent the rest of his life in self-imposed exile in Trieste, Italy, Paris and Zurich, Switzerland.

"Being related to 'that' Joyce was a major issue in my father's time. My grandmother, May Joyce, always said the family should not deny the relationship -- we just shouldn't boast about it," said Monaghan, who is administrator of the James Joyce Center, a central Dublin town house that opened 17 years ago to promote appreciation of the writer's life and works.

The first "Bloomsday" celebrations in Dublin weren't observed until June 16, 1954, when a handful of writers and poets piled into two horse-drawn carriages to sample several pubs connected to Bloom's fictional odyssey.

Fifty years later, "Bloomsday" now attracts literary tourists from all over the world. The challenge has been to broaden Joyce's appeal beyond the Joycean elite, who don Edwardian bowlers and bonnets -- only to be mocked by snide Dublin onlookers as "the prats in hats."

"In the past, Bloomsday deserved its reputation as an exclusive event that was largely for tourists and academics, but now we're bringing Bloomsday onto the streets," Monaghan said.

David Norris, one of Dublin's most outspoken and flamboyant Joycean scholars, says Dublin is "not as Joyce-illiterate as it once was."

"There's a general appreciation where once there was ignorant scorn," said Norris, who on Sunday delivered his own celebrated one-man stage tribute to the life and works of Joyce. "An amazing number of people have dipped in and out of 'Ulysses' -- nibbled around the edges, as it were."

The Joyce center is mounting its own traditional Bloomsday breakfast Wednesday, featuring readings from the book. The center has also hired actors to perform scenes from "Ulysses" at public places throughout the city center.

Also Wednesday, O'Connell Street will close again for parades, drama and music based on the book's "Parables of the Plums" episode, describing two women who scale the street's landmark column and spit plum stones onto passers-by below.

This weekend, the nearby River Liffey will feature a "Ulysses"-themed light show with monumental images being projected onto the riverbank buildings. And more than a dozen art galleries, cinemas, music venues and museums are offering their own displays of Joyce-inspired works.

But at most venues, organizers have feared possible complaints from Stephen Joyce, the writer's notoriously litigious grandson, who lives in France and who doggedly defends the copyright value of his grandfather's works.

Ireland's parliament passed emergency legislation last month that cleared the way for the National Library to display its previously unseen collection of Joyce's "Ulysses" manuscripts, purchased in 2002 for $15 million. Other events had to be curtailed or canceled, fearing they might breach copyright laws.

"It's one of the tragic ironies that James Joyce fought so hard against censorship and for freedom of expression, and his grandson fights so hard to prevent access to his work," Norris said. "I don't like bullies, and Mr. (Stephen) Joyce has made himself very unpopular about the place."

A biennial gathering of Joycean experts, last held in Dublin in 1992, began Saturday, involving more than 130 academics primarily from universities in the United States and continental Europe.

Some of the listed topics appear, in Joyce's own phrase, "high falutin' stuff." Among them: "The Transubstantiation of Stephen and Bloom; or How Our Heroes Lose Themselves in the Troubled Unity of Transcendence, Sign and Dissemination."

Irish Times columnist Kevin Myers has led attacks on what he calls "the pretentious shenanigans of the Joyce industry" and says the book is as rewarding to read as proofreading a telephone directory.

"The truth is that few revelers will have read any 'Ulysses' at all; some will have read only parts of it, and only with a great effort, before abandoning it; and just a tiny minority, the equivalent of the Hassidic Jewish population of Greenland, will have devoured it all with undiluted pleasure," Myers wrote in a column that annoyed and amused Joyceans in equal measure.

But Norris said it shouldn't matter a bit if a Bloomsday reveler hadn't read the work.

"If high-powered academics want to get snotty-nosed about it, that's their problem, but Bloomsday should be a broad church," he said. "What are we supposed to do -- have a police guard, questionnaires and lie detectors outside the breakfast making sure everybody involved has read 'Ulysses' from beginning to end?"

Stephanie Frerich, a Trinity College master's student who regularly escorts tourists to Joyce-associated streets and landmarks, agrees that some Joyceans come across as pretentious pains. But she says "Ulysses" deserves its reputation as the greatest novel of the 20th century.

"I've never encountered anything else so creative, with so many layers and all these characters, all encountered in a single day. And it's very rude and funny," said Frerich, who came to Ireland from St. Cloud, Minn., to study Joyce and other Irish writers.

On her twice-weekly sidewalk tours, Frerich must shout above the din of passing trucks and buses as she reads geographically precise Dublin scenes from Joyce's works. Often, the buildings to which she refers were torn down or transformed beyond recognition decades ago.

"Joyce was proud of his photographic recall of the Dublin he left behind in 1904, down to the order of every shop on O'Connell Street," she said, standing at the spot that was once 7 Eccles St., Bloom's fictional home, which today is actually the entrance to a hospital. "He provided the most vivid portrait imaginable of a Dublin that's all but gone."

------On the Net:

International Joyce Symposium, http://www.bloomsday100.org/index.php

ReJoyce Dublin 2004, http://www.rejoycedublin2004.com/default.asp

James Joyce Centre, http://www.jamesjoyce.ie/home/

National Library exhibition, http://www.nli.ie/new--what.htm