Bloomsday

BLOOMSDAY – THE HISTORY

Bloomsday celebrates the day on which the action of James Joyce’s novel Ulysses takes place on 16 June 1904. According to Richard Ellmann’s biography, Joyce chose June 16th as a gift to his partner and later wife, Nora – to commemorate the day on which she first went for a romantic stroll with him and changed his life forever.

The day is named after Leopold Bloom, the central character in Ulysses. The novel follows the life and thoughts of Leopold Bloom and a host of other characters – real and fictional – from 8am on 16 June through to the early hours of the following morning.

One of the earliest Bloomsday celebrations was a Ulysses lunch, organised by Sylvia Beach, publisher ofUlysses, and her partner Adrienne Monnier in France in June 1929. Joyce and thirty other guests were invited to a luncheon at the Léopold restaurant near Versailles, to honour both the publication of the French translation of Ulysses and Bloomsday’s 25th anniversary.

Bloomsday as we now know it, owes its origin to the fiftieth anniversary celebration in Dublin, on 16 June 1954. Irish writers Flann O’Brien and John Ryan organised a group of Dublin’s intelligentsia for  what was to be a day long pilgrimage along the Ulysses route. Ryan had engaged two horse drawn cabs of the old-fashioned kind, which in Ulysses Mr. Bloom and his friends drive to poor Paddy Dignam’s funeral. They planned to travel round the city through the day, visiting in turn the scenes of the novel, ending at night in what had once been the brothel quarter of the city, the area which Joyce had called Nighttown. The pilgrimage was abandoned halfway through, when the weary Lestrygonianssuccumbed to inebriation and rancour at the Bailey pub in the city centre, which Ryan then owned.

On June 16 1967, a gathering of Joyce scholars took place in Dublin for the inaugural James Joyce Symposium. This biennial event has grown from strength to strength and will be held in Dublin for the seventh time in 2012. Sponsored by the International James Joyce Foundation, the symposium has also taken place in many of the cities in which Joyce lived, Zurich, Trieste, Rome, and Paris. The symposium has also travelled to lots of other European cities, including Copenhagen, Venice, Frankfurt, Monaco, Seville, London, Budapest, Tours, and Prague.