DaithaiC

An Irish expat in London casting a cold eye on life.

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Daithai C: James Joyce and Me

Feed : daithaic.blogspot.com | Updated : 2008-08-24 16:26:58 | View original story

DaithaiC

Sunday 24 August 2008 At 16:26

Today, in my hometown of Dublin, hundreds of people gather to celebrate Bloomsday, the annual event dedicated to the lead character in James Joyce’s Ulysses. Bloomsday re-enacts the epic journey through the capital undertaken by Leopold Bloom on June 16th 1904. The name derives from Leopold Bloom, the protagonist of Ulysses, and 16 June was the date of Joyce's first outing with his wife-to-be, Nora Barnacle, when they walked to the Dublin village of Ringsend. Nora Barnacle is the great constant of Joyce’s life, a chambermaid from Galway, who remained his rock, teacher, and a portable Ireland throughout their lives in exile. Indeed if you walk down Dublin’s Nassau Street at the side of Trinity College you will see in winter (when the leaves are off the trees) on the gable wall of the building where the college wall ends the outline of a sign for “Finns Hotel”, the long closed hotel where Joyce’s inamorta worked as a chambermaid. The narrator of Joyce’s Ulysses, Leopold Bloom is a non-practising son of a Hungarian Jew (Blum) and Dublin is viewed on this single day through his outsiders eyes in a narrative modelled on the structure of Homer’s Odyssey.

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