Ulysses: The Second Century! A 2023 Bloomsday Report

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• Ulysses:The Second Century! A 2023 Bloomsday Report
  A second century for Ulysses has begun, and readers are still arguing about the book!
• Richard J. Gerber

Bloomsday 2023 was a revelation as publicity flowing from last year’s centennial celebration generated greater than usual interest and discussion of Joyce’s novel. In fact, on the heels of a Covid-truncated 2022 Symposium in Dublin, this year’s renewed attention found more people than ever taking the plunge and reading Ulysses as well as Joyce’s other works in a widening gyre . . . and that assures his immortality!

A variety of new and returning in-person and online Bloomsday-related events sprang up at worldwide locations this year, an illustration of the ever more positive temper of our post-pandemic times; it was a kind of revived Spiritus Mundi. For instance, on 7 June, the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia hosted a costumed 1920s Parisian Soirée Toasting of Joyce and Sylvia Beach. In Cork, Ireland, a two-day celebration of Joyce and his connections with that city was observed on 16 and 17 June. In Dublin, Old Ghosts, produced by the Irish National Opera Company and streamed via OperaVision on Bloomsday, imagined Joyce in conversation with Nora Barnacle, Homer, and Penelope as he developed the character of Molly Bloom. And in New York, the Joyce Society sponsored its third annual festive reading of Ulysses outside the Dive, a restaurant on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. This year’s theme, “A Shout in the Street” (U 2.386), featured Elevator Repair Service, a creative performance troupe, which presented scenes from “Calypso” and “Lestrygonians.” Amsterdam Avenue was nearly blocked off as hundreds watched Bloom tear into his “rolled pith of bread” and Gorgonzola (U 8.850).

This year’s big news stories on the big day came via the internet. New York State announced a $10 million grant in support of construction of the University of Buffalo’s James Joyce Museum. The new exhibition space, 5,000 square feet, will provide greater visibility and access to the university’s more than 10,000 pages of Joyce’s working papers, notebooks, manuscripts, photographs, correspondence, portraits, publishing records, ephemera, and personal artifacts, as well as his private library and a complete collection of significant Joyce criticism. Watch this space for progress reports on the project and opening day celebrations. [End Page 445]

The Joyce Museum story burned up the “tubes of the internet,” as my father used to say. This was so much the case that Bloomsday news of the offering for sale of Stanislaus Joyce’s inscribed copy of his brother’s first Shakespeare edition of Ulysses was almost buried. Several copies of the first edition were seen for sale at the New York Antiquarian Book Fair in April. As predicted, this post-centennial glut tended to depress the market. However, Stannie’s copy bucks (no pun intended) that trend, and, with a price of $1.25 million, it is the first to crack the million-dollar threshold. If it had not been rebound, there is no telling what the asking price might have been!

Bloomsday week also brought word of the passing of Pulitzer prizewinning American novelist Cormac McCarthy (All the Pretty Horses, Blood Meridian, The Road, No Country for Old Men). We are reminded that, in a 2008 interview, conducted by Oprah Winfrey, McCarthy cited Joyce’s writing style as an influence. In particular, McCarthy said: “James Joyce is a good model for punctuation. He keeps it to an absolute minimum.” Someone should advise those who seek to change Joyce’s punctuation of this.

In a similar vein, recognizing the predominance of the internet in all our lives now, I agreed for the first time to participate actively in two Zoom meetings about Ulysses, with one convening two days before Bloomsday and a second on the evening of 16 June; in the past, I had been inclined to be a voyeur on such occasions. Leading a discussion on “Editing Joyce: Pound to Gabler,” I found that a consensus of the first group favored the proposition that Ezra Pound edited Joyce mostly in an effort to improve Joyce’s language, when Pound...