What's On column: Take a Bloomsday stroll around Joyce’s Dublin

The days are getting longer and the sun is threatening to break through the clouds. Bloomsday (June 16) was upon us last week.

This is a festival celebrating James Joyce’s book Ulysses (itself set on June 16, which was the day Joyce first stepped out with the love of his life Nora Barnacle).

Originally banned in England and the USA, the Irish Free State also took a dim view of the book. In 1954, Flann O’Brien, Anthony Cronin and Patrick Kavanagh went on a beer sozzled pilgrimage around the Dublin sites mentioned in the book.

At this point, Bloomsday was born.

It is 100 years since Joyce’s unique novel was published. Bloomsday this year should be an extra special event, then.

Highlights include Nora and Jim, a one act play by Nora Connolly and To Heaven by Water, a free walking tour along the Royal Canal. You can also catch a live reading from the book in Sweny’s Pharmacy (which featured in chapter five of the book and has been beautifully maintained by a team of volunteers).

If you don’t have time to visit any of these events, there is a very insightful documentary on the RTÉ Player called 100 Years of Ulysses, which does a good job of contextualising the societal, political and literary themes of the book.

Ulysses has a remarkably simple plot, set on one day and following the peregrinations of two men around Dublin.

One character (Stephen Dedalus) leaves the Martello Tower in Sandycove and at the same time his counterpart Bloom departs his house on Eccles Street to begin his journey around the city.

At the end of the day, and near the end of the novel, the two characters meet and return to Bloom’s house.

The density and complexity of the language and the range of different styles, changing from chapter to chapter, has proven an obstacle to generations of would-be readers.

But worry not. Ulysses is a book that can quite reasonably be dipped in and out of, all the better if one does so while sipping a pint in one of Dublin’s elegant Edwardian pubs. It could be said, to use a more modern term, that Joyce was trolling his readers. One can imagine him sitting at his desk and laughing heartily at the insertion of each in-joke and oblique reference.

Joyce wrote the book in Trieste, Zurich and Paris. He had left Ireland behind, tired of what he saw as its provincialism and tribal politics, but what is evident in the book is that he never turned his back on the country. He said he wanted to make such a book that, if Dublin were destroyed, Ulysses could be used to rebuild it brick by brick.

Joyce believed in the constitutional nationalism espoused by Parnell, and felt it was a national tragedy when his hero went to an early grave, hounded by church and state.

He saw the merits of a modern, pluralist democracy. For that reason, it is no mistake that the hero of Ulysses is an Irish Jew.

Published in the same year as the establishment of the Free State, Joyce would have advocated for the unravelling of the arms of church and government, not for them to become closer.

One character in the book remarks: ‘Our national epic has yet to be written’. Ulysses has aged better than most of its contemporaries and is rightly considered by many to be Ireland’s national epic.

It is a love letter to Dublin, and Bloomsday is a tribute to Joyce’s achievement.

For more information on all the events visit bloomsdayfestival.ie.