{"id":3611,"date":"2025-06-13T14:56:35","date_gmt":"2025-06-13T13:56:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/specialcollections\/?p=3611"},"modified":"2025-07-16T14:42:34","modified_gmt":"2025-07-16T13:42:34","slug":"bloomsday-2025-celebrating-ulysses-by-james-joyce","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.qub.ac.uk\/specialcollections\/bloomsday-2025-celebrating-ulysses-by-james-joyce\/","title":{"rendered":"Bloomsday 2025: Celebrating Ulysses by James Joyce"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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A selection of material exploring the world of James Joyce’s Ulysses<\/em><\/strong> is now on display on <\/strong>the first floor <\/strong>of the McClay Library. Set over the course of a single day \u2013 16 June 1904 \u2013 the novel follows three Dubliners: Leopold Bloom, Molly Bloom and Stephen Dedalus. Blending stream-of-consciousness narration, satire, and linguistic experimentation, Ulysses<\/em> echoes elements of Homer’s Odyssey<\/em>, reimagining myth within the context of everyday life in Dublin. The day it depicts, now known as Bloomsday<\/strong>, is celebrated by readers around the world each year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The First Edition and the Women behind Ulysses’ Publication<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

“Our national epic has yet to be written” <\/h2>\n\n\n\n

– Ulysses<\/em> Episode. 9, Scylla and Charybdis<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Written over a seven-year period, Ulysses<\/em> was first published by Sylvia Beach<\/strong> in 1922. Special Collections holds a first edition<\/a><\/strong> of the novel, number 526 of 1,000 copies. It features its original paper covers, bound in hard boards, with full green leather binding, gold tooling and five raised bands on the spine. Joyce requested that the cover of Ulysses<\/em> match the blue of the Greek flag, a nod to the classical myth that inspired his modern epic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Joyce’s masterpiece may not have reached readers without the efforts of several radical women who defied the stringent censorship laws of their time and championed literary modernism. In 1918, Margaret Caroline Anderson<\/strong> and Jane Heap<\/strong> first published episodes of the novel in serial form in their avant-garde American literary magazine, The Little Review<\/em>. Their work was cut short when they were prosecuted in the Ulysses<\/em> obscenity trial in 1921. In 1922, Sylvia Beach<\/strong> \u2013 the American-born founder of the English-language bookshop Shakespeare and Company in Paris \u2013 offered to publish Ulysses <\/em>following discussions with Joyce about his difficulties securing a publisher. Alongside Harriet Shaw Weaver<\/strong>, whose patronage made the writing of Ulysses<\/em> possible, these women\u2019s commitment to modernist literature and refusal to conform to moral and cultural restrictions was vital in securing Ulysses<\/em> its place in history. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Painting Joyce<\/h1>\n\n\n\n

“The supreme question about a work of art is out of how deep a life does it spring.” <\/p>\n\n\n\n

– Ulysses<\/em> Episode 9. Scylla and Charybdis<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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Louis Le Brocquy, The Head Image: Interviews with the Artist<\/a><\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

Louis le Brocquy<\/strong> (1916-2012), one of Ireland’s most celebrated painters, was drawn to Joyce both as a fellow Dubliner and a radical explorer of consciousness. Le Brocquy created nearly 120 studies of Joyce, aiming, in his words, “to draw from the depths of paper or canvas changing and even contradictory traces of James Joyce.” These fragmented portraits mirror the complexities of selfhood explored in Ulysses<\/em>, moving beyond physical likeness to evoke the writer’s interior world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Dear Dirty Dublin<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

“As he set foot on O’Connell bridge a puffball of smoke plumed up from the parapet.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

– Ulysses<\/em> Episode 8. Lestrygonians<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Ewart 3.1.10 1836, Dublin<\/em>, from the Ewart Map Collection<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Though written in Trieste, Zurich and Paris, Ulysses<\/em> is firmly rooted in Dublin. The city rings out from the novel \u2013 its streets, smells, voices and rhythms vividly brought to life. From Leopold Bloom\u2019s lunchtime gorgonzola sandwich and glass of burgundy in Davy Byrne\u2019s pub, to Paddy Dignam\u2019s funeral procession from Sandymount to Glasnevin Cemetery, Joyce offers readers a rich sense of life in Dublin in the early 20th<\/sup> Century. He achieves this not by laying out the city in tidy detail, but by capturing its pulse through the lives of its inhabitants. He once famously declared that if Dublin “suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The Music of Joyce<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

“He crossed under Tommy Moore’s roguish finger. They did right to put him up over a urinal: meeting of the waters.”<\/em> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

– Ulysses<\/em>, Episode 8. Lestrygonians<\/p>\n\n\n

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“Silent, O Moyle”, from Moore’s Irish Melodies: With Symphonies and Accompaniments<\/a><\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

A tenor with a lifelong passion for music, Joyce competed in the 1904 Feis Ceoil and once shared the stage with the celebrated tenor John McCormack<\/strong>. Ulysses<\/em> \u2013 particularly the “Sirens” episode which Joyce claimed to have structured as a musical fugue \u2013 draws deeply on musical and sonic techniques. For Joyce, language was something to be heard as much as read and he invited readers to sound his writing aloud to reach deeper understanding.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thomas Moore\u2019s<\/strong> “Silent, O Moyle” (also known as “The Song of Fionnuala”) is referenced in Ulysses<\/em>, Finnegans Wake<\/em>, and the short story “Two Gallants.” As the author of Irish Melodies<\/em>, Moore was widely regarded in the 19th<\/sup> Century as Ireland\u2019s national bard. In Joyce’s work, “Tommy” Moore is both evoked and critiqued. Where Moore\u2019s songs were often associated with a sentimental nationalism, Joyce sought to challenge traditional forms and reframe Irish identity. From “The Lass of Aughrim” in “The Dead”, which stirs memories in Gretta Conroy, to the recurring references to “Love’s Old Sweet Song” in Ulysses<\/em>, a piece Molly Bloom is set to perform on her concert tour, music and sonic texture are woven into Joyce’s narrative structures, characterisation and linguistic sensibilities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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