Happy Bloomsday!
June 16, 1904—
If you notice English majors greeting one another joyously, saying “Yes—yes—yes!” they’ll titter with delight. It will all be terrific fun for them. And here’s the reason why:
Today is the date on which all the events depicted in James Joyce’s famous novel Ulysses take place—even though the book itself wasn’t published until 1922 and therefore we celebrated the centennial after my daughters had graduated from college. There is probably also a lot of excitement in all sorts of intellectual circles.
And now, you can truly impress your friends by telling them the plot:
Leopold Bloom, the main character of Ulysses, doesn’t have much work to do, so he spends most of his day wandering around Dublin doing errands. He leaves his house on Eccles Street, walks south across the River Liffey, picks up a letter, buys a bar of soap, and goes to the funeral of a man he didn’t know very well.
In the afternoon, he has a cheese sandwich, feeds the gulls on the river, helps a blind man cross the street, and visits a couple of pubs. He thinks about his job, his wife, his daughter, and his stillborn son. He muses about life and death and reincarnation. He knows that his wife is going to cheat on him that afternoon, at his house.
In the evening, he wanders around the red-light district of Dublin and meets up with a young writer named Stephen Dedalus, who is drunk. Leopold Bloom takes him home and offers to let him spend the night. They stand outside, looking at the stars for a while. Then Bloom goes inside and climbs into bed with his wife.
They’ll feel smart and proud and better than the rest of us (and you, again, can feel morally superior for knowing it). And now you know why.
(…yes, I said yes, I will Yes.)
The Haus of Dcaligari 