James Joyce: Bloomsday 2014
James Joyce set the action of Ulysses on a single day,16 June 1904, and fans have been celebrating it ever since, writes Laura Tennant
Bloomsday is named after Leopold Bloom, the central character in Joyce’s modernist masterpiece, but the date has significance beyond the realm of his fiction. 16 June 1904 was also the day Joyce first ‘walked out with’ Nora Barnacle, the woman who was to become his wife, and who he said ‘made him a man’.
During the summer of 1904, Joyce also began work on Dubliners , and took the fateful decision to leave Ireland. He started writing Ulysses in 1914, and finally published it in Paris in 1922.
Joyce’s experiments with a stream of consciousness style of writing which tried to capture the chaotic, allusive, fast-moving and sometimes filthy life of the mind revolutionised the novel. So influential was Ulysses that its shock waves are still being felt today. The debut novel from Irish writer Eimear McBride, A Girl is a Half-formed Thing , was originally begun, McBride admits, as a ‘rip-off of Ulysses’, before going on to win multiple prizes, including, most recently, the Bailey’s Women’s Prize for Fiction (previously the Orange Prize for Fiction).
According to one of numerous rave reviews, this one by David Collard in the fashionable White Review , McBride has invented ‘a new form of prose which deploys a spartan lexicon in fragmentary vernacular syncopations to represent the form of thought at the point before it becomes articulate speech’.
New, perhaps, but directly heritable from McBride’s illustrious compatriot nonetheless. Happy Bloomsday.
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