Profile:They may spend most of the year buried in Ulysses, but on Bloomsday they blossom, dressing up in their Edwardian finery and showing off their knowledge of James Joyce, writes Rosita Boland
Stately, plump buck-naked Joyceans will have started their day today at the Forty Foot by diving into "the snotgreen sea. The scrotum-tightening sea." James Joyce's description of Dublin Bay from the parapets of Sandycove's martello tower in the opening pages of Ulysses may be famous, but it's not one that's likely to ever make it into the copy of estate agents' ads when it comes to describing the view from multi-million euro houses on the Sandycove seafront.
Today is Bloomsday. Again! Like Christmas, it comes around every year, and, also like Christmas, it starts earlier every year. What used to be a one-day event on June 16th, the anniversary of that fictional day in 1904 when Ulysses is set, is now a week-long shindig of walking tours, readings, music, dressing up, theatre and consumption of offal and Gorgonzola sandwiches. Bloomsday has become a brand, celebrated in scores of cities around the world. As a Toronto-based Joycean website declares, "Bloomsday is a kind of literary Holy day celebrated around the world". It can only be a matter of time before Hallmark starts making cards to mark the occasion.
Bloomsday is synonymous with a particular kind of person, the Joycean. The clothes maketh the Joycean man and woman. Dress code is composed of Edwardian blazers, boaters, parasols and long dresses. Modes of transport are eye-catching butcher-boy messenger bikes and horse-drawn carriages. Joyceans don't mind being stared at; in fact, what most Joyceans really like is to be noticed. For instance, one would never describe Ireland's most famous Joycean, a rotund, bearded man whose house is on the same north Dublin street as the Joyce Centre, as introverted.
There are a few distinctive types of Joyceans. There are the media-friendly academics, who are happy to be photographed looking like extras from a period drama. Bloomsday is like a day off and a day out for these academics: an excuse to raid the dressing-up box and act all unconventional. It's their way of saying, we're so brainy (well, we are Joyceans), surely we can get away with having a bit of fun in public for one day of the year? Surely nobody will stop taking us seriously?
Then there is the low-key Joycean, who loves the books, and knows a lot about them, but who doesn't advertise their knowledge as if they were wearing a billboard. These kinds of Joyceans like to make a pilgrimage to Trieste, where Joyce lived on two occasions, and they tend to think that these days Bloomsday is more a circus tent than a temple of literature.
And, of course, there are the Joyceans who have never read a book of Joyce's at all. Ulysses is often described as being at least as famous for being unread as it is for being read, although it's a fair guess that it's even less read by the general public than Finnegans Wake. So there's the Joycean who only gets involved in Bloomsday because of all the associated partying. The Joycean ligger, if you will, as typified in 2004 when 10,000 Dubliners turned up for a free open-air Bloomsday-themed breakfast on O'Connell Street.
ON BLOOMSDAY, THE typical Joycean engages in a full programme of rituals, of which food is a key element. Ulysses was one of the first books to showcase what we'd now recognise as product placements. What martinis and various brands of vodka are to James Bond, Gorgonzola sandwiches and grilled mutton kidneys with a fine tang of faintly scented urine are to Leopold Bloom.
Breakfast features the inner organs of beasts and fowls, as eaten with relish by Bloom, but perhaps not digested with as much ease by 21st-century constitutions. One of these days, Gordon Ramsay, the television chef committed to promoting the joys of offal in his restaurants, will probably turn up to make a Joycean-themed breakfast-cheffing appearance.
The Joycean then goes on to lunch at Davy Byrne's on Duke Street, where Gorgonzola sandwiches and the mild fire of Burgundy wine join the offal already lodged within the Joycean stomach. The Joycean could at this point conduct an experiment and see how many glasses of Burgundy he needs to consume before his conversation transforms into a stream of consciousness.
The unique thing about Joyce is that no other literary figure seems to make people come over all strange for a particular day each year in a similar way. It's somehow impossible to imagine, for instance, a Godot Day - where presumably something would actually happen - to celebrate the work of Samuel Beckett. Similarly with WB Yeats; Yeatsians don't don Celtic Revival garb once a year and walk round the Abbey Theatre reading passages about Kathleen Ní Houlihan and her four green fields, or consult mediums and engage in annual attempts at automatic writing. Mind you, a Dickens theme park, Dickens World, featuring the "Haunted House" of Ebenezer Scrooge, a Victorian schoolroom, and Fagin's Den, opened only this year in Kent, so if you wait long enough for your favourite writer's reputation to grow, clearly anything is possible.
Joyce was famous for his epiphanies, where characters have a subtle, but profound, moment of realisation or insight that transforms their view of the world. All Joyceans, whether they realise they've had one or not, will have experienced an epiphany in recent years. It's the copyright epiphany, and it will have arrived into their stream of consciousness in the form of Stephen Joyce, Joyce's grandson. Much as the typical Joycean might like to stick their copy of Ulysses under their oxter on Bloomsday and go out and start doing an impromptu reading from the text, they will now know that this is a deeply problematic issue.
JOYCE, WHO DIED in 1941, came out of copyright in 1992. However, due to a complex change in the copyright laws in this country, he went back into copyright again and does not emerge from it until 2012. What this effectively means is that his surviving relative, Stephen Joyce, has control over what does or does not get read, broadcast or published of his grandfather's opus, no matter what the circumstances are. However, public readings at the Joyce Centre, which had been taking place when Joyce first came out of copyright, can continue due to the coincidentally, but aptly-named "grandfathering law". This allows exemption from current law, since the readings had already been established previously. Hard luck, though, for almost everyone else. Unless you have permission from Stephen Joyce, you can forget about reading from his work in public spaces.
In 2004, for example, the centenary of the fictional Bloomsday when events were going on all round the world, he refused permission for any text to be read in either English or French, at a celebration in the Centre Culturel Irlandais in Paris. Academic and writer Séamus Deane, who was present at the event, stated afterwards: "Joyce wrote about possibilities of being Irish that were never realised. It is something that can only be registered in a great work of art. We were talking about the greatest emancipatory text, and we couldn't read a word of it because of the Stephen Joyce handcuff. This is an example of how a work of art can be squeezed, asthmatised and asphyxiated into the notion of what constitutes copyright."
It's ironic that the famous closing words of Ulysses, from Molly Bloom's soliloquy, are "yes I said yes I will Yes." The grandson of the man who wrote those words has spent a lot of time in recent years saying exactly the opposite.Who are they?
Joyceans celebrate the work of James Joyce. However, in a typically Irish way, you can be a Joycean without ever having read a word of any of his tomes.
The Joycean File
Why are they in the news?Today is Bloomsday, the raison d'être of Joyceans worldwide.
Most appealing characteristic:They want everyone to celebrate Joyce's work.
Least appealing characteristic:Wearing ridiculous Edwardian clothes first thing in the morning.
Most likely to say:"Joyce was the greatest writer of all time."
Least likely to say: "I haven't actually read Ulysses, or Finnegans Wake, or Dubliners, or A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, or Exiles, or Stephen Hero, or Chamber Music."