Sir, - Analysing the weather on Bloomsday, Brendan McWilliams referred to this "famously uneventful day" (June 16th, 1904). This is inaccurate.
The main event in Ulysses is the friendship that evolves between Leopold Bloom, the Jewish advertising canvasser, and Stephen Dedalus, the young writer and teacher returned from Paris for his mother's death and now living without much money on the outskirts of the city. The significance of this friendship is that 11 years before, Bloom's son, Rudy, had died after only 11 days, and that Stephen lacks a paternal figure in whom he can confide: for both men, meaningful communication has been largely absent during the day. Moreover, Bloom is cuckolded by his wife, Molly, while Stephen feels betrayed by Malachi "Buck" Mulligan, his derisive fellow tenant in the Martello Tower at Sandycove.
Other notable events during Bloomsday are the funeral of Paddy Dignam in Glasnevin Cemetery, the Royal Ascot Gold Cup Race (betting is rife in the morning, "Throwaway" wins that afternoon), the viceregal cavalcade passing out of the Hibernian metropolis in the afternoon the birth of a boy to Mrs Mina Purefoy in the Holles Street Hospital that evening and a dramatic visit by Stephen and it loom to the Monto red-light district.
Bloom's day is reported to Molly in their bed, wherein he omits to mention his "clandestine correspondence with Martha Clifford, his "public altercation with the nationalist bigot, the citizen, in Barney Kiernan's pub, "the erotic provocation and response thereto caused by the exhibitionism" of Gerty McDowell on Sandymount Strand and, of course, his consorting with Night town's whores, each an episode of importance for this "allround man.
How tragic, then, that this Bloomsday should have been blackened by the callous murder of two police officers in Lurgan by "patriots" filled with the same poison as the citizen.
"Novelists," according to Charlotte Bronte, "should never allow themselves to weary themselves of the study of real life" (The Professor, 1857). Not until Ulysses (1922), though, did there appear descriptions of such real-life bodily functions as nose-picking (Stephen), defecation, peristalsis, flatulence and masturbation (Bloom), micturition (Bloom, Stephen and the scurrilous narrator of Cyclops) and menstruation and memories of copulation and parturition (Molly)., In this "usylessly unreadable" epic of the human body, Joyce's kaleidoscopic range of styles compels us to view "ordinary" experience and potentialities afresh.
One final correction: "It's uncertain as a child's bottom" is quipped about the weather by Simon Dedalus, not his wandering son, Stephen, on the way to Dignam's funeral. - Yours, etc.,
Letterkenny,
Co. Donegal.