Odyssey through Dublin

For one day, a city celebrates a novel: Niamh O'Driscoll went to Dublin for Bloomsday EIGHTY NINE years after its publication, James Joyce's novel Ulysses is more than an odyssean narrative between two book covers.
In keeping with its status at the vanguard of modernism, it has become an event. As any Dubliner will tell you, it has leapt off the page and into the streets where Leopold Bloom's one day wander round the streets of Ireland's capital is re-enacted. rehashed and revered and (sometimes) re-read by thousands of the city's inhabitants.
June 16 is Bloomsday wherever there are Joyce readers (although in Oxford, celebrations have been somewhat tamely rescheduled for Saturday).
In Dublin. the really dedicated Bloom followers begin the day with the appetising breakfast of "inner organs of beasts and fowls" that marks Leopold's first daylight ingestion. At the South Bank restaurant, a few brave souls were getting to grips with "thick giblet soup. nutty gizzards. a stuffed roast heart, liver slices fried with crustcrumbs and fried hencods' roes" that Bloom goes in for. That's real dedication for you.
However, apparently no breakfaster, even the most studiously re-creative dared ask if the kidneys were "enhanced by a faint smell of urine" as Leopold's kidneys are.
It isn't just food that marks the progess of a Bloomsday pilgrim. There were lots of jaunty stripey blazers on "stately plump Buck Mulligan" look-alikes strutting around the streets of the city and some Edwardian picture hats blocking up the tea rooms where Bloom furtively watches Gertie whisper with her friends. Dogeared copies of Ulysees accompany the faithful like wise Minerva accompanies Odysseus or Stephen Daedalus hangs round Bloom. There is declaiming of favourite passages on street corners and in the corners of public houses and to a few lonely herons and cormorants outside Joyce's tower in Sandycove.
At Waterstone's on Dawson Street a vast crowd, spilling onto the streets, gathered to hear professor Brendan Kennelly, William Kennedy and Catholic Herald favourite Clare Boylan read from their favourite bits of the day's great wandering narrative.
Clare Boylan is adamant that Ulysses is not an obscure or impenetrable word-slog, only fit for swotty set texts: "It seems to me an absolutely everyday and accesible read" she said happily.
She also said that she thought a new era was dawning in the Irish arts and that part of the delight of Bloomsday was that it both looked back to a golden age in the arts and heralded a new artistic spirit walking the streets: "The great regret in Dublin is the passing of that sort of era when everyone went to every sort of entertainment and there was no sort of elitism in the arts. But it is coming back, there is a sense of fun and entertainment in which everyone can share."
And she added "the weather is always good on Bloomsday" This aspect naturally helps when part of the process of the day is to ramble in a suitably post-modern manner around the Georgian streets of Dublin, indulging in the odd spot of philsophising over the odd pint of Guinness. Maybe even having the odd argument with a few young bloods also wandering the streets in search of dialogue and drink.
There were lots of Molly Blooms in evidence too. Molly's final, frank assertion of a female consciousness was personified by actress Patricia Leventon whose blowsy Bloom serenaded the early morning offal-eaters at the South Bank restaurant. Outside the tower, a giant model of Bloom and an only slightly smaller Stephen Daedalus teetered precariously over the gathered ranks of devotees putting on their spectacles and preparing to read their favourite passages aloud to each other.