Well, Bloomsday is here again. For us Dubliners, this would normally entail a trip to the Martello down in Sandycove where the first chapter of James Joyce's monumental Ulysses is set. As a teacher, I have taken many classes on a sort of pilgrimage there, over the last 18 or so years. That's the length of time that I have been teaching! If you've never done it before, I would encourage you to do so. But, for God's sake make a stab at reading the book first. The first few chapters are remarkable, without a doubt the most singularly original of any modern novel. First there is the setting. The old tower. Its very Shakespearean. Of course, Hamlet springs to mind. James Joyce was an enormous fan of Shakespeare, and this comes true straight away in the setting of the first chapter of the novel. All literature is about, essentially, family. Joyce is no different. Throughout this first chapter, the death of his mother, like the ghost of Hamlet's father, haunts the young Stephen Dedalus.
Normally, weather permitting, you would swim in the Forty Foot - the popular name for a local bathing place at the foot of Joyce's Tower in Sandycove ( see the link below). The year I wrote this poem cycle, I was thinking about my son Liam who lives in Paris. I was holidaying in Crete in the beautiful town of Plakias, and he could not come with us. So, I dedicated the first poem to him. See the poem The Martello. In Homer's Odyssey, which Joyce famously used to structure his own epic Ulysses, Telemachus is Odysseus's son who remains waiting for the return of his father for the many years that he is away from home. Only recently I translated a poem by Joseph Brodsky into French which was treating the same theme. Like I said before, all great writing is essentially about family. This is why we have the canon, as it is a part of our tradition. It goes hand in hand in understanding family and what it means, for good or bad, to be a part of a family. The family is the first social structure which we come into contact with, and so it is a microcosm of greater society. If you understand your own family, and the extremely complex power struggles that go on, it will give you a very clear idea of what to expect when you go out into society. So, here it is, my post today about James Joyce and Bloomsday which if anyone asks you is all about Family!
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