I have to convince myself that I wrote that book.” They sent me hortensias, white and blue, dyed. As he wrote to his patron Harriet Shaw Weaver: “There is a group of people who observe what they call Bloom’s day-16 June. By 1924, enthusiasts had begun trying to add a new feast day to the calendar, to Joyce’s mixed bewilderment and delight.

And that participatory style of fan culture (and, increasingly in recent years, cosplay) started quite early. She’s seen together with Bloom as his section opens in Chapter 4, and has the mike to herself for her famous soliloquy in the final chapter-but otherwise appears only as the glimpse of a “generous white arm,” uncredited, in Chapter 10.ĭevotees of the novel have tended to reënact Bloom’s and Stephen’s walking hours rather than Molly’s waking hours. But as an actual, bodily presence, she principally bookends the novel. Throughout the day, Molly is frequently in Bloom’s thoughts, as well as in the sotto-voce off-color comments of a handful of his male friends and acquaintances. To the best of our knowledge, she hasn’t left the house-but what she’s done while sheltering in place passionately flaunts all social-distancing guidelines. While Bloom and Stephen enjoy their hot chocolate, Molly’s in the other room, in bed, and once again alone. Home also I cannot go.”) All of which is to say that “Ulysses” belongs to a genre that we wouldn’t have recognized until recently: it’s an anti-sheltering novel.

(He’s vowed not to return to the place he’s been sharing with his frenemy Buck Mulligan, but has also broken decisively with his family: “I will not sleep here tonight. Around 2:00 A.M., the two make their way to the Bloom home (7 Eccles Street), where they share a cup of cocoa, and a piss in the yard under the stars afterward, Stephen sets off on his own, for parts (and bed) unknown. The two male protagonists who share top billing, Bloom and Stephen Dedalus, each leave their respective domiciles at about 9:00 A.M. In “ Ulysses,” Bloom gets a little work done, attends a funeral, furthers a chaste epistolary dalliance-but mostly he avoids home, where he knows his wife, Molly, will that afternoon consummate a quite vigorous, fleshly dalliance with the improbably named bounder Blazes Boylan. It’s Bloomsday, the nerd holiday celebrating the day in fiction-June 16, 1904-that Leopold Bloom spent wandering the streets of Dublin, in James Joyce’s “ Ulysses.” But this year will be a very different Bloomsday: admirers will celebrate a novel of the Dublin streets while sheltering in place, as the “Heart of the Hibernian Metropolis” has been rendered off limits by COVID-19.

Bloomsday ulysses