Bloomsday: The Clothes And The Bikes

 Today is Bloomsday:  the date, in 1904, in which James Joyce's Ulysses is set.  As it happens, that date, like today, is a Thursday.

Ambassador Emer O'Connell and Consul Dominic Berkeley launch the Embassy of Ireland's book giveaway to celebrate Bloomsday 2021.  This doesn't relate to a bike ride per se, but I like the photo.

Numerous bike rides are holding Bloomsday-themed bike rides.  Some seem to have little more connection to the novel than people cycling in costumes based on clothes of that era:  or, at least people's ideas about it.  I don't mind that:  While I encourage helmet-wearing, I like seeing people crowned with ribboned straw hats astride bikes.  

But by the time the novel was published, women's clothing was less voluminous than it was before the bike boom of the 1890s.  Bicycling led to hoopskirts and whalebone corsets being replaced by shorter skirts and bloomers. (The latter would be particularly appropriate on "Bloomsday," wouldn't it?)  Also, as the sartorial revolution in progress, cyclists were forsaking high-wheelers in favor of "safety" bicycles with two wheels of equal diameter.

So...while I am not against some "artistic license," if you will, I think riding a high-wheeler in a Bloomsbury ride is a bit like showing up for a Woodstock-themed celebration with a "punk" haircut and clothing.   Or baking chocolate chips into bagels (hey, I'm a New Yorker) or topping pizzas with, well, almost anything.

What It's Really About

We've all seen the "On This Day In History" columns.  I like to look at them:  Sometimes I learn about people and events I never knew before.

For example, I didn't know that on this date in 1903, Ford Motor Company was incorporated, and in 1961, ballet star Rudolf Nureyev defected from his native Soviet Union.

I have long known, however, that quite possibly the most-commemorated events of this date never actually happened.  Yet they will be remembered long after most of the others are forgotten.

I am not talking about the fact that, one year ofter Henry Ford's motor company came to be, one of the most famous writers in history got married.  And he married the most unlikely of people:  someone who had no interest in literature and, when asked by a journalist what she thought of Andre Gide--on the occasion of his winning the Nobel Prize for literature, no less--said, "When you've been married to the greatest writer in the world, you tend to forget the little guys."

The literary spouse in question is Nora Joyce.  And, of course, she was defending the reputation of her beloved Jimmy.

And he wrote a book containing the people and events that are being commemorated today--far more than the founding of FoMoCo or the defection of a ballet dancer.  The events happened on this date in 1904 and, like the people involved in them, were creations of the man who set them down on paper.

Now, you all know no one ever called him "Jimmy".  (At least, I don't think anyone did!)  James Joyce wrote a book that did exactly what he said it would:  It's kept generations of professors, critics and scholars busy arguing over what it's "about".

The truth is (drumroll), his Ulysses is the Seinfeld of modern literature:  It's not about anything at all. At least, not really.  Sure, there are parallels between his characters and those of Greek mythology.  But the stories about the gods and demigods, like all tales embedded in systems of belief, are explicit attempts to explain the meaning and purpose of, if not life itself, then the world around us.  

I can find no such attempt in Joyce's book. When I say that, I don't mean it as a condemnation:  One could (and I have) argued that some of the great works of literature--including no less than Shakespeare's Hamlet-- really aren't "about" anything, except perhaps the foibles of the characters themselves.  

Now, of course, even with all of my erudition (ha!), you shouldn't take only my word.  I am even willing to consider (though not without a fight) that I could be wrong.  You see, the esteemed author of the "Cycling In The South Bay"--whose credentials are impeccable--claims that Ulysses is really a book about bicycling.

On what is this claim based?  CITSB's author offers the following evidence--13 mentions of bicycle or bicycling in the 782-page tome:

1. “They passed from behind Mr Bloom along the curbstone. Beard and bicycle. Young woman.”
2. “His eyes followed the high figure in homespun, beard and bicycle, a listening woman at his side.”
3. “Gerty MacDowell loves the boy that has the bicycle.”
4. “As per usual somebody’s nose was out of joint about the boy that had the bicycle off the London bridge road always riding up and down in front of her window.”
5. “W. E. Wylie who was racing in the bicycle races in Trinity college university.”
6. “But he was undeniably handsome with an exquisite nose and he was what he looked, every inch a gentleman, the shape of his head too at the back without his cap on that she would know anywhere something off the common and the way he turned the bicycle at the lamp with his hands off the bars and also the nice perfume of those good cigarettes and besides they were both of a size too he and she and that was why Edy Boardman thought she was so frightfully clever because he didn’t go and ride up and down in front of her bit of a garden.”
7. “His right hand holds a bicycle pump.”
8. “He smites with his bicycle pump the crayfish in his left hand.”
9. “Love on hackney jaunt Blazes blind coddoubled bicyclers Dilly with snowcake no fancy clothes.”
10. “He had sometimes propelled her on warm summer evenings, an infirm widow of independent, if limited, means, in her convalescent bathchair with slow revolutions of its wheels as far as the corner of the North Circular road opposite Mr Gavin Low’s place of business where she had remained for a certain time scanning through his onelensed binocular fieldglasses unrecognisable citizens on tramcars, roadster bicycles equipped with inflated pneumatic tyres, hackney carriages, tandems, private and hired landaus, dogcarts, ponytraps and brakes passing from the city to the Phoenix Park and vice versa.”
11. “of course hes mad on the subject of drawers thats plain to be seen always skeezing at those brazenfaced things on the bicycles with their skirts blowing up to their navels even when Milly and I were out with him at the open air fete”
12. “pretending to read out the Hebrew on them I wanted to fire his pistol he said he hadnt one he didnt know what to make of me with his peak cap on that he always wore crooked as often as I settled it straight H M S Calypso swinging my hat that old Bishop that spoke off the altar his long preach about womans higher functions about girls now riding the bicycle and wearing peak caps and the new woman bloomers God send him sense and me more money”
13. “can Milly come out please shes in great demand to pick what they can out of her round in Nelson street riding Harry Devans bicycle at night”

QED

Actually, I am rather willing (Is there such a thing?) to accept that writer's claim, especially after stumbling over this:

Jim Joyce, eh?  Well, even if he'd used a less-obvious pseudonym, all of those critics and professors and commentators he wanted to keep busy would have found him out sooner or later, don't you think?  ;-)

This Ride Includes A Currant Bun

Now here's a reason to go to Dublin this weekend:

Alice Coughlan of The Wonderland Theatre Company is leading a guided tour of the streets, pubs and historic buildings in which the stories of James Joyce's Dubliners are set.

The ride is one of the many events taking place from now through Sunday to commemorate Bloomsday.  If you've read Joyce--or some earlier posts on this blog--or simply paid attention to your English teachers or professors every once in a while (ha, ha), you know that his most iconic work, Ulysses, takes place on 16 June 1904.  

Now even if The Wonderland Theatre Company is absolutely wonderful (Somehow I wouldn't be surprised if they are!), I'm not sure that they could do a guided tour of everything recounted in Ulysses.  Actually, I'm not sure that anybody should try to depict anything in it:  It's somewhere in that space between dreams that are so real and reality that is so vivid, so intense, that it seems like a dream.  Also, although it's been called a novel, I think it's more like an epic which can no more be turned into a movie than Song of Myself can be.  

But doing a bicycle tour based on Dubliners isn't the "next best thing" or a "default choice."  I have long felt that the best tour guides (at least, the best I've experienced) are storytellers:  They provide lively, illuminating narratives of the place you are visiting.  Sometimes I can remember those stories even better than the physical details of the place!

And what better vehicle, if you will, for leading the reader/listener/audience through such a story than a bicycle?

Hey, I could be tempted to go on WTC's Bloomsbury ride just for this:   "Tickets include a currant bun with the boys of An Encounter at Dublin Port."  

Now, even though I've done a fair amount of riding in a skirt--sometimes with heels--I think it would be a challenge to ride in that green dress Ms. Coughlan (at least, I assume it's her) is wearing.  Even more of a challenge would be looking as good as she does in it!  

Fun Fact:  Given the stream-of-consciousness style of Ulysses, it's easy to believe that he picked the date on which it is set--16 June 1904--at random.  Which is a roundabout way of saying that it's what I thought, for a long time.  However, it is, in fact, the date on which he met Nora Barnacle, who would become his wife.

Another Fun Fact:  Darina Laracy Silone, the wife of Italian writer Ignazio Silone, asked Nora for her opinion of Andre Gide.  And she got it, all right. "When you've been married to the greatest writer in the world," Nora intoned, "you don't remember all the little fellows."

Finnegan's Ride

Way back in the snows of antiquity, I read James Joyce's Dubliners, Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake.  Call me a philistine, but I haven't touched any of them since.  Not that I wouldn't; I just don't feel the urge to do so.  

Plus, I really think Ulysses--all 800 or so pages--has to be read in one sitting.  I am reminded of that after tuning into WBAI, the local Pacifica radio station, for its annual Bloomsday reading of the book.

Ulysses is a stream of consciousness (or a collection of the world's longest run-on sentences) that describes a single day--16 June 1904.  

One thing I might do some year soon, if I have the money and time, is to go to a Bloomsday bicycle rally in Dublin.  If nothing else, the sight of all of those people, attired in the vetements of the period and riding delivery bikes, riding from pub to pub in through the streets of Dublin.