Sunday was the chronological aphelion of Bloomsday, June 16th, the date on which James Joyce’s Ulysses is set. “The chronological what?” I hear astronomy-challenged readers ask.
So before proceeding, I refer those to the Ithaca chapter of Joyce’s book where, while engaged in very earth-bound activity – synchronised urination – in the back garden of No 7 Eccles Street, Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus gaze upwards at the stars.
“Which various features of the constellations were in turn considered?” asks one of the catechism-style chapter’s 309 questions.
And amid the long answer is this: “. . . the almost infinite compressibility of hirsute comets and their vast elliptical egressive and reentrant orbits from perihelion to aphelion”.
Yes, readers, the aphelion is the point of an orbit where a planet, asteroid, or comet is farthest from the sun. December 15th, similarly, is the date in the calendar most distant from June 16th.
To a group of Dublin-based Joyceans with too much time on their hands last weekend, this seemed like a good excuse for pints. Thus it was that on Sunday night, we met in Davy Byrne’s pub – Ulysses Central – to mark the inaugural instalment of an event hereafter known as Gloomsday.
In keeping with the theme, the beer consumed was dark. So was the food: the pub’s excellent Beef and Guinness pie. One of those present, however – publisher Cormac O’Hanrahan – had also taken the trouble of printing a sort of missalette, featuring his selection of the book’s bleaker passages, mostly drawn from the Hades episode: Paddy Dignam’s funeral.
Via this, we all took a turn with readings “from the Book of Gloom to the Gentiles”, the lighter parts of which included Bloom’s ironic musings on the Last Day and Judgement:
“That last day idea. Knocking them all up out of their graves. Come forth, Lazarus! And he came fifth and lost the job. Get up! Last day! Then every fellow mousing around for his liver and his lights and the rest of his traps. Find damn all of himself that morning. Pennyweight of powder in a skull.”
Getting back to comets, hirsute and otherwise, Ulysses is full of them and their imagery. “Blazes” Boylan is an obvious example – “A shock of red hair he has sticking out of him behind like a furzebush!” says one character.
But another of our Gloomsday group, Senan Molony also argued convincingly for the cometary nature of the Hely’s sandwich board advertisers, who cross paths with Bloom at various points of the city, carrying a letter each of the eponymous stationery firm’s name.
Molony suggests these are a reference to Halley’s comet, whose 76-year orbit coincided with a mid-point of Joyce’s life in 1910.
Their heliacal (get it?) orbit may also have a political subtext. The Comet, Senan reminded us, was a radical nationalist newspaper of the 1830s, published in D’Olier Street. And the Hely’s route extended from the top of Grafton Street – site in 1904 of a planned Wolfe Tone memorial – to the William Smith O’Brien statue, or near: hinting at the cycle of Irish rebellion from generation to generation.
Gloomsday will hardly take off the way its perihelical predecessor did. And yet Sunday’s event had superficial similarities with the first organised version of Bloomsday, in June 1954, when a small group including Patrick Kavanagh and Flann O’Brien reenacted the events of 50 years earlier.
That was supposed to be a full orbit of the book’s landmarks. But due to overconsumption of alcohol en route, the celestial bodies involved crashed at Duke Street, mid-way, and abandoned the rest of the itinerary.
Our event started and ended in Duke Street. The only movement out of Davy Byrne’s occurred after the discovery that somebody (we’ll call him “Cormac”) had booked the table for December 27th by mistake.
There was at first no room at the inn, forcing a brief detour to the Bailey, opposite, before the very helpful Alexandra found space and called us back.
We shared the packed pub with a group of women who were reliving their disco-queen days dancing to Abba and the likes. By closing time there was only them at the front of the bar and the weirdos reading Ulysses at the back.
I mention this because, gender-blind as we are, it was only when posing for the first official Gloomsday group selfie that we realised with horror there was no female presence among our number (Philip Mullen and Mick Kearney made up the quintet).
This was considered normal enough in 1954 but is of course unacceptable now. So we thought about asking some of the disco dancers to join us for the photo-shoot, to take the bad look off it.
Then it hit us that if they were unfamiliar with the book we were celebrating and only learned afterwards about the risqué nature of some of Joyce’s material, their unknowing inclusion in a commemorative photograph might not be welcome.
The lesser of two evils was to keep the picture to ourselves. We can only hope that if it features in future literary history books, posterity will forgive us.
