Molly Bloomsday June 16th

TYPO ALERT!

Ok for once, I cannot. No, I reallyl cannot let it go! My appalling proof-reading is one thing, but I cannot let you read about Joyce’s ‘steam of consciousness’. I have corrected it below!

Molly Bloomsday & the Stream of Consciousness.

Molly Bloomsday is a new festival, an offshoot in Derry of the Dublin based Bloomsday. Both are celebrated on 16th June which is the day on which the great book Ulysses by James Joyce is set (16 June 1904). It was published in 1922.

Bloomsday is named after Leopold Bloom and is an international festival celebrating Ulysses.  Molly Bloom is her husband who has a soliloquy at the beginning of the book.  The Molly Bloomsday concentrates on Molly and women’s literature. The Dublin version is a literary festival as well with people dressing up as characters from the famous book, readings, plays etc..

The Bloomsday Book

Joyce thought Odysseus was the only all-round character in literature. Not a one dimensional hero, but a man with a complex character, not always making the good choice. He based Ulysses, loosely, on Homer’s plot. The main characters, Leopold and Molly Bloom were based on Odysseus and Penelope. Stephen Daedalus was Telemachus, their son. Daedalus is Joyce’s alter-ego.

What makes the book so great is that Joyce was, with Virginia Wolfe, one of the first great Modernist writers. They used stream of consciousness from the characters’ points of view from deep in their heads. This is how Joyce describes Ulysses according to Djuna Barnes:

“The pity is … the public will demand and find a moral in my book—or worse they may take it in some more serious way, and on the honour of a gentleman, there is not one single serious line in it. … In Ulysses I have recorded, simultaneously, what a man says, sees, thinks, and what such seeing, thinking, saying does, to what you Freudians call the subconscious.”

Ulysses and I

My copy of Ulysses is very well travelled. I very often take it on holiday.  I start on Chapter 1, and at some point before the end of the holiday I am still on Chapter. I stop reading.  I’ve got past the beginning of Chapter 2 once.

Don’t get me wrong, I am fully convinced it is a brilliant book.  It’s my best friend’s favourite book.  So one day I WILL READ IT!

Actually, I quite like the sound of a steam of consciousness.

For a touch more modernism, see my post: boating-adventure-the-second-best-modernist-building-in-london/

First published on June 16th 2025