Happy Bloomsday To Us All!

David Morton

2 years ago

“Grey way, whose violet signals are…” James Joyce’s Bahnhofstrasse, Zurich, c. 1928

There’s a poem that comes to mind, usually unbidden. I can be doing something completely mundane, and suddenly, there it is. And as I intone the words to myself, I get goosebumps.

The poem is “Bahnhofstrasse” by James Joyce, better known as the author of the great novel, Ulysses.

Bahnhofstrasse

The eyes that mock me sign the way
Whereto I pass at eve of day.

Grey way whose violet signals are
The trysting and the twining star.

Ah star of evil! star of pain!
Highhearted youth comes not again

Nor old heart’s wisdom yet to know
The signs that mock me as I go.

I loved the poem in my 20s and even more in my 60s. It’s one of those moments that live in my memory, like the first time I heard a ruffed grouse when I was six. Or saw the Beatles on Ed Sullivan in 1964.

The long view of life

There’s music in the poem’s lines and it’s short, which makes it easy to remember. It’s melancholy and clear: four beats per line and a pure rhyme scheme. It strums the heartstrings in a deeper way now that I’m seeing the long view of life, looking back, taking the measure of things.

“The eyes that mock me,” the regrets and sadnesses that litter the past, the judgements not by others, but of myself. There is a small sense of hope just out or reach in the violet signals. As if the skies may soon open and signal that all is not lost. But there’s no getting around those grey clouds!

There’s a complex relationship with the past here, such as the “trysting and twining star.”

The trysting and the twining star

“Trysting” is something lovers do: they make a secret plan, then meet covertly. “Twining” is when things go wrong. The secret plan disappoints. It so often does.

The hopes and aspirations that buoyed us in innocence now seem lost in old age, a failed promise.

Bahnhofstrasse is the name of a street in Zurich, Switzerland, where Joyce lived between 1915 and 1919. It was an expensive shopping street as well as the place for the city’s main railway station. It’s a moody backdrop for personal reflection on memory and existential angst.

I can imagine a solitary James Joyce shuffling along the lamp-lit Bahnhofstrasse. He was in his mid-30s and in poor health. He was almost completely blind (glaucoma and cataracts) with a host of other medical conditions, and tentative about his prospects despite his youth.

Celebrating Bloomsday

It was also the end of World War One, a time when Europe was in flux, the old world had been turned upside down, and uncertainty lay ahead.

The sense of disillusionment in Bahnhofstrasse also touches on some of the broader themes in Ulysses.

Next Sunday, June 16, is Bloomsday, celebrated by James Joyce enthusiasts around the world. Ulysses is set in Dublin on that day in 1904. Readers follow the movements and the inner lives of the novel’s main characters, one of whom is Leopold Bloom, from whom the name Bloomsday is drawn.

Bloom is a timid advertising agent. He is shaken by the recent knowledge that his wife, Molly Bloom, is having an affair with a guy named “Blazes” Boylan. He attends a funeral for his friend, Paddy Dignam, who apparently died of drinking. There are visits to pubs, drunken brawls and even a scene in a brothel.

And hilarious conversations, memorable characters, wonderful wordplay.

Elevated to the heroic

While the events are unremarkable in themselves, Joyce elevates them to heroic status, drawing parallels with Homer’s Odyssey. Segments of the novel are named after Homer’s character’s. Leopold Bloom is Odysseus, the central character of Homer’s epic. Molly Bloom is Penelope, Odysseus’s long-suffering wife who endured years of her life alone while he was off fighting in the Trojan Wars. Stephen Dedalus, another character, equates to Telemachus, the son of Odysseus and Penelope, though Stephen is not Molly and Leopold’s son.

Joyce reveals the characters’ inner lives through the use of “stream-of-consciousness” writing, long passages with little attention to punctuation, capitalization or grammar. Like run-on sentences. The reader experiences these passages as disconnected and random, but they are carefully structured by Joyce to reveal the psychology of the characters and poignant views of their inner lives.

“O and the sea the sea”

Molly Bloom’s ecstatic “soliloquy” at the very end of Ulysses is my favourite of these passages.

O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and the pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

Here is a picture of “highhearted youth” in full fettle: Molly Bloom remembering a time when the world shimmered with colour and possibility and hope! Yes, a thousand times!

Highhearted youth comes not again

I always believed the man she refers to in this soliloquy (“well, as well him as another, and then asked him with my eyes to ask again” — my commas) is Molly’s memory of Leopold himself as the one she fell for, the one she opened her heart to with a rose in her hair.

Does this mean she and Leopold reconcile at the end of the novel?

Perhaps … I don’t want to ruin the novel. Molly and Leopold can overcome the rupture in their marriage. The question is, can they overcome her infidelity?

Like the poor old James Joyce moping along the Bahnhofstrasse under the night sky, lit only by stars of evil and stars of pain.

Happy Bloomsday, Mr. Joyce. Happy Bloomsday to us all!

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