A History and Experience of Bloomsday in Lisbon 2012-2022

Abstract

This text is an account of “Bloomsday”(a celebration of the day in which James Joyce’s Ulysses is set) in Lisbon in the years 2012-2022, from the perspective of the director of the event. I have always tried to interweave Ireland, Portugal and Brazil in the encounter with Joyce with ourselves and our sounds in language and music, with our diverse locations, and with the different translations of Ulysses. The vision has always been to combine entertainment and a subversive joy via music, performative readings and remarks on Ulysses, together with diving deep into the philosophical panorama and profound possibilities of experimenting with language through everyday characters and the experience of life and death within a simple story that encompasses Joyce’s “chaosmos.” Crucially, it is in reading and hearing the text aloud where one enters literature as reality and as a vivid experience. This text also brings up two fascinating reviews of Ulysses which were an inspiration for Bloomsday in 2022: one from 1922 by Shane Leslie (the son of a protestant Anglo-Irish landlord, who converted to Catholicism) where he referred to the book as “literary Bolshevism”; and the other from 1935 by Karl Radek (a Bolshevik leader of the Russian Revolution of 1917) who called it “a heap of dung, crawling with worms.” In their negative critique from opposite ends of the political spectrum, they nevertheless capture the revolutionary spirit and “epic of the human body” of the book in which we are still learning to catch up with and to flourish.