How to Make The Ordinary Extraordinary

Love...

On Bloomsday people dress as characters from Ulysses, (photograph by Julien Behal/PA Wire, AP Images)

Ireland is a nation of storytellers. Every time I visit this beautiful country I feel deeply connected to its people, culture, love of words, folk tales, sense of humour, and even superstitions. As a novelist, I feel at home here. So much about Irish culture speaks to my heart—the connection with oral storytelling, the complex layers of memory and forgetting, the space for emotions, the weight of history, and of course, Bloomsday.

For my Irish friends this might feel pretty normal but I cannot help asking myself: How many countries in the world have a public day to commemorate and celebrate a beloved writer or poet? How many nations can turn this into a joyous, glorious literary fiesta enjoyed by people of all age groups?

Ireland does and does it so well.

Bloomsday, on the 16th of June, is a celebration of James Joyce’s epic novel Ulysses, and its brilliantly flawed and imperfect protagonist Leopold Bloom. Every year, on the anniversary of the day the story takes place people dress up as characters from the book. Do not be surprised when you see moustached men with straw boater hats and women with ruffled blouses and Edwardian skirts promenading along the waterfront as if they have just walked out of a time machine. There are street performances, workshops, walking tours, house parties, spontaneous readings, and, most strikingly, a very visible appreciation of literature.

Works of fiction are seldom honoured in this way around the world, and on those very rare occasions when they are the celebration is almost always rooted in patriotism, nationalism and the legends of nation-state building. It is not literature per se that is celebrated but rather a foundation myth, a hero’s journey, a patriotic narrative.

But Ulysses has nothing to do with any of these. In fact, nothing remarkable, chivalric, or momentous happens in this brilliant novel. By taking an uneventful day in Dublin in 1904, focusing on everyday life, creating both fringe and familiar characters, and then naming the book after the Homeric Epic, Joyce gently reminds us that there is no such thing as an ‘ordinary person” —every single human being is a fascinating puzzle. Even in the most simple moments of life there is beauty, philosophy, poetry.

This novel is a love letter to Dublin.

A letter written by an author in exile.

The first time I read Ulysses I was a university student with dreams of moving to Istanbul someday. I bought a copy in an English bookstore, finished reading and absolutely hated the novel. It was a non-native speaker’s nightmare. I struggled with the language, the cadence. I failed. I sulked.

I could perfectly understand how when James Joyce finished this novel he felt so exhausted that he could not write a single page of prose for another year. I felt exhausted myself. Time went by. I read other books by Joyce. I adored Dubliners and A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man.

‘He tried to weigh his soul to see if it was a poet's soul,’ said Joyce in Dubliners.

I tried to weigh my soul to see if it was a novelist’s soul.

Years went by. By then I had already moved to Istanbul. The sounds, songs and silences of the ancient city seeped into my dreams. A megapolis of heartbreaks and ruins, conflicts and inequalities, music and melancholy, history and forgetting….

Things changed. I changed.

Then Istanbul changed.

And then I read Ulysses again and this time it was a completely different experience.

One of deep love.

James Joyce was a nomad, to begin with. A peripatetic existence shaped his writing. Wherever he went, no matter how far he traveled, he carried Dublin with him. He was one of those people that the Epic of Gilgamesh refers to as having been burdened with a “restless heart.”

That restlessness was not a choice initially but something he had been born into. When he was a boy, each time his father was unable to pay the rent, the family would have to leave. Years later, as a grown man, he would continue the “habit”—although often by necessity. When he lived in Paris, even in the same city he changed homes 19 times. Sometimes they were evicted, sometimes they had to run away.

He was a remarkable polyglot. He learned Norwegian to read Henrik Ibsen’s writing in its original language. German, French, Irish, Russian, Greek, Polish…. At home with his children he spoke Italian.

‘Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives,’ Joyce said in a letter.

And in another letter: “A novelist is ‘a priest of eternal imagination, transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everliving life.”

It is hard to believe this today but for a long time Joyce struggled to get his work published. He tried many publishers but was rejected by all of them—even, sorry to say, by Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth press. We must send a salute to Shakespeare and Co in Paris. It was Sylvia Beach’s independent press that in the end published one of the most consequential novels of the 20th century.

His bad eyes, his nomadic soul, his mastery of style, his endless fears, his debilitating anxieties, his sense of humour, his unashamed embrace of multiplicity and nuance, his enormous vocabulary, his fabulous puns, and the words he invented (e.g. Joyce was scared of thunderstorms and coined a 100-letter word to describe the feeling: Bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk)

But most importantly, his affirmation of life, beauty, and love—even as he himself struggled with poverty, illness, censorship, ‘otherness’, book banning, exile, and melancholy—and his readiness to engage fully with the art of being human—in all its complexity, vulnerability and strength. There was no other like James Joyce.

He was right: “Love loves to love love.”

Happy Bloomsday everyone!