# Posted 6:30 AM by Patrick Belton  

BLOOMSDAY: A CENTURY. In some sense, modern literature began a hundred years ago today.

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him by the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned:

-- Introibo ad altare Dei.

In the world of text, of Molly Bloom's sensuous, doubting, ultimately affirming soliloquy (I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used), of Stephen Daedalus's monologue walking along the beach which stretches in Sandycove from Martello tower to Dun Laoghaire (Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes), this was the day Stephen and Leopold wandered throughout the city Joyce himself had fled (using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use - silence, exile, and cunning), enacting a modern Odyssey, and eventually finding one another briefly (and in Bella Cohen's brothel) as father-seeking son meeting son-seeking father. In the other, non-textual world, the world of breakfasts made of 'the inner organs of beasts and fowls' and 'grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine', 16 June 1904 was the day when the artist, as a young man, fell in love with rustic Galway girl Nora Barnacle. And he would immortalise the day for her.

Halted, he peered down the dark winding stairs and called up coarsely:

-- Come up, Kinch! Come up, you fearful jesuit!

Joyce is not quite Stephen - the worlds of language and sausages don't correspond quite that neatly - but both come together in places. Daedalus was, after all, Joyce's early pen name as a student at Clongowes, and in a more real sense, Joyce was the real Daedalus, the architect who created the Labyrinth for the minotaur at Crete, and then showed his son Icarus to fly to escape it. After observing painfully his son's death, Daedalus is exiled to Sicily - undoubtedly, one supposes, to be the crafter of novels. And as far as how well the artificer of the century's most intricate, Labyrnthine text did succeed when he went to 'encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race'- well, go this morning to O'Connell Street to see how Joyce's myth of Dublin has been received by that city's people, and si monumentum requiris, circumspice.

In the Celtic calendar, there is day called Samhain when, after one agricultural cycle has ended in harvest and before the next one has begun, two years are joined together - but imperfectly, and in the crack between them, it was possible to pass between the world of men and the world of the Sidhe, the faeries. Bloomsday is such a day, when the world of sausages and the world of Joyce and Daedalus come together - imperfectly, but for a moment it's somehow more possible to pass between them. And benefit from the reconciliation, in the world of faeries, myth, and divine jesuitical artificers, between Stephen's intellect, Bloom's corporeality, and Molly's sensuality, and between the father who forever sought a son and the son who forever sought his father.

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.

Is the book really as grand as all that to-do happening in O'Connell Street this morning suggests? Oh Yes yes yes it is, yes.


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