Next Thursday, 16 June, is Bloomsday – named after Leopold Bloom, hero of James Joyce’s 1922 novel Ulysses, and the day on which the book is set. Bloomsday is too often an exercise in commercialised nostalgia, but it is worth going back, in this 100th year since the book’s publication, to exactly why Ulysses was so revolutionary.
If much of what is called modernism is a response to what the poet TS Eliot called the “immense panorama of futility and anarchy” that followed the first world war, then Joyce’s modernism is distinct. It gives order to the anarchy, celebrates the richness of modern life, and often sounds a comic note.
