One century ago, on June 16 1904, the colonised city of Dublin was experiencing a Thursday, just short of the summer equinox.
Eighteen years on, this was the Troy in which its most famous son, the modernist James Joyce, schemed to set his reworking of the Odyssey. Voted recently the greatest novel of the 20th century, which it served to shape, Ulysses substitutes for Odysseus the cunning Greek, one jokey Jew called Leopold Bloom. So, in Ireland, June 16 has forever after been nicknamed, rather facetiously, Bloomsday.
The point about this Bloomsday is that it was an unspecial working day in a seamy, backwater provincial port. Joyce’s Dublin was still so underdeveloped (population 300 000) that Bloom and his friend, Stephen Dedalus (the stand-in for young Joyce himself), could cross it twice on foot before they eventually join up. On the fringes of that “brutish empir”, its main function was to
export the country’s cattle that few of its own citizens could afford to eat.
Otherwise it exported people.
Being two years after the Peace of Vereeniging, it should come as no surprise that the text is replete with mentions of the Anglo-Boer South African War. That was the recent big event that took Queen Victoria with it and shipped out to Africa no less than one-fifth of the male population of her dependency to fight in her cause.
Sticking to Joyce’s flypaper mind are the words those Dublin Fusiliers brought back with them: “trekking”, “assegaais”, “sjamboks”. And there are many other such “abstrusiosities”.
Scholars such as Barbara Temple-Thurston and Richard Brown have sourced references from “Mafeking, the Relief of”, through to Dolly Gray, who makes a guest appearance still waving goodbye to her absent-minded men of the regiment from her balcony, in the well-known Nighttown pantomime shebeen-crawl sequence.
Among the fantasies of this pawnshop homeland one marks the folklore that their nationalist hero, Charles Stuart Parnell, was held to ride again as one General de Wet! Up the Boers!
For this is Joyce’s “chattering allincluding most farraginous chronicle”, after all, and he meant his encyclopedic reach to include the topical in his people’s minds. But not all has been ticketed and tabulated.
There are much darker strands in the weave of Joyce’s polemic against the “pox Britannia” that also have South African connections. Extraordinarily, Joyce had picked up on the belief that dry conditions spread foot-and-mouth disease, which threatened to poleaxe the meat industry.
So the African Dr Rinderpest (of 1895) stalks these pages as the new plague. (The actual June 16 1904 was severely drought-stricken, hardly relieved by a brief thunderstorm.)
Before the rinderpest, Rorke’s Drift of the Anglo-Zulu War gets more than a mention, because Molly Bloom’s father, the drum major, fought there then. Her husband’s friend, Arthur Griffith, makes his fortune in conquered Zululand thereafter, selling Jalap (which is a brand-name laxative), in line with forcing Bovril on Boers.
Griffith then becomes the founder of Sinn Fein, the Irish independence movement, quoting King Shaka as his liberation hero!
Throughout the day there is also talk of sending a mission out to convert the Negro cannibals (to teach them to eat bits of Christian corpse, Dedalus reckons).
But Dedalus retaliates with learned quotes from those dark heresiarchs, Averroes and Sabellius. If this is too learned, like most of Ulysses, be comforted in knowing that Joyce spotted the irony that it was African theologians who had first missionised among Europeans. He reckoned there were reasons why this fact had been written out of the histories, so he wrote it back in again.
Yet, more relished for its blue passages than its blue pencil, Ulysses is of course an Irish bog of impossible puns — from the “Book of Guinness’s” in the beginning to Bloomsday/Doomsday at the final full stop.
But giving the last words to Molly Bloom (while her husband, after a long, dry day, humps the melons of her rear), Joyce lets her drift into a stream of unpunctuated consciousness. Famously, her life-affirming thoughts are for peace and prosperity for all, without regard to race, religion and any what-have-you, not the truckle of men’s trade.
To do this Joyce uses the pungent South African metaphor again: “let oom Paul and the rest of the Krugers go and fight it out between them instead of dragging on for years killing any finelooking men there were with their fever if he was decently shot it wouldn’t have been so bad a lovely fellow in khaki and just the right height over me … “
And then she segues to her author’s democratic conclusion: “I hate the mention of their politics after the war that Pretoria and Ladysmith and Bloemfontein it’d be much better for the world to be governed by the women in it.”
A hundred years on, Bloomsday is not that far in spirit from South Africa’s June 16 celebrations, after all. “Life, life,” sighed Leopold Bloom, “all shite and onions. Better not.” And as Stephen Dedalus replied immortally: “Let my country die for me.”