James Joyce's Ulysses is a novel unique in the history of English literature, perhaps all literature, in that it has a day dedicated to its celebration all over the world. So extraordinary was the novel's impact on readers that the first Bloomsday was celebrated within two years of the novel's publication by Sylvia Beach (Paris: Shakespeare and Company, 1922; see image), proprietor of Shakespeare and Company, at once a bookshop, lending library, publishing house, and modernist salon. The day is named for Leopold Bloom, one of the novel's three chief characters. Of course, when we think of Bloomsday and of Ulysses, we also think of Dublin, the city in which the novel is situated, and which may be regarded as a character in its own right. But what is this "Dublin," and what is "June 16?" These are questions provoked by the novel itself—another way of inquiring, like Joyce and his characters, into our experience of space and time.
June 16 is the date on which Leopold Bloom and the young writer Stephen Daedalus wander through the ancient streets of Dublin, and, simultaneously, through both the ancient and more recently cleared byways of memory. These Dublinish avenues and side streets, and the ghosts of past and present which suddenly appear in them, are interwoven with the protagonists' moment-by-moment existence, so that past and present, inner and outer, become a tapestry of ancient myth and Dubliner's dream diary. Joyce chose June 16 because on that date he walked through Dublin to the suburb of Ringsend with Nora Barnacle, his wife-to-be. But Bloomsday is a time not only to recall Joyce's life, to trace Bloom's and Stephens's steps through the streets of Dublin, and to read and reread the first modernist literary masterpiece. We are also invited to look inquiringly at things which we too frequently take for granted: our interior monologues and the places and people they memorialize.
Joyce's style, later called "stream of consciousness" (a phrase coined decades earlier by the philosopher William James), is an artistic approximation of what happens in the mind and body as it journeys through life: loving, envying, wanting, mourning, fearing, pondering, wondering. One of Joyce's essential insights, which would become central to modernist literature, is that the mind creates "reality." The universe is contained within each person's experience. Joyce conveys this as well through his classical paradigm. Bloom's classical alter-ego is Ulysses, the heroic wanderer of Homer's Odyssey, the epic poem on which the novel's structure is closely patterned. Though this pattern provides an ironic perspective on Bloom's seemingly mundane and sometimes hapless and humiliating adventures, the poetry of the novel's language, the self-awareness of the protagonists, their tentative engagement with, and occasional, passionate surrender to the mystery of their being, endows their inner lives with a mythic grandeur. But whereas in ancient myth, the hero journeys to distant lands and performs acts of courage through which he discovers his destiny, in Ulysses, the heroes journey into the self.
Ulysses has exerted an enormous influence on a wide range of writers, many of whose papers are in the Berg Collection. Two notable examples of the variety of the novel's influence are T. S. Eliot's pioneering modernist poem "The Waste Land," (the typescript/manuscript of which, bearing Ezra Pound's edits and notes, is in the Berg Collection), especially the first page, unpublished in Eliot's lifetime (see image), and the Beat epic of searching for missing fathers across a continent: Jack Kerouac's On the Road (see image).