As is fitting for every June 16—for every BLOOMSDAY—this is my little tribute to James Joyce’s Ulysses and its famous day fêted across the world today.

Joyce was the maestro of listening to shouts in the street, of reporting on a day in the life of ordinary Dubliners. Before he came along, daily life was hardly the stuff of high-end literature. In the late 1940s, Henri Lefebvre, a French philosopher and sociologist, became one of the first scholars to spot the significance of the thesis for Marxist politics. Five Year Plans were well and good, Lefebvre thought, but they were remote abstractions for ordinary folk. Turning people onto socialism meant locating politics somewhere more meaningful. “Economic statistics cannot answer the question: ‘What is socialism?’ Men and women don’t fight and die for tons of steel, or for tanks and atomic bombs. They aspire to be happy, not to produce.” Inventing a new society must be carried out “concretely,” said Lefebvre, “on the level of everyday life, as a system of changes in what can be called lived experience.”

Everyday life, for Lefebvre, is dialectical. On the one hand, it’s the realm increasingly colonized by the commodity, by market expansion, by its inexorable advertising machine, tapping into people’s homes, into people’s heads, fashioning not only human needs but also lifetime dreams, always available and attainable at a cost. Hence everyday life is shrouded in all kinds of mystifications and fetishisms, all kinds of alienation. It’s the realm, in other words, open to ideological manipulation. And yet, on the other hand, everyday life is also the primal scene for meaningful social change—the only scene, Lefebvre reckons—“the inevitable starting point for the realization of the possible.” Or, more flamboyantly, “the supreme court where wisdom, knowledge and power are brought to judgment.” 

In Everyday Life in the Modern World, published in that tumultuous year of 1968, Lefebvre spends the opening dozen or so pages discussing Ulysses. He’s particularly proud of the fact that his own birthday, June 16, is Bloomsday, the day the anti-drama of Ulysses unfolds—Lefebvre was born in 1901, three years before Joyce’s first date with Nora Barnacle, his future wife, now immortalized as the most famous date in modern literature. Ulysses, says Lefebvre, signaled a “momentous eruption in modern literature, diametrically opposed both to novels presenting stereotyped protagonists and to the traditional novel recounting the story of the hero’s progress.” At the same time, “in his endeavor to portray the wealth and poverty of everyday life,” Lefebvre writes, “Joyce exploited language to the farthest limits of its resources, including its purely musical potentialities.” 

Lefebvre immerses himself in Joyce’s dialectics, helping inspire his own Marxist dialectic: “that everything stems from everyday life which in turn reveals everything, or, in other words, that the critical analysis of everyday life reveals ‘everything’ because it takes ‘everything’ into account.” This is something more than mere tautology. Ulysses lets us glimpse a sort of “universal everyday life,” says Lefebvre, “because Joyce’s narrative rescues, one after the other, each facet of the quotidian from anonymity.” Joyce himself always said the human character was best displayed in the commonest acts of life. How someone ties their shoelace, or eats an egg, gives a better clue to their disposition than how they go to war. Character emerges from little acts not grand ones. 

If Marx in Capital lays bare the “hidden” abode of capitalist production, Joyce, in Ulysses, lays bare the hidden (yet all-too-visible) abode of modern reproduction, the arena that’s both the starting and end point of progressive politics, decreeing its victory or defeat. Lefebvre explains it thus: “Everyday life is made of recurrences: gestures of labor and leisure, movements both human and mechanical: hours, days, weeks, months, years, linear and cyclical repetitions, natural and rational time; the study of creative activity (of production in the widest sense) leads to the study of reproduction or the conditions in which activities producing objects and labor are reproduced, recommenced, and re-assume their component proportions or, on the contrary, undergo gradual or sudden modifications.” “Every life is many days,” says Joyce, striking a remarkably similar chord, “day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves.” 

Something often asked of Joyce: ought literature be fact or art? To which he invariably responded: “It should be life.” One of the things, he says, “I couldn’t get accustomed to in my youth was the difference I found between life and literature,” and thereafter sought to address this disjuncture, bringing the two together. What a literature of life required was above all a certain form of realism: “in realism,” Joyce says, “you are down to facts on which the world is based: that sudden reality which smashes romanticism into a pulp. What makes most people’s lives unhappy is some disappointed romanticism, some unrealizable or misconceived ideal.” And yet, Joyce’s realism doesn’t simply document the real: “if it is to seduce and fascinate,” says Lefebvre in Critique of Everyday Life—seduce and fascinate as Joyce’s works do—“the real-world fascination must be metamorphosed, transfigured. If it is to be noticed, every object, every living being, must be exaggerated, rendered surprising.”

Ulysses is a marvelous incarnation of a twenty-four-hour everyday life. And although a lot of the “action”—if we can call it “action”—is internal, a dialogue inside the heads of protagonists, it’s noteworthy how much of this takes places in public. It’s almost as if the inner life of people, as they roam the city, going about their daily business, is released by being out in public, that the outer life somehow nourishes the inner life, and vice versa. Being in public heightens the inner world, stimulates it. 

Bloom is the direct dialectical counterpart of his most famous peer’s, Marcel Proust’s alter-ego Marcel, whose consciousness of the outside, of the public world, heightens the more he spends indoors, alone in his bedroom, within four very private walls. At the beginning of The Prisoner, dozing in bed, Marcel perceives from the early morning light, and from the first street noises, what kind of day it is—“whether sounds reached me muffled and distorted by dampness or twanging like arrows in the empty, resonant space of a wide-open morning, icy and pure.” “It was, in fact,” he says, “mainly from my bedroom that I perceived the world around me.” 

“I don’t like being shut up,” Joyce once told his Parisian friend, fellow Dubliner Arthur Power, in the 1920s. “When I’m working, I like to hear noise going on around me—the noise of life.” Had Joyce gotten used to noiseless places, “I might have lost my ability to work wherever I happen to be, in a lodging-house, or in a hotel room, and silence might have become a necessity to me as it was, for example, to Proust.” So, as Marcel lies shut up in bed, Joyce has Bloom up bright and early, roaming the street a little after 8am, “walking in happy warmth,” in search of his breakfast, a pork kidney from Dlugacz’s butcher’s store. 

Thus Bloom’s daily life unfolds in all its unadulterated ordinariness; a mild Thursday morning, June 16, passed almost entirely outdoors, in the public or quasi-public realm—at a cemetery, in a public library, in a maternity hospital, at the offices of a newspaper, on a beach promenade, in a cabman’s shelter, in assorted bars and restaurants, as well as out on Dublin’s streets, encountering people likewise going about their daily round. In the streets, Bloom muses, “life is a stream,” “always flowing in a stream, never the same.” 

Bloom was Joyce’s Everyman, and a day in the life of this man, with cosmopolitan leanings, an outsider in a provincial land, isn’t simply an adventure, as the surrealists had it; it has Homeric qualities, is the basis of world history, the starting point of what is possible and impossible in life. Above all, it is life. There’s nothing else other than the everyday, as Lefebvre tells us, epic even when little or nothing happens.

Joyce exposes everyday life in all its ambiguities—its disappointments and joys, its poverty and fecundity, its fumbling myopia and clear-sighted grandeur. Ulysses is the antithesis of traditional novels, of those that present a plot with a hero, recount his progress, his dramatic rise up the pecking order, towering emergence on the world stage, overcoming all and everyone. (Joyce might have agreed with Bertolt Brecht’s maxim: “unhappy the land that needs heroes.”) Bloom’s reality is categorized by its triviality, by its low-downness. His only loftiness is his decency, the decorum of his street encounters, an admirable humility few great heroes ever have. Bloom demonstrates dignity in his daily affairs, how he greets people in the street, how he urges himself to make eye contact, his respect and curiosity, sympathy and kindness about the plight of other Dubliners who’ve hit hard times, who suffer woes. 

People asked Joyce: “Who is Bloom?” “A good man,” Joyce said, “a worldly man,” a worldly man despite never going anywhere. “He’s a cultured allroundman, Bloom is,” says the character M‘Coy in Ulysses. “He’s not one of your common of garden…you know…There’s a touch of the artist about old Bloom.” Indeed, Bloom straddles the dialectic between artist and citizen, between autodidact intellectual and common man, between a bumbling ad-canvasser (his day job) and humble democrat.

Wandering around Dublin, flowing through its buildings and people, its human traffic, its sights and smells, through the sheer variety and vitality of its voices, Bloom’s story might be our story: how to avoid crashing into rocks, getting washed away by the tide; how to navigate oneself through life’s many pitfalls and hazards. It’s like Odysseus directing his ship, having his oarsmen pull away from those wandering rocks, from the whirlpools of the great human ocean. Bloom’s archipelago is Dublin, and we can follow his trials and tribulations as we steer ourselves through our own urban archipelago. 

There’s something fascinating about how Joyce constructs Ulysses and creates Bloom. It’s surrounds something that crops up a few times explicitly in the text, offering a clue to Joyce’s method and intent: the notion of parallax. Around lunchtime, food is very much on Bloom’s mind. And in his pursuit for bodily nourishment, for food for thought, he mentions parallax passing the “timeball” at Aston Quay, recalling how Dunsink Observatory is twenty-five minutes behind of Greenwich Mean Time—on account of the sun, seen in two different places by each observatory at the same time. This is parallax: how different lines of sight afford slightly different views of an object.

Bloom says he never really understood parallax—despite having Sir Robert Ball’s “fascinating little book,” The Story of the Heavens (1886), in a blue cloth edition, on his living room bookshelf. Yet Bloom’s ruminations indicate he gets Ball’s point more than he thinks, internalizing it as his own personal sensibility. “Let us take a simple illustration,” says Ball. “Stand near a window whence you can look at buildings, or the trees, the clouds, or any distant objects. Place on the glass a thin strip of paper vertically in the middle of one of the planes. Close the right eye and note with the left eye the position of the strip of paper relative to the objects in the background. Then, while still remaining in the same position, close the left eye and again observe the position of the strip of paper with the right eye. You will find that the position of the paper on the background has changed.”

Parallax for Bloom, though, just as for Joyce, can be interpreted a little differently from this celestial understanding. For one thing, Bloomsday might best be described as one 24-hour “parallactic drift” and Joyce makes Bloom the purveyor of parallax: he sees things, often the same thing, from different vantage points—“but don’t you see? and but on the other hand,” Pisser Burke mimics Bloom, ridiculing his ability to see an issue from differing angles, for grasping a problem in its deeper, all-round complexity. 

Hence the major stumbling block “reading” Ulysses: following Joyce’s parallax shifts, his sudden jolts in perspective, his and Bloom’s “parallactic drifts” throughout the day. Shifts in sentences frequently signal shifts in parallax, movements from a first person “I,” as an internal monologue, to a third person “he” or “she,” voiced by an exterior narrator; a movement between the subjective self and a commentator looking on, somebody who’s narrating the action objectively, from a position outside the self. 

This is why Ulysses can be appreciated orally, hearing it performed, enacted by different readers, since the shifts in parallax then get articulated by recognizably different human voices, and we can follow the streams of thought as well as the streams of action. One of the great feats of the Bloomian parallactic drift is perhaps one of the greatest political takeaways from Ulysses; I’m tempted to say greatest Marxist takeaway: Bloom’s ability to think and see as a public and individual at the same time, as both an “I” and a “we,” a simultaneous vision from his own and another’s perspective. 

The “we” in question here is the demos, the public at large. The Bloomian “I” is thus also the Bloomian “we,” we, the people—at least, we, the progressive people. Such a “binocular” vision likewise keeps a hold of the Marxist ambiguity between the realm of freedom and the realm of necessity. Bloom, as a secular Jew, sees the sanctity of individual rights yet understands the collective duties of a responsible citizen. Vitally, he has an openness and awareness to each, to both at the same time. His isn’t a desire to impose one over the other, to assert either a singular selfishness or crushing authoritarianism. Bloom is a citizen of the city and a citizen of the world, not a blinkered bigot.

He’s a patient pacifist, a disliker of injustice and hypocrisy, who enters into relations with other people with a sense of equality, concerned about what happens beyond his own doorstep. Bloom’s ability to see both the wood and the trees lends itself to an intelligence universally lacking at present; a democratic yearning that can inspire a Left at a time when many of its protests have been cornered, when nearly everything once considered desirable for ordinary working-class and middling people—Joyce’s own constituency—all the stuff that once seemed to belong to the working-classes, has now been claimed or bargained away by the Right, by the rightward monocular drift of the current state of the world.

And our cities, too, have fallen, their public spirit ripped apart, crushed beneath this reactionary sway. Cities were formerly thought to be progressive enclaves; now, you can’t be so sure. Citizens have been taken in by the menacing jingoism of “citizens,” like the bullying nationalist Joyce conjures up in his “Cyclops” episode, who now collectively roam the globe and turn their subjects into one-eyed monsters themselves. Suddenly, people have been taken in by demagogues and autocrats. Meanwhile, rights—including the right to the city, once the cry and demand of progressives, the right to affordable housing, the right to justice, etc., etc.—now get overwhelmed by the right to life and right to bear arms, the right to personal liberty, the right not to be vaccinated, to be greedy and selfish, to not give a shit about anybody else. That’s my right, right?

It’s the right to do anything you want, anyway you want, to insult and maim. It also apparently means the right to lie, to peddle false news and false claims (the election was rigged, and so on). One time, too, direct action on the streets was enshrined in leftwing politics; now, it’s the Right who’re trying to reclaim the streets, who mobilize outside the state capitols, who march downtown, who storm the Capitol, who proclaim their right to direct democracy. It’s a world gone viscerally topsy-turvy. Bloom would have had none of it. And that’s as good a reason as any to celebrate his day today, and to affirm it each and every day.