Nerds the world over go all out for Bloomsday. It’s June 16, the anniversary of James Joyce and his wife Nora Barnacle’s first date in 1904, also the day Joyce chose for the events of Ulysses—three characters, Leopold and Molly Bloom and Stephen Dedalus, going about their lives in Dublin. Revelers retrace Bloom’s one day in Joyce’s Dublin hour by hour, enjoying the modernist master’s big dirty book cover to cover in dramatic readings, and donning the summer dress of middle class Edwardian Dubliners.
But June 16 isn’t just Bloomsday anymore.
It’s the anniversary of Donald Trump’s golden escalator descent, the day he started us down the path toward his presidency. (Only the second anniversary, I swear.) Trump probably wasn’t thinking of Leo Bloom then—although there are parts of that day in Dublin I don’t doubt the Donald would enjoy. He was thinking of crowd size, his personal wealth, and the beautiful border wall nobody would build better.
But the coincidence bears noting—because while Trump was not thinking of Joyce, Joyce was thinking of Trumpian nationalism back in the day. Well, sort of. Leo Bloom meets a grumbling nationalist, called only “the citizen,” in Barney Kiernan’s pub (today, the site of a jewelry store) in the book’s 12th chapter, The Cyclops. The citizen complains about “foreign wars” and strangers, outsiders, immigrants, “coming over here to Ireland filling the country with bugs.” (Mexican immigrants, the president told us two years ago, were bringing drugs and crime.)
At one point, Bloom, whose father was Jewish, considers the sweep of history: “Persecution, says he, all the history of the world is full of it. Perpetuating national hatred among nations.” Pressed to define “a nation,” he stumbles. (“A nation is the same people living in the same place,” he says, clumsily adding after patrons laugh at the vague reply, “Or also living in different places.”) The citizen, who carries a nationalist newspaper known to publish pro-pogrom editorials, plies him, “What is your nation if I may ask?”—and isn’t satisfied with his answer, that he was born in Ireland too. Later that same Bloomsday: “The citizen made a plunge back into the shop. ‘By Jesus, says he, I’ll brain that bloody jewman.'” (What had incensed him then was Bloom’s saying, “Three cheers for Israel! Mendelssohn was a jew and Karl Marx and Mercadante and Spinoza. And the Saviour was a jew and his father was a jew. Your God. … Well, his uncle was a jew. Your God was a jew. Christ was a jew like me.”)
On June 16 in 2017 we can dress up and attend readings, a literary escape perhaps from an unpopular political reality—but the fiction we’d be slipping off into spared little in the way of dirty details. A nearer re-creation of Joyce’s Dublin in our age would take much less effort than pulling together an Edwardian costume, or even leaving the comfort of your smartphone. Log in to Twitter, the 21st century’s grimy pub, and challenge an alt-rightist to a pointless debate. To really bring Bloom’s Barney Kiernan’s to life, find your Trumpian troll and DM him a defense of ethno-religious pluralism.
