Actor Elaine Theodore (right) renders Molly Bloom’s soliloquy. At left is actor Elise Manning. Photograph: Frank Curran

Despite having a substantial Irish-American community, Boston has not hosted a Bloomsday celebration—to honor James Joyce’s monumental 1922 novel, Ulysses—on the scale of commemorations held annually in New York or Dublin or even São Paolo (which has been marking the day for 20 years). On June 16, partnering with the New Center for Arts and Culture, the Irish Studies Program at Boston College took up the baton, sponsoring a day of films, discussion, lectures, raucous readings, and live music.

June 16 marks the anniversary of the launch, 103 years ago, of Joyce’s courtship of Nora Barnacle, the Dublin chambermaid who became his abiding companion and, in 1931, his wife. In tribute, Joyce set Ulysses entirely on that date. The book follows the Jewish adman/everyman Leopold Bloom through his adventures—bawdy, elemental, or slight—on that ordinary Dublin day in 1904, thereafter known as Bloomsday.

Events began on Boston College’s campus at 11:30 a.m., with a screening in Devlin Hall of Fine Arts Professor John Michalczyk’s film Of Stars and Shamrocks, about the Irish and Jews of 19th- and 20th-century Boston; they closed with a 7 p.m. showing of Bloom, a cinematic dramatization of Ulysses starring Stephen Rea that had its local premier at Boston College in 2004. In the meantime, there were period exhibits (sculpture, photographs, sheet music, newspapers) in the Burns and Bapst libraries and victuals for sale under a festival tent. WBZ-TV political analyst John Henning moderated a discussion of Irish-Jewish relations in Boston, with panelists from Boston College’s history department and the American Jewish Historical Society.

The main event, though, was a series of readings from the celebrated book, rendered by a cavalcade of personalities. The humorist and political commentator Jimmy Tingle read the part of Citizen, Bloom’s anti-Semitic antagonist from Chapter 12, and recited an excerpt from Judge John Woolsey’s 1933 U.S. district court decision that allowed the allegedly obscene Ulysses to be sold in this country. “In respect of the recurrent emergence of the theme of sex in the minds of [Joyce’s] characters, it must always be remembered that his locale was Celtic, and his season spring,” Tingle quoted, drawing laughs that probably weren’t heard in Woolsey’s courtroom. David Barry, the Irish consul general in Boston, and Rony Yedidia, the Israeli consul to New England, read narrative passages from some of the later chapters, lending a sedate counterbalance to exuberant performances by actors including Elise Manning and Ciaran Crawford, who read the parts of many of Ulysses’s secondary characters. Local actor Steve Barkhimer stole the show in the guise of Bloom, with vocal inflection and rubbery facial contortions that captured the earthy protagonist.

“It really makes the book come alive, to hear the interior monologues in the way Joyce would have heard them,” said Larry Hardesty, a youngish man in Chuck Taylors and a white T-shirt who skipped the panel discussion to thumb through a few pages of his library copy of Ulysses. For Hardesty, who had seen a poster for Bloomsday Boston in a bookstore, one element of the novel that can fall through the cracks of its 600-plus pages of dense text is its humor. As Marjorie Howes, a professor of English and codirector of the Irish Studies Program, observed in her opening remarks (titled “Ulysses for the Perplexed”), Ulysses is “the greatest novel in 20th-century literature . . . but not everything in it is great, solemn, or even good.” In her talk, Howes observed that the popular description of Ulysses as the Mount Everest of literature—the “best, highest, most challenging, biggest” novel of the 20th century—intimidates many readers. She proposed an alternate metaphor: the book as an ocean. “Ulysses is not to be mastered or conquered,” she said. “It’s to be enjoyed, dipped into, paddled around in.”

In more than 200 cities, from Buffalo to Berlin, Joyce enthusiasts take to the streets every Bloomsday. New York City’s Symphony Space puts on “Bloomsday on Broadway,” a 12-hour fest during which writers and actors from Frank McCourt to Stephen Colbert perform or read aloud. Dublin celebrates Bloomsday for the whole week leading up to June 16, with readings, performances, and tours of the shops, streets, and pubs that figure prominently in the book. (Joyce had said he wanted “to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city one day suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book.”)

For a first-time effort, Bloomsday Boston drew a good crowd, filling the roughly 300 seats in Bapst’s Gargan Hall for the readings and panel discussion. Some, like Kathy Garity ’72, came seeking motivation. “This might inspire me to tackle Ulysses, or maybe even Finnegans Wake,” said Garity, already familiar with Joyce’s more accessible Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

For Daniel Neuman, executive director of the New Center, which grew out of Boston’s Jewish philanthropic community, the pull of the day was the opportunity to consider the intersection of two diasporic communities. “It seems most appropriate,” he said, that, in Boston, Bloomsday celebrate the connection “represented in Ulysses between a protagonist who’s Jewish and a largely Catholic country.” Hearkening to Boston College’s original role as a school for the sons of Boston’s Irish immigrants, University Provost Cutberto Garza observed that the collaboration with the New Center “vividly illustrates the relevance of the Irish and Jewish experiences to each other and equally importantly to those of other diaspora communities.”

Scattered through the audience were a dozen or so participants who followed a Bloomsday tradition often enjoyed elsewhere, donning Edwardian garb and playing the part of a favorite character. “I take every opportunity to dress up in period costume and throw on an accent,” said Kate Dorman ’06, attired as Gerty MacDowell, the lame beachgoer who tempts Bloom in Chapter 13. Anna Light, the costume shop supervisor at the University’s Robsham Theater, provided Dorman’s powder-blue dress, straw hat, and parasol, as well as the outfits of more than one Leopold Bloom and Bella Cohen (a brothel madam).

Dorman, a teacher’s aide who learned to love Joyce in Marjorie Howes’s Ulysses class as an undergraduate, held unofficial court on the Bapst lawn before the readings started. Inspired by the accordion and fiddle music emanating from the festival tent, she gave an impromptu Irish jig lesson, kicking up her heels while gripping her parasol in one hand and holding up her bloomers with the other. “I’m not sure if you know ballet,” she said, in line with the spirit of the day, “but this is very much the opposite.”

Read more by Tim Czerwienski