The Irish Arts Center's 36-hour reading, the city's Irish literary tradition, and why June 16 matters to a million Irish-Americans who call New York home.
New York has more Irish-Americans than any city outside Ireland. Every June 16, the Irish Arts Center on Eleventh Avenue begins a 36-hour reading of Ulysses — start to finish, page to page, passed from reader to reader. It ends when Molly Bloom says yes.
New York City holds what is arguably the most sustained Bloomsday celebration outside Dublin: the Irish Arts Center's annual 36-hour public reading of Ulysses, which begins at midnight on June 15 and runs continuously until the novel is complete. Hundreds of volunteers — actors, writers, ordinary readers — take turns at the podium, reading their assigned passage and passing the baton to the next.
The Irish Arts Center on West 51st Street has hosted the event for decades. It has become one of the defining events of the Irish-American literary calendar in New York — a city where that calendar is substantial.
The Irish Arts Center at 726 Eleventh Avenue hosts the city's longest Bloomsday tradition: a continuous public reading of Ulysses beginning June 15 at midnight and ending when the novel ends. All 18 episodes, all 265,000 words, read aloud by volunteers. The Molly Bloom soliloquy traditionally closes the reading as June 16 turns to June 17.
New York received more Irish emigrants than any other American city. By 1860, one in four New Yorkers was Irish-born. The city's Irish community — from the Famine refugees who built the Erie Canal and the railroads to the post-war economic emigrants who staffed the hospitals and the fire department — created a cultural infrastructure that still exists. The Irish Voice, the Irish Echo, the Irish Repertory Theatre, the Emerald Isle Immigration Center: all of these are products of a community that has been building institutions for 175 years.
Bloomsday in New York is part of that infrastructure. It is not a tourist event. It is an Irish community event that happens to involve one of the greatest novels in English.
The Irish families of New York — the Murphys, the Walshs, the Ryans, the Lynches, the Byrnes — carried their surnames from the same counties Joyce was writing about. The Ulysses Dublin of 1904 was still the Dublin their grandparents left. Bloomsday, for these families, is a connection to that city — even for those who have never been.
The final chapter of Ulysses — Molly Bloom's unpunctuated interior monologue, delivered as she lies awake in bed while her husband sleeps — is the chapter most often performed in New York. It is one of the most famous passages in English literature, and the most frequently excerpted. Molly is Penelope to Bloom's Ulysses, and her final word — "yes" — ends the novel as it began, with a morning in Dublin that contains everything.
New York has always responded to Molly Bloom. There may be something in the city's own interior monologue — relentless, unpunctuated, circling — that recognises hers.
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