This was the yowl heard though the streets of Dublin on 16 June, as fans of James Joyce, cats, and James Joyce AND cats celebrated Bloomsday. It is all in honour of Leopold Bloom, the hero of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), who spends this very day enjoying an odyssey around Dublin, as well as round the inside of his own head. 

This year sees the 70th Bloomsday. And why not, it is great fun, full of readings, performances, re-enactments and more, and the chance to enjoy gorgonzola sandwiches with burgundy, one of Leopold’s many meals. In the book, Bloomsday was set in 1904, exactly 120 years ago. Joyce chose this day because it was the day of his first sexual encounter with Nora Barnacle, the future Mrs Joyce.  Belvedere believes that this is what gives the work its dionysiac dimension. Poldy Bloom is a man of great appetites. 

Where do cats come into this?

Good point. 

We first meet Bloom in chapter four, which is entitled Calypso.   the first thing he does is have a conversation with his cat.  It goes like this:

Mr Bloom watched curiously, kindly, the lithe black form. Clean to see: the gloss of her sleek hide, the white button under the butt of her tail, the green flashing eyes. He bent down to her, his hands on his knees.

Milk for the pussens, he said.

Mrkgnao! the cat cried.

He watched the dark eyeslits narrowing with greed till her eyes were green stones. Then he went to the dresser, took the jug Hanlon’s milkman had just filled for him, poured warmbubbled milk on a saucer and set it slowly on the floor.

Gurrhr! she cried, running to lap.

Obviously Joyce was a cat fan. No one who is not a cat fan could transcribe cat speak like this. And to remove any doubt, Joyce wrote two wonderful cat stories for his grandson Stephen They started life in letters written to the four-year-old in 1936, and  were published posthumously. The Cat and the Devil, aka The Cat of The Beaugency, about a clever cat who outwitted the Devil himself, was first published in 1965; and we had to wait until 2012 for The Cats of Copenhagen.

For more inspirational felines, look at Ian Heath’s Clever Cats . And for more about cats in literature, see Literary Cats part of the Creative Cats series, all at Clowder Press.