This year, the English Department of the Faculty of Philology of the Belgrade University, made its debut at the Bloomsday Festival with the idea to celebrate the year following the centenary of the publication of Ulysses. The event was sponsored by the Bloomsday Festival in Dublin, Ireland and was included in its Global Bloomsday 2023 programme. The brains of the idea are the Alumni Production director, Prof Branko Vuksan and Andrijana Prodanić, who spent the months further developing the concept with four other students — Tijana Prišć, Ana Radaković, Jasmina Filipović, and Marija Đorđević. With the help of the Zürich James Joyce Foundation, the team was provided with reference materials which contributed to the Happening being original alongside those in London, Melbourne, Los Angeles, etc. For the occasion, the events with which we presented the Faculty included a poster exhibition, a short film, and a public reading.
The poster exhibition, Non Serviam, was based on Ulysses’s worldwide negative and positive reception and was on display at the Multimedia Centre from 16 June to 8 July. The idea was to create something which would generate important aspects of Ulysses’s interpretations for new and previous readers alike. The radicalism that extends into the novel’s fearless exploration of taboos around class, politics, money, sexuality, marriage, colonialism, religion, ethnicity, and even language certainly left a lot of material for the critics of the time. Confronted with such an enigma, they in vain sought clarification from the author through the critics that the Zürich James Joyce Foundation shared with five undergraduate students (Andrijana Prodanić, Tijana Prišć, Jasmina Filipović, Ana Radaković, and Marija Đorđević).
The film, Bloom’s Belgrade Breakfast, is a round-table discussion on Joyce’s influence on contemporary Serbian writers such as Danilo Kiš and Milorad Pavić. Shot at Tri šešira, a restaurant in Belgrade’s bohemian quarter, the film puts Ulysses in a unique, traditional Serbian setting. In a homage to Leopold Bloom’s icon kidney breakfast, Prof Branko Vuksan and the student team, joined by Prof Aleksandra Vukotić, Prof Mina Đurić and MA student Konstantin Ađanin, engaged in conversation over a customary, Serbian breakfast. Its authenticity lies in the spontaneity of cameraman Dušan Cvetić, who was in charge of the gripping shots.
On the afternoon of 16 June, the meanderings of Leopold Bloom led to the Multimedia Centre, where the opening of the exhibition and the film premiere took place. The rest of the afternoon was devoted to the public reading, which was streamed on the Alumni YouTube channel with the help of Dušan Cvetić and Aleksandar Pašalić. The evening was immortalised with photographs thanks to Petar Slijepčević, who captured everything on the camera. With each part read, a little Dublin in Belgrade spread and further meandered through the city. Notably, as the novel’s legacy may reside in how attentively and scrupulously it concentrates on the music of tentative and shambolic urban lives, the live music could not have been missed. With the traditional Irish music in the air, the guests could experience a taste of an Irish pub with complimentary food and drinks. In addition, the team set up a souvenir stand where Joyce fans could purchase badges, mugs, bookmarkers, and tote bags — all adorned with a celebrity known to everybody.
In this fashion, the Bloomsday 2023 was seen off while the team was enthusiastically encouraged to work on the next one with the hope that such a happening would become a tradition at the Faculty. All the bits and bobs were put away in the boxes to wait agogly to rattle next year.
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