Last night, The University Club of St. Paul hosted their annual Bloomsday celebration, honoring James Joyce’s Ulysses, a novel whose action takes place on June 16, 1904. A group of eighty or so people, primarily sexagenarian (by one superficial participant’s observations), gathered in a well-lit room.
Aside from a fairly amazing reading of Molly’s soliloquy (by Molly Culligan, who could play Maude in Harold and Maude if it ever needed to be re-cast), little of the evening’s events had much to do with the book itself. There were some Irish folk songs, some Irish-flamenco folk songs, a reading from a contemporary book that has been compared to Ulysses, and then some poems about Joyce and his tome.
At first I thought this was a little strange — shouldn’t a holiday about Ulysses focus its festivities on the text? But then I was all like, Nah — that would probably be kind of boring, or at least predictable. I assume that everyone who celebrates Bloomsday has read Ulysses (who else would possibly care?) and maybe wants something separate from analyses and praises of the book.
In Dublin they do these sort of scavenger hunts, where people follow the paths of Leopold Bloom and/or Stephen Dedalus — the novel’s principal characters — throughout the city, but that can’t really be replicated in the Twin Cities, despite St. Paul’s deep Irish roots.
So then I thought about Bloomsday’s temporal proximity to Father’s Day, and how maybe it should or could be a sort of anti-Father’s Day. One of Ulysses‘s central themes is about the disowning of one’s dad; Stephen is constantly trying to sever his ties with his father, while in a very morbid sense Bloom has been disowned by his son, who died. In The New Bloomsday Book — a wonderful paraphrase of Ulysses for any first-time reader — Harry Blamires describes what happens in the "Circe" episode: "Stephen runs away from his destiny. He flees the Pater, whether God, fatherland, Simon [his dad], home, Bloom, in his pursuit of freedom. Hunted, he gives the hunting cry, and Simon Dedalus swoops down on him like a buzzard."
Declan Kiberd adds to this in his introduction to Penguin’s Annotated Student Edition of Ulysses, "The revolt of the son is never the cliché-rebellion against a tyrannical parent, but the more complex revolt against the refusal or inability of an ineffectual father to provide any lead at all."
Maybe for Bloomsday, all sons (and daughters) could run around with leashes padlocked around their necks, though no one holding the leash. All the fathers (and mothers) could have the keys to the padlocks … and then lose them (another theme of the book is of lost keys/access/acceptance/etc). The day could be spent trying to wriggle out of our respective collars, probably to no avail. Just a thought.
That was the first part of the post. Now comes the second part.
As mentioned above, the crowd at The University Club was kind of small and kind of old. While no doubt there are some tight-jean’d hipsters out there reading Ulysses so they can say they read it, it’s a little sad to me that the book’s following seems to be dwindling.
I’m not sure if it’s critics, or professors, or what, but there’s definitely a stigma about the novel that suggests it’s impenetrable. Ulysses is kind of like the stone that held Excalibur — we are told and believe that something invaluable and amazing exists therein, but it’s simultaneously insinuated that, for the commoner, extracting that value is damn near impossible. There are a lot of potential readers, I think, who won’t approach the book because they think it’s inaccessible. In fact this might be the fault, or intention, of Joyce himself, who declared that his book was written as a kind of practical joke to keep critics busy for a hundred years.
Which is why it was so refreshing to come across this passage written by Anthony Burgess (author of A Clockwork Orange, etc) in his book ReJoyce:
My book does not pretend to scholarship, only to a desire to help the average reader who wants to know Joyce’s work but has been scared off by the professors. The appearance of difficulty is part of Joyce’s big joke; the profundities are always expressed in good round Dublin terms; Joyce’s heroes are humble men. If ever there was a writer for the people, Joyce was that writer.
And really, the entire novel supports this thesis. While much of the prose is intentionally difficult and obfuscated, the dialogue is mostly straightforward — and powerful. Joyce said that what he intended to do was take a sandblaster to the history of the novel and wipe the slate clean. Each of the eighteen episodes presents us with a literary style that is emulated, satirized, and then discarded.
And then, finally, there is Molly’s soliloquy. It is Joyce’s gift to literature, the form of stream-of-consciousness writing. (Vladimir Nabokov calls it "Stepping Stones of consciousness" because he doesn’t believe it’s an actual stream — he argues that people think in images as well as words, and because there are no actual images in Ulysses, it cannot be the complete flow.)
Molly, Bloom’s adulterous wife, is vulgar, simple, indulgent, human. And we get to see her thoughts and emotions from inside her skull. The lack of punctuation is dizzying, but as for the actual words, there’s nothing difficult about Molly’s internal monologue. Once you sync your own brain to hers — which happens pretty naturally — you can easily understand her thoughts. Of Bloom, for example, she thinks, "he never goes to church mass or meeting he says your soul you have no soul inside only grey matter because he doesnt know what it is to have one yes."
The rest of the book is necessary — it prepares us for the soliloquy, which might not have the same revelatory power without the slog it takes to get there. Nevertheless, Molly and the other characters, through their actual words and thoughts, transmit enough revelations — in mostly plain English — that really anyone can grasp the power of Ulysses. So, hopefully next year there will be some fresh faces at Bloomsday.
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