Bloomsday at 100: two reflections on James Joyce's legacy

Bloomsday, June 16, 1904, is the day anatomized, commemorated, and celebrated in James Joyce's Ulysses. Striking testimony to the enduring power of Ulysses is that we mark not the birth of its author or the publication of the book but the imagined day of the fiction. Ulysses has inspired a holiday to rival St. Patrick's Day. Joyce's vision of Dublin on June 16, 1904, is so compelling that it has entered our consciousness, become part of what we feel and know, remember, and imagine.

Once banned, often excoriated, still dauntingly difficult, Ulysses has become the canonical twentieth-century novel. Readers continue to be exhilarated, nettled, and perplexed by it. Fundamentally paradoxical--a comic epic, antic and grave, mordant and heartbreaking--Ulysses is an encyclopedia of modernism and a gospel of postmodernism.

Yet Ulysses features the traditional qualities of fiction, intriguing characters confronting and creating their fates in a lifelike time and place. We come to know intimately Stephen Dedalus, Leopold and Molly Bloom, their thinking and feeling, suffering and longing.

Joyce's characters live in a vividly rendered world. Dublin on June 16, 1904, pulses with life: the sights and sounds, the smells and textures of the city. Newspapers, horse races, trams, power outages, a procession, advertisements, songs, bric-a-brac--all vibrating. Ulysses depicts Dublin, street by street, shops and pubs, bridges, municipal buildings and statues, flotsam and jetsam.

While Joycean reconstruction of time and place is phenomenally accurate, other tidbits have metaphoric or symbolic implications. Woven into the dense fabric of Ulysses are correspondences that connect mundane matters and mythic models--particularly the Bible, Homer, Dante, Mozart, and Shakespeare. Joyce's revision of Dublin in 1904 becomes a vision of world without end.

Joyce's resourceful language, endlessly inventive, invites comparison with Shakespeare's verbal virtuosity. Ulysses has the inclusive scope of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and the Oxford English Dictionary. Of its thirty-three thousand words, sixteen thousand are used only once. One notorious episode recapitulates the history of language from primitive utterances all the way on, or down, to contemporary slang and drunken babble. Joycean language reaches for the heavens and plunges to the lowest depths--from the paradisial "heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit" to this hellish vision of Stephen's mother, dead of cancer: "Pain, that was not yet the pain of love, fretted his heart. Silently, in a dream she had come to him after her death, her wasted body within its loose brown graveclothes giving off an odour of wax and rosewood, her breath, that had bent upon him, mute, reproachful, a faint odour of wetted ashes.... A bowl of white china had stood beside her deathbed holding the green sluggish bile which she had torn up from her rotting liver by fits of loud groaning vomiting."

However frightening or disturbing its material, Ulysses revels in the felicitous possibilities of language. An extraordinary variety of tones and styles resound in Dublin on this day of days. Joyce regards his world variously, with rigorous irony, satiric austerity--yet with unflagging magnanimity and pervasive humor. Joyous delight and exuberant energy are sustained despite dismaying pain, suffering, and loss--gaiety (in Yeats's phrase) "transfiguring all that dread." Joyce's coinage for his mixture of laughter and solemnity is "jocoserious."

Joyce, like Shakespeare, is myriad-minded--providing and requiring multiple perspectives. His vision is ecumenical, encompassing many voices, and his writing is drenched in Catholicism, the faith and institution that shaped and provoked him. Passionate ambivalence to Catholicism pervades Ulysses. Like Stephen Dedalus, James Joyce was a rebel, exile, and apostate, an avowed foe of what Stephen bitterly denounces as "the holy Roman Catholic and apostolic church." Unforgettably (and melodramatically), Stephen taps his skull and proclaims, "in here it is I must kill the priest and the king."

In 1904, at age twenty-two, Joyce left Ireland forever with his life-long companion, Nora Barnacle, and repudiated Catholicism forever, more or less. As he lay dying in Zurich in 1940, a priest asked Nora, still a Catholic, if he should administer last rites. "Oh, no," she replied, "I could never do that to him." Yet just as Joyce forsook but never forgot Dublin, he abandoned his faith but kept its categories (in Hugh Kenner's formulation).

Designated by an interviewer a "Catholic writer," Joyce mildly insisted that he was better understood as a "Jesuit writer." Trained by Jesuits, Joyce admired their intellectual rigor and valued their lucid explication of complicated material. As a novelist, Joyce became a great arranger. He always insisted that however complicated his techniques, his meaning is clear.

An important part of Joyce's spiritual legacy is his concept of the epiphany, adapted from the feast celebrating the revelation of Christ to the Magi. In Joyce's secular redefinition, epiphanies "show forth" mysteries hidden behind or within something very ordinary. In these "sudden spiritual manifestations," he perceived or discovered the miraculous meanings of mundane materials--commonplace gestures, everyday things, the vulgar speech of "Dear dirty Dublin."

On his quest for the abiding significance of everyday experience, Joyce became a "priest of the eternal imagination," a potent rival to the priests he flamboyantly repudiated. "Don't you think there is a certain resemblance between the mystery of the Mass and what I am trying to do," he remarked, "... by converting the bread of everyday life into something that has permanent artistic life" for spiritual "up-lift." In a less pontifical mood, he agreed that his writing was "trivial." "Also quadrivial," he added. Having his portrait painted, he instructed the artist, "Never mind about my immortal soul. Just be sure to get my tie right."

That incongruous, disconcerting mix of the sublime and the ridiculous, the spiritual and the secular, typifies Joyce and Ulysses. Conceiving a Jewish hero in Dublin, Joyce makes that anomaly as problematic as possible. Leopold Bloom is "Jewish" in a partial and elusive sense--like Woody Allen, "Jewish, with an explanation."

By strict religious criteria, Bloom is hardly or barely Jewish. He is not observant; he loves pork; he knows only bits of Jewish theology, learning, lore, and tradition. He is not even circumcised. His grandfather was a Hungarian Jew named Virag Lipoti who emigrated and converted. Bloom himself converted twice, to Catholicism and to Protestantism. He married an Irish girl named Molly Tweedy and they "practice" no particular faith.

Yet Bloom is regarded as Jewish for several good reasons. There are hints that Bloom's Irish-named mother was Jewish. Scores of references and allusions in Ulysses associate Bloom and Judaism. Most important, Bloom thinks of himself as Jewish. He identifies with Jewish history and tradition; he embodies and articulates traditional Jewish values and concerns. No wonder the great Judaica scholar Gerscholm Sholem concluded, "Well, the rabbis might not say that Bloom was a Jew, but I do."

Joyce called his book an epic of two races, Irish and Israelite. Bloom's Jewishness is central. The hero is an outsider, someone "other" in the predominantly Catholic society of Dublin in 1904. Bloom is an archetype of the modern protagonist, marginal, in a sense deracinated, tenuously connected to his culture. In his miniature odyssey, he is the Wandering Jew.

Bloom is also a deeply bourgeois, profoundly Irish, highly domestic character, steadfastly linked to his wife, parents, and children. While many of Bloom's cohort waste their resources in pubs, Bloom rarely indulges and worries constantly about being a good provider, husband, and father. Joyce specified respect for family as a "Jewish" trait.

Bloom has other instincts and attributes Joyce regarded as "Jewish." He is generous and compassionate, idealistic and public minded, charitable and tender. Bloom demonstrates a traditionally Jewish respect for learning. No intellectual, not always deeply informed, he is always curious and probing. Bloom's values are broadly liberal and humane, yet characteristically Jewish in their emphasis upon this life and this world. He is a good man, arguably the "best Christian in Dublin." He is certainly one of the most lovable characters in literature.

But Joyce is too many-minded, too complicated, too keen on ironies and competing possibilities, to create a simply admirable, lovably Jewish hero. Joyce also conceives Bloom with some stereotypical "Jewish" deficiencies, especially as remarked by his Irish companions. There is more than a bit of the schlemiel (to cite that useful Gaelic term) about Bloom. Though Bloom's macho peers are fools to mock his tenderheartedness, and they stupidly misconstrue his loving kindness as effeminate, Bloom is maddeningly passive and objectionably flaccid. His masochistic fantasies remain disturbing. One suspects that Joyce associated these inclinations with "Jewishness."

In a memorable scene at a Catholic funeral, Bloom feels estranged. Unimposing, incapable of the casual banter enjoyed by his companions, especially over drinks, he has little to say and what he says is rarely notable. But Bloom's thoughts, his reflections, are unusual. While his life is dull, bland, his perceptions are vivid, robust.

"What price the fellow in the six feet by two with his toes to the daisies?" Bloom wonders in the cemetery. "No touching that. Seat of the affections. Broken heart. A pump after all, pumping thousands of gallons of blood every day. One fine day it gets bunged up: and there you are. Lots of them lying around here: lungs, hearts, livers. Old rusty pumps: damn the thing else." Now his stubborn skepticism becomes openly satirical: "The resurrection and the life. Once you are dead you are dead. That last day idea. Knocking them all up out of their graves. Come forth, Lazarus! And he came fifth and lost the job. Get up! Last day!"

Bloom's inner life abounds with vibrancy. He's perceptive, wondering, commanding, and often amusing. Bloom views the world with sharp skepticism and persistent interest. The world he inhabits may be prosaic but his consciousness is bright, engaging.

Molly's famous last words say yes to Bloom, and affirm the force of Joyce's art, now and in time to be: "and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes." Ulysses, this great bright book of life, will continue to thrill and woo us unto the crack of Bloom.

Robert H. Bell is Kenan Professor of English and founding director of the Project for Effective Teaching at Williams College. He is a recent winner of the Cherry Award for Great Teachers. Author of Jocoserious Joyce: The Fate of Folly in "Ulysses," he is completing A Reader's Companion to David Foster Wallace's "Infinite Jest."

On June 16, 1904, Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom, one of literature's most unlikely and endearing couples, each journeyed through Dublin in James Joyce's Ulysses. To Joyce enthusiasts all over the world, that day became known as "Bloomsday." This year being the centenary, Ireland is holding a festival from April 1 to August 31. Although Joyce might have been pleased that his works are still being read, that his name is remembered with affection and festivity in his own country, where it was once condemned and reviled, the commemorative program outlined by the Irish Tourist Board would hardly have been to his taste. Joyce has become an Irish industry in some ways as trivial as leprechaun spotting and shamrockery.

But not entirely. Dubliners, Joyce's seminal 1914 book of short stories, describes the paralysis of his native city. The twin forces of politics and religion had entrapped the Irish in alcoholism, sexual repression, and poverty. Frustrated by such oppression, Joyce himself left Dublin, not coincidentally, in 1904. He called his Dubliners a "chapter in the moral history of my country," an attempt to galvanize the creative energy that would help his fellow citizens to "revolt against the dull inelegance" of the city. Dubliners refused to examine the darkness underpinning the veneer of their shabby respectability, Joyce thought. In contrast, he defended the freedom of humanity in opposition to all airless and merely logical orthodoxies.

Richard Ellmann begins his biography of Joyce--both the 1959 and 1982 editions: "We are still learning to be James Joyce's contemporaries, to understand our interpreter." Maybe, at last, on the centenary of Bloomsday, we can celebrate something of the freedom that Joyce sensed as our destiny. The words with which he ends A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man may well be taking flesh three generations later: "I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race."

Dublin or Duibh linn, as the name is written in the ancient annals, means a black pool. The name has a certain psychological resonance, for Joyce pioneered an artistic way into the underground darkness of the unconscious. In a 1906 letter to his brother Stanislaus he says:

   if I put a bucket into my own soul's well, sexual department, I draw
   up Griffith's and Ibsen's and Skeffington's and Bernard Vaughan's and
   St. Aloysius's and Shelley's and Renan's water along with my own. And
   I am going to do that in my novel (inter alia) and plank the bucket
   down before the shades and substances above mentioned to see how they
   like it: and if they don't like it I can't help them. I am nauseated
   by their lying drivel about pure men and pure women and spiritual
   love for ever: blatant lying in the face of the truth.

As it happens, the city Joyce made famous has recently developed a number of features suggesting that its inhabitants are at last becoming aware of the human and artistic possibilities Joyce undertook to investigate. In 2003, the so-called Millennium Spire was finally completed and now stands 120 meters tall in the center of O'Connell Street. The architect, Ian Ritchie, says that this creation should be viewed as the spire of an underground cathedral encompassing the whole city of Dublin, and, perhaps, the whole country of Ireland. A new bridge across Dublin's River Liffey was officially opened on Bloomsday 2003. This "James Joyce Bridge" links Ellis Quay on the north of the river to Ushers Island, the location of the actual house described in Joyce's masterful story, "The Dead." Costing [euro]9 million, the bridge was designed by Santiago Calatrava Valls. It was one of the last works of Belfast's Harland and Wolff, makers of the Titanic. The bridge itself took six months longer than anticipated to construct because of its unusual design. Finished in gleaming white, it provides not only a most elegant sculptured connection between the teeming city and the house of "The Dead," but also twin pedestrian walkways and viewing areas on each side of a central four-lane section carrying road traffic. It allows for Bloomsday pilgrims to walk across the waters of what Joyce described as "anna livia plurabelle," enacting perhaps their own odyssey from Irish paralysis to Joycean freedom.

The bridge's engineers tell us that "the main arch steelwork was formed on a large hydraulic press (thought to be the largest horizontal open press in the world) ... to produce complex multiaxis bends as specified for this uniquely designed structure." The same might be said for the press on which the original works of Joyce were printed! You might even say that the purpose of Joyce's works was similar to the goals of the bridge designers: "to develop bend geometry." I like to think that the bridgebuilders' vocabulary captures what Joyce was trying to do in his novels.

The two main parabolic arches of the bridge create two continuous, tilted, tied arches as the support spans for this unique steel structure. In a similar way, the two main parabolic arches of Ulysses are the journeys of Stephen and Bloom through the streets of Dublin. "In Ulysses, I have recorded, simultaneously, what a man says, sees, thinks, and what such saying, seeing and thinking does, to what you Freudians call the subconscious."

If Milton felt called to explain the ways of God to humankind, Joyce felt obliged to explain the ways of humankind to God. Having rejected the orthodoxy of the Catholic Church, he embraced with passion and rigor what could be called an orthodoxy of humanity. He realized that there was more to life than deductive Jesuit philosophy. In this sense he was a contemporary in spirit of the Surrealists, of Proust, of Freud, of Jung, of Rilke and all those who were embracing the new century's awareness of human possibility. Not that Joyce was in any way appreciative of his contemporaries. He despised Freud and Jung, for example, referring to them as Tweedledum and Tweedledee. He felt that they were pillaging a reality that artists alone were capable of expressing.

The reason Joyce had to use such an esoteric and opaque style in his final masterpiece, Finnegans Wake, is that, as he explained, "one great part of every human existence is passed in a state which cannot be rendered sensible by the use of wideawake language, cut-and-dry grammar and go-ahead plot."

Joyce described Finnegans Wake as written "to suit the esthetic of the dream, where the forms prolong and multiply themselves, where the visions pass from the trivial to the apocalyptic, where the brain uses the roots of vocables to make others from them which will be capable of naming its phantasms, its allergies, its illusions." The "new conscience" that Joyce was forging in the smithy of his soul was not the Catholic rational ordering of life borrowed from Aristotelian or Thomistic principles. For him, the center of gravity was no longer reason or consciousness. Another axis had to be established between consciousness and the unconscious, bridges had to be designed which would allow access to this underground and unexplored world.

Joyce's magisterial work is such a bridge. Ironically, it is a kind of cathedral as well, one that incorporates the whole of humanity, unconscious as well as conscious, nighttime as well as daytime, male as well as female. For Joyce, as for the second-century bishop and martyr St. Irenaeus, the glory of God cannot be other than man and woman fully alive. I said to the Judas Tree speak to me of God, and the Judas Tree burst into Bloom.

Mark Patrick Hederman writes from Glenstal Abbey, Limerick, Ireland. He is the author of The Haunted Inkwell: Art and Our Future (Columba).

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