Content provided in partnership with
Bloomsday at 100: two reflections on James Joyce's legacy
Commonweal, May 21, 2004 by Robert H. Bell, Mark Patrick Hederman
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.
Find Research Guides for:
Find Featured Titles for: Home & Garden
Most Popular Articles in Reference
- The importance of understanding organizational culture
- Credit card attitudes and behaviors of college students
- What factors attract foreign direct investment?
- Libraries Need Relationship Marketing - mutual interest marketing concept, ...
- How to set performance goals: employee reviews are more than annual critiques
- More »