Tuesday, July 06, 2004
Late Again: Bloomsday Greetings
In keeping with a one-day pattern of tardy commemorations, I wrote this back on June 16:
100 years ago today, as far as I know, nothing in particular happened. Then, 18 years later, a book was published that honed in on that nothing-in-particular, in a busy city that slumbered through its days and cloaked itself at night. Dublin - the city of binary increase, home of St.s Patrick and Guiness, a ghetto of satirists and scoundrels. JJ started us off before dawn and took us well past bedtime on an essentially bifurcated trail, painting a mural that puts the Island of La Grande Jatte to shame - because here, each constituent point of color is itself a painstaking portrait shaped and blended with heartfelt
sensitivity. I’d read Portrait of the Artist already; I’d liked Joyce’s style and rhythm and vocabulary, and he created beautiful stories out of the smallest tailings of daily life. Also, he hadn’t written much - a few very famous works, a few less famous ones. A short list of major tomes. I found that admirable.
A few years ago I was looking for my next book and decided to read Ulysses. I think it was because I’m both curious and masochistic. I’d heard it was good, complex, impossible, uplifting. I’d heard it was unreadable and that it was the world’s best book, so I wanted to see for myself what the furor was all about. I found a nice clothbound hardcover in shocking teal and started in, feeling like a man in speedos leaving Ellis Island for Dursey Head by breaststroke in February.
I won’t pretend that I understood much of it, but there’s so much of it to start with that I do think some meaningful fraction of it filtered through. I understand that the structure parallels that of the Odyssey - I never read it, didn’t notice it. They say one great scene is literally scored to mimic some famous piece of classical music I’ve not only never heard, but I’ve never heard of. There were a lot of words I didn’t bother to look up and many more that seemed idiomatic and went right over my head. But that didn’t seem to matter. Once my eyes and mind adjusted to the tone of the tome, I fell in love with it.
I was visiting a foreign country without benefit of a travelogue, language skills, passport or guide - just overwhelmed, with every page I turned, by the complexity and depth and beauty even in scenes taking place in raunchy alleys and outhouses. Once I got through about 80% of the book I started slowing down - it got better and better as I got better at reading it, and consequently I enjoyed it more and more the further I went, and I tried to savor each word to the utmost. It’s one of only two eight-hundred-page books I’ve ever read that ended too quickly. And now that Bloomsday is upon us and we’re 100 years in the future from that incredible ordinary day, I’m actually thinking of reading it again. I’ve only got about 2000 pages of novels and biographies stacked up on my night table, but Ulysses is calling me again, like a siren. Well, maybe more like a dirty limerick, but it’s a hard call to ignore all the same.
