And So Concludes My Joycean Mania

my Joycean mania. I will go downtown later to a pub, where Joyce lovers are already far into their celebration – the readings, the songs, the limericks, have already begun. Meeting with old friends, all of us holding our copy of this great book.

Came across this article today (among many others here at A&L Daily) about the lasting length of this book’s shadow.

BUT Ulysses transmutes the events of Homer’s Odyssey into the common speech of the Dublin Joyce knew. It was English as the language had never been spoken before, and perhaps never will be again: an English of comedy, depth, pathos, and blarney. The reader feels an almost physical desire, a linguistic lust, to have heard the voices recorded in its pages. Joyce did not simply use language; he lived within language, and Ulysses is truly a poem in prose. There is no other body of fiction, in any language, fully comparable to James Joyce’s.

For the novel’s use of language alone we should all celebrate the hundredth Bloomsday this June 16. Becoming a writer in the English-speaking world without knowing Ulysses now seems impossible, and the book’s influences are found everywhere–even in politics, as when Stephen Dedalus makes his famous comment, “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake,” which could apply to millions today.

Those who aim to be genuinely literate should at least understand the sense of language as a multidimensional fact that led Joyce to succeed Ulysses with the considerably more difficult Finnegans Wake, a book composed in “dream language.” The contemporary Irish writer Roddy Doyle early this year declared in a moment of ill-advised bluster, from which he quickly retreated, “I only read three pages of Finnegans Wake and it was a tragic waste of time.” That is a bit like hearing that an aspiring artist looked at one painting of Picasso, with the same result.

There was a time when such mockery was prevalent among cultural conservatives; but that era should, by now, have passed by. Even Joyce’s subtle prescience–particularly about the causes of national prejudice and brutality in the century we have left–is enough to make Ulysses worth our attention. So, too, Joyce’s wisdom about the intellectual, cultural, and literary traditions of Western civilization makes the book worth revisiting this year. And then there’s the fact that Ulysses is such a comic story: bawdy, raucous, uncontrolled. A lot like real life, as it happens. Never was there a book like Ulysses. James Joyce took the modernist novel and forged it into the great story of human beings as they are: mockable and praiseworthy, pathetic and noble, foolish and wise, beastly and angelic–and very, very funny.

God bless, and thank you Joyce, and happy birthday Bloomsday.