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Tuesday, June 15, 2004

BLOOMSDAY COUNTDOWN



O Jamesy let me up out of this pooh Molly Bloom complains in the middle of her unparagraphed, unsentenced, and unpunctuated soliloquy at the end of Ulysses. Professors like me - people who routinely conduct graduate seminars dedicated solely to Joyce's novel - are trained to point out to their students that this moment in the text is an instance of literary self-reflexivity; for "Jamesy" is none other than the novel's author, James Augustine Joyce (during his lifetime, Irish detractors called him James Disgustin' Joyce), and Molly is calling out to her maker from her fictional bed, begging him to make her stream of consciousness stop.

One hundred real years after that fictive June 16, 1904, there is no stopping the Joycean flow. Tomorrow (today, if you're Australia), hundreds of thousands of ordinary people from Szombathely to Sydney will gather to recite beloved lines from Chamber Music, Portrait of the Artist, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake.

They will dress up as their favorite Joyce characters; they will display their Joyce death mask sculptures, their James Joyce stroll gardens, their Joyce films. Scads of them a few hours ago sat at tables stretching the length of Dublin's O'Connell Street and ate Joyce-inspired breakfasts. They will sing songs immortalized by having been dropped into a Joyce story; they will sing their own Joyce-inspired music. They will drink the new Provins Valais specially labelled red and white "Cuvee James Joyce." They will stand by the side of the Liffey, the Mississippi, the Seine, and the Nile reading aloud about Paddy Dignam's funeral and Leopold Bloom's soap.





Ever since Roddy Doyle's putdown of the James Joyce industry ("They'll be offering James Joyce Happy Meals next,"), it has become fashionable to deride Bloomsday, the worldwide festival in honor of James Joyce's greatest work, Ulysses, and its hero, Leopold Bloom. And the thing has certainly gotten out of hand. It used to be the provenance of literary nerds like me, who'd get up at six in the morning on a hot rainy Washington day and join eight other jerks in some out of the way setting that someone thought looked Irish and do a marathon reading of the novel. Now it's a glitzy affair for gliterati everywhere.

They'll be dancing, for instance, in the streets of Ljubljana. Slovenia News reports that "A discreet plaque commemorating Irish writer James Joyce has recently been unveiled at platform no. 1 of Ljubljana's central railway station. In 1904, Joyce and his wife Nora mistakenly disembarked there, believing they had reached their destination - the city of Trieste." Mistakenly, mind you. But Ljubljana will take it.

"Így Szombathely Joyce híres regényalakjának, Leopold Bloomnak századik évfordulóját méltó módon ülheti meg," explains szombathely online, voice of the Hungarian town of that name, now famous because Leopold Bloom's father - an extremely minor character in the novel, and long dead when its events take place - comes from there. "As they have for years, Joyce's fans will congregate in Szombathely, a well-tended, pretty little town of some 80,000 inhabitants in southwest Hungary, in mid-June to celebrate Bloomsday, named for the fictional Leopold Bloom, the genial protagonist of Ulysses" notes a Hungarian newsletter. "But this year, with the centenary, Szombathely celebrates its ReJoyce Festival lasting over a week, to honor the Irish writer (1882-1941) who, in his revolutionary novel, put this Hungarian town on the literary map."

The organizer of the Hungarian Bloomsday is convinced he has tracked down the real Hungarian "Blum" who served as the inspiration for Joyce: "We have identified the Blum
house in Szombathely, and that is where the statue of James Joyce will be erected, as if emerging from the wall of the house."

Cities, ordinary readers, cutting-edge artists: all identify themselves with Jamesy's pooh, perhaps because this affiliation conveys both a certain seriousness and a keen aesthetic responsiveness. The hot Irish band, The Pogues, expressed this widely shared instinct to hitch a ride with him by featuring on a recent album cover a famous photograph of Joyce, and surrounding the photo with a montage of the band members dressed and posed identically. The equally hot band, Black 47 [as J.V.C. points out, for which I am grateful], sings: "To see where James had bit the dust/ I hopped a train to Zurich. / The customs man held down his hand:/ What was my business? / I wanna get laid on James Joyce's grave/ and I wanna do it instantly./ James Joyce I got no choice. / James Joyce I was only trying to find my voice."

Kate Bush's album, The Sensual World, is profoundly Joycean; in one song, Bush is Molly Bloom, "Stepping out of the page into the sensual world /Stepping out, off the page, into the sensual world…"





Molly Bloom got up out of Jamesy's pooh and entered the sensual world through the sheer literary power of James Augustine Joyce, who sang the bliss of existence. And why not, once a year, celebrate that bliss, and the way Joyce sang it, in the streets?

Ulysses, one writer points out, "is the only book in the world...to which a holiday is dedicated." It has, notes another, "become [the world's] international literary holiday." "For those who are passionate about their literature," writes an Australian observer, "June 16 is ice-cream, sex and Christmas rolled into one. [Celebrants] share a kind of trancendent, proselytising glow." "It is June 16," writes an American reporter, "not April 23 (Shakespeare's birthday) or February 23 (Keats' death) that has become the world's de facto literary holiday." "Do any [other literary luminaries] have dedicated days?" asks an Australian who doesn't think Joyce should have one either. "Memorial half-hours? Do we pause for a minute to praise the name of Lampedusa or Nabokov? And where, Paris included, has there been a talk-back session on Proust?"

The day has gotten big enough that politicians, some of whom spin Joyce and some of whom actually read and love him, have noticed, as Gideon Long, a Reuters reporter recently pointed out:



"Joyce exemplifies the European aspect of Irish identity," Irish President Mary McAleese informed a gathering of students in the Brazilian city of Sao Paulo earlier this year.

"International in his vision and impact, but always intellectually rooted in his native city of Dublin, Joyce could be said to represent the spirit of modern Ireland -- confidently Irish, comfortably European, fearlessly global in outlook."

Speaking to a gathering at Tel Aviv University, Foreign Minister Brian Cowen posited Leopold Bloom, the Jewish hero of Ulysses, as evidence of "the long history of affinity between the Irish and Jewish people".

Hailing Bloom as "a modern-day epic hero", Cowen assured the Israelis that the humble advertising salesman who wanders around Joyce's Dublin would be "very much to the fore in June of this year when we celebrate the centenary of Bloomsday".

Foreigners have also jumped on the Joycean bandwagon.

When Dominique de Villepin visited Dublin as French foreign minister this year, he reminded the Irish that Ulysses -- vilified in Ireland for years -- was first published in Paris, where Joyce spent much of his adult life.

"Joyce's journey embodies a new form of writing that criss-crosses the labyrinthine surface of the city to explore the nooks and crannies in the depths of the human soul," said De Villepin, a poet in his own right.

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, addressing a meeting of Irish businessmen in Dublin last month, observed, like millions of despairing literature students before him, that "Ulysses is a pretty hard book to read".

Wen had read it, though, and had also tackled Joyce's earlier novel "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man".





"I see the Bloomsday celebrations as a tribute to the power of the book," writes Nuala O'Faolain, an Irish novelist. "It's about celebrating our good luck that Joyce chose to write the great urban book about our city. Other cities have a patron saint, we have a patron book. Whatever way you look at it, that's something to be celebrated."

Indeed, Maurizio Pastore, an Italian studying law in Dublin and interviewed taking part in Bloomsday there, says as much: "This is so rare to see - a city celebrating its greatest artist. In Italy we don't celebrate Dante or Michelangelo. We should."





But let us look at the other side - the Doyle side - of Bloomsday in greater detail. Lots of -- call them killjoyces -- are out there, and it's worth examining their complaints more closely.

Part of the complaint involves the broader problem of the Irish culture industry, the sentimental flattening of Irishness. John Banville in the New York Times talks about "the exasperation many of us feel at the pervasiveness and bathos of the Joyce myth." John Waters, who writes for the Irish Times, agrees that the event has much to do with Joycean mythification and Irish self-mystification: "So many [Bloomsday celebrants] have no idea what they're celebrating. The whole event has nothing whatsoever to do with the meaning of the work. ...It's a shallow response born of our continuing inability to understand ourselves."

And part of the problem is disloyalty to the book itself - and to literary sensibility more broadly. "The version of Joyce these people are peddling," Banville continues, "is reprehensible, pernicious even. [Bloomsday] sets out to popularise a book that was a highly sophisticated, highly intellectualised undertaking. It is not mainstream, nor was it ever meant to be. When people claim Joyce had his eye on posterity,that is true, but it was intellectual posterity he was after, not mass approval." A British observer similarly writes: "Literature...is an essentially private act. The every-year-louder-and-louder bells and whistles that mark June 16,1904, ...is a party...an opportunity for university professors to drink too much and not feel guilty. [It] has absolutely nothing to do with its reason for existing: to move, to unsettle, to -- one hopes -- even transform individual readers. The loudest revolutions always take place in the quietest rooms." In the same vein, an Australian writer says the events are "more about frustrated show-offs and blowhards coming over all Irish in public than about a searching reflection on the motivations of James Joyce..."

Bloomsday, then, makes a mockery of the privacy, seriousness, and difficulty of authentic literary responsiveness. Banville finds the desecration of Ulysses so disturbing that he leaves town on Bloomsday.

I share this anxiety about maintaining the exile, silence, and cunning of literary experience, protecting the experience of interiority from the society of the spectacle. For me there's something both fascinating and depressing about, say, John Houston's efforts to film stories like Joyce's The Dead and novels like Lowry's Under the Volcano. Bound to the realm of the visual, even a great director makes Geoffrey Firmin look like little more than a pompous drunk. Ignorant, or semi-learned, about Ulysses, the average Bloomsday participant can make the flesh of a true Joyce student crawl.

But even with all of this, I say the more the merrier. After this centenary blowout, Bloomsdays will be more sedate anyway; and I certainly don't begrudge the blowout. Why?

One of the bitter themes of Ulysses is that reality can't be calibrated to your desires. Stephen Dedalus, when we meet him, has returned to Ireland from abroad having failed - so far at least - to realize the exuberant literary dreams that propelled him out of Ireland. He hates being back, and he hates himself. In Leopold Bloom, Dedalus encounters a man who has accepted the impossibility of certain fulfillments, who has accepted the fallibility of himself and every other human being and still been able to love. Dedalus spends the entire novel (with the exception of a few moments with Bloom) rejecting people, running away from situations, loathing his cowardice and his lovelessness. Bloom, the object of a good deal of contempt and even violence in the course of the day, remains humane, forebearing, open-hearted.

The contents of Bloom's consciousness are always - by the intellectual standards of a Stephen Dedalus - disappointing; he's an ordinary fellow of middling education with sentimental notions of world betterment; he's evading the problem of the grief he feels over his son's death, and this evasion continues to deaden his relationship with his wife. Stephen's consciousness on the other hand is always intellectually impressive. He's highly educated, well-traveled, witty, corrosive. And yet we end the book with love and respect for Bloom, not Stephen. Bloom alone's the Homeric hero. For there's no evidence that Stephen will be able to break free of his paralyzing world-rejection; whereas a day with Bloom is an education in decency and heroism and love.

Every disappointing Bloomsday reveler is a kind of Leopold Bloom. Or perhaps a Simon Dedalus. Irish, his son Stephen says of him. All too Irish.