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Saturday, June 19, 2004
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Bloomsday Postscript
UD’s favorite headline of all the Bloomsday headlines Google News sent her way was datelined Eugene, Oregon: “Eugene Does Absolutely Nothing for Bloomsday.” UD has spoken in general terms about James Joyce, Ulysses, and Bloomsday. As the world puts its Edwardian hats back on their racks, it seems right to speak a bit more personally. UD has made fun of her Joyce fetishes - the tea cup, the sweatshirt, the mouse pad, and, I guess, the image you see above - but the truth is that she adores and reveres the writer. She even reveres the man, and James Joyce is a great deal more difficult to cherish than his work. He was churlish, belligerent, and often cruel. His core was an intense aesthetic privacy whose sanctity and vitality he defended at the cost of his outer life, which was often squalid and embittering. You can admire the sacrifices Joyce made for his art while despising the drunken jealous shit he could be to his wife. Joyce’s children too paid a price for his disheveled existence. But he lent them and Dublin immortality. And he transmitted to his readers that intense aesthetic vitality, prompting a corporate excitement and gratitude powerful enough to have produced the only international literary holiday in the world. When the premier of China tells of his esteem for Ulysses, you know that the novel's author has created something beautiful and universal, something difficult enough to be satisfying, something durable and true. James Joyce’s literary descendents have attempted his miraculous mix of style, moral philosophy, character, consciousness, and place. I think Saul Bellow came pretty close to succeeding in this attempt in a work explicitly indebted to Ulysses - Herzog. Herzog’s main character, Moses Herzog, gets his name from Joyce’s novel, which includes a miniscule character -- just a name, really -- called Moses Herzog. In Herzog, Bellow uses the Joycean narrative method of constant unmarked shifts from third-person detached telling to first-person interior monologue, and in so doing manages to attain something close to Joyce‘s fluidity of consciousness and world. Still, Joyce stands alone, a fact which maddens other novelists, from Virginia Woolf to Roddy Doyle. Throw anything you like at him. Nothing sticks. At the end of the day (speaking of which, look at the time! I'm off to bed.) Portrait of the Artist and Ulysses stand alone. |