ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF MOLLITUDE
Yes, it’s a word. An old, rare word for sure — from the Latin for “soft” — but mollitude is still out there, still kicking.
Also still kicking is the only novel great enough to have its own annual, global celebration – James Joyce’s Ulysses, whose centennial we mark this year. It’s a book full of invigorating wordplay, as in the wordplay of my title, which not only takes off on another great novel (Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude), but puns on the name of one of Joyce’s most important characters, Molly Bloom.
Bloomsday, today, gathers Ulysses lovers from all over the world to reread portions of the book while nursing a Guinness and singing along to songs like, well, My Irish Molly. Molly Malone.
Molly’s famous stream of consciousness closes out Joyce’s book on a note of life-loving human resilience. Her monologue always makes me think of yet another Molly – the real-life Unsinkable Molly Brown, famous for helping save passengers on the Titanic, and for rallying her terrified fellow survivors in the lifeboats.
Its inventive use of language, its theme of unsinkability despite the sorrows and perils of life – this only begins to get at the ultimately unaccountable power of Joyce’s novel. Read with an open heart and an open mind, the book clearly transports many of us to a place of exhilarating aesthetic freedom, where we ourselves, our language, and even our world can somehow be renewed.
It’s true that Joyce’s two main characters – Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus – seem stuck in a depressive paralysis; but even they, once their paths cross and they find fellowship with one another, demonstrate a capacity for regeneration.
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Everything in Ulysses draws us away from deadly, mendacious people and language, and toward the pulsing authentic generous words and personalities of particular, vulnerable, human beings. The novelist/hero of Don De Lillo’s novel Mao II says of such language that
it made his heart shake to hear these things in the street or bus or dime store, the uninventable poetry, inside the pain, of what people say.
Ulysses conveys – with deep conviction and persuasion – its belief in the recuperability of a kind and even beautiful world, founded on our recognition of one another’s complexity and uniqueness. And how else to convey this humanity but through our words, our songs, our sympathetic encounters with one another?
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One can also convey authentic humanity through its negation, through language whose paranoid mechanical quality (as in the novel 1984) makes us aware, as we mark authenticity’s appalling absence, of our instinctual human connection.
This Bloomsday, if you want to know how far we have fallen from Joyce’s vision of empowering human mutuality, read our last president’s twelve-page response to the January 6 committee. See how far you can get with his dead bleats of dead cliches until you can’t take it anymore. And then laugh at it. Laugh at it with all the strength that a conviction of the greatness of humanity can give.