I would venture to guess that the thousands who celebrate Bloomsday don’t know and don’t care about the intricacies and merits of the literary work, but know plenty about the book’s celebration of life. Yet Dublin (and to a lesser extent Trieste, where Joyce lived for 15 years) is the mecca of the Joycean cult: thousands gather to enact scenes from the book, engage in panel discussions about the book’s opacities and retrace the steps through the Dublin of Leopold Bloom’s day. For some, the book is an obsession–even a cult– for others, pretentious, and for many others, unreadable. This is where reality and fiction rub up against each other with no discernable boundaries. It’s been compared to a science fiction convention that is spread out all over Dublin, where people walk around all day with their noses in the book, following Leopold Bloom’s itinerary street by street, door by door. On that day, thousands revel they read Ulysses aloud, celebrate it in drama and song, “and above all, get drunk” (Scott Huler in “No-Man’s Land”). But let’s get back to “Ulysses” and June 16, “Bloomsday”. But equally, for millions worldwide, and most of Dublin’s population, the pain is worth the reward: he is a god.
Mostly, it’s a question of hate for the students who–like me decades ago–at first study the text as unequipped undergraduates, and frustration for all those–again like me at a later date–who have to teach it to the next batch of unequipped students. James Joyce’s literature is a cult for many, and a love-hate relationship for some. Here is one representative line: “What clashes here of wills gen wonts, oystrygods gaggin fishy-gods!” James Joyce. If you want to get to the bottom of the Joycean well of literary genius you’ll need patience and commitment.īy the time that he had gotten to writing Finnegan’s Wake, (1939) he had not only abandoned almost all usage of punctuation, but created his own language, an amalgam of all the Romance languages, plus more. He really did pride himself on writing for the intellectual, on being the master of obscurity.
And knowing how Joyce suffered from a bad case of ‘the arrogance of genius’, he may not have said the actual words, but the sentiment was genuine. Most likely the story is apocryphal, he probably never actually said those words, but every student who has agonized through Joyce’s literature thoroughly believes it. Every college professor teaching the weighty works of James Joyce–iconic Dubliner and narcissist–loves to repeat the story that Joyce proudly claimed having put in enough puzzles and conundrums in his Ulysses to keep one hundred professors busy for one hundred years.
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