‘I’ve read it and read it. I’ve seen the fil-lum. And I still don’t know what it’s about,” the venerable Dublin woman told Irish TV news.
As unpromising a review as this sounds, the enduring incomprehension that many – possibly most – readers experience attempting James Joyce’s Ulysses has done the novelist’s legacy no harm. Quite the contrary, as every year the book is commemorated exhaustively, and not just in Ireland.
Performative Joyceanism almost certainly predates Jane Austen-mania, first being launched as Bloomsday in 1954, generating decades of spin-off events and dressing up.
The June 16 anniversary of protagonist Leopold Bloom’s opaquely eventful walk through Dublin long ago stretched to Bloomsweek, which takes more like 10 days. People routinely dress in starched 1904 costume, at the least donning a flowery hat or straw boater to show respect.
They attend readings, lectures, plays; artistic, musical and even running tributes; and follow Bloom’s route – many features of which still exist, though the Confectioners’ Hall is now a Footlocker. Dublin alone ran 130 official events this year, but every district and town has its own programme.
Why? The typically “yeah/nah” Irish explanation would be, “Well, sure ye know yerself.” A stiff measure of self-mockery leavens the reverential ethos. In one of this year’s musical tributes, Joyce’s wife Norah is depicted as lamenting that he chose writing over a fine budding career as a professional singer. The fictional Molly Bloom remonstrates: “But think of all the hours all those scholars and historians would have lost, poring over his work and trying to understand it.”
“Precisely,” ripostes Norah tartly.
There are as many theories about Joyce’s meaning as there are pubs in Ireland, Joycean scholarship thriving globally, too.
Among other mischief, he fused actual events with the most fleeting of inner feelings, so that Bloom’s interior monologues and external dialogues intermingle, along with the restless musings of his subconscious. Which is left up to readers and their own subconsciouses, and is probably the basis of Joyce’s maddeningly teasing appeal.
In later works, he mashed words together remorselessly, several neologisms 100-101 letters long. One encyclopaedic Joycean tour guide, who regularly portrays the writer at events, admits he tackles the notoriously bamboozling Finnegan’s Wake only at night after a couple of whiskies. “Ye just have to let it wash over ye. It’s all ye can do.”
Then, of course, there are the rude bits that caused intermittent publication bans. In New Zealand, the 1967 fil-lum of Ulysses was allowed to be screened to gender-segregated audiences. How very Irish that unintentionally was, as in Ireland some local priests were still insisting on – and enforcing – segregated bathing beaches.
Joyce’s style proved a curious modesty screen. Unlike when naughty 60s children got their mitts on illicit copies of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, few could make head or tail of anything but a scattering of forbidden language.
Both the works and the fierce treasuring of them are also obvious expressions of Irish nationalism. Joyce nervelessly mocked the British throne and Catholic church, while styling Bloom a non-observant Jew in order to explore enforced “otherness”. He believed the Irish and Jewish had much in common, prodding a nerve still bristlingly contemporary.
You’d hardly know it in June, but Joyce has his critics. The novelist Paulo Coelho (to a possible rattling of pots and kettles) called his work “all style” and no substance. Irish writer Roddy Doyle has said, “Ulysses could have done with a good editor.”
To which Joyce might have said, as he did in Finnegan’s Wake, “gaggin fishygods”, what a “shabby choryush of ankalified muzzlenimiiissilehims”.
Which probably doesn’t mean, “Well, bucko, who dresses up for hundreds of tributes to your work every year?” but really should.
