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A FAMOUS NOVEL
JAMES JOYCE (left) first published the controversial novel "ULYSSES" in 1922, but it still stirs up readers today--and is celebrated in public at Philadelphia's "Bloomsday." Because of its frank, candid, sexual soliloquy by the character Molly Bloom in the book's final secton, it was widely banned around the world for years. |
Philadelphia’s Bloomsday
Echoes Joyce’s 'Ulysses'
of TheColumnists.com
I enjoyed my first Bloomsday recently. I had a wonderful time though I can’t quite explain why.
Bloomsday is the 24 hours of June 16, 1904, a date 107 years ago immortalized by James Joyce in "Ulysses," his 700-plus page novel. The novel was published in 1922. The first Bloomsday celebration on record occurred in 1954. Bloomsday became a Philadephia institution in 1993, promoted by the Rosenbach Museum because of its possession of an original copy of the Ulysses manuscript.
"Ulysses" is, for most of us, fairly unreadable, yet Bloomsday has been celebrated all over the world. It is called Bloomsday after the novel’s protagonist, Leopold Bloom, like Joyce a Dubliner.
The readings for the 19th celebration June 16 started at noon outside the Rosenbach Museum’s brownstone buildings. I arrived two hours into the reading on closed-to-traffic Delancey Place, a charming one-block street of Sycamore-leafy trees. There were about 100 white folding chairs arranged in a semi-circle on the street outside the lectern. People listened from the seats or sprawled on stoops as some 80 readers read until just past 7 P.M.
People read for about five minutes each. An early reader was the Irish Ambassador to the United States, H.E. Michael Collins. Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter was a no-show this time. Former Mayor and Governor Ed Rendell often read. Philadelphia novelist Chaim Potok has read Leopold Bloom’s lines.
I had a leisurely afternoon. I listened for awhile, went into the museum a spell to look at a collection that included an Arthur Conan Doyle Sherlock Holmes script, an Abraham Lincoln speech and a letter written by John Brown five days before he was hung in Charles Town, W.Va. I checked out the inevitable gift-shop material at a table on the street: Bloomsday T-shirts, coffee mugs, posters, books by Joyce, even a chocolate bar with Joyce’s picture on the wrapper. I went back to listen to some more readings, even moseyed around the 20th Street corner for a cup of coffee at a cupcake shop.
My interest in "Ulysses" stems from a program of "Ulysses" readings at my community that was inspired by Mark Ball, a law professor-Joyce devotee. He instituted a weekly program of readings from "Ulysses" that will take two years to complete. Some 35 people started reading with him, and there are almost a dozen hardy souls still at it, immersed in Dublin.
The museum invited Ball to join the roster of speakers. He spoke for five minutes in the “Wandering Rocks” section of the book. Ball’s enthusiastic, Irish accent-rich rendition received one of the loudest rounds of applause.
Here is one paragraph from Ball’s five-minute stint:
She lies laid out in stark stiffness in that secondbest bed, the mobled queen, even though you prove that a bed in those days was as rare as a motorcar is now and that its carvings were the wonder of seven parishes. In old age she takes up with gospellers (one stayed at New Place and drank a quart of sack the town paid for but in which bed he slept it skills not to ask) and heard she had a soul. She read or had read to her his chapbooks preferring them to the “Merry Wives” and, losing her nightly water on the jordan, she thought over “Hooks and Eyes for Believers’ Beechers” and “The Most Spiritual Snuffbox to Make the Most Devout Souls Sneeze”. Venus has twisted her lips in prayer. Agenbite of inwit: remorse of conscience. It is an age of exhausted whoredom groping for its god.
I didn’t understand this just as I did not grasp most of the book. But I appreciated that other people were enjoying the book, or the sense of the book, or the scene of the readings under the Sycamore trees. .
We were helped greatly by a complimentary eight-page newspaper, the “Bloomsday Herald.” It listed the names of all the speakers and their affiliations. Essays “Why Read 'Ulysses'?” and “Some Reasons Not To” were invaluable for trying to follow Joyce’s bag of language tricks.
For example there was this explanation for some of the “Wandering Rocks” material read by friend Ball: “This episode comprises nineteen separate passages, each a short poetic sketch or a scene or event happening somewhere in Dublin. Some of these episodes, though seemingly unrelated, appear to be happening simultaneously, affording the reader the sense of a wide-angle lens through which the whole city may be viewed.”
Oh.
Joyce, born in 1882, died in 1941. Each of the Philadelphia programs has a theme. For this one, “Paris in the 1920s,” the “Bloomsday Herald” published a timeline of Joyce and Paris.
Among other things, we learn that Sylvia Beach, who would open the celebrated “Shakespeare and Company” bookstore, moved to Paris in 1901, the year Joyce arrived in Paris the first time as a student. In 1922, the year Ernest Hemingway arrived in Paris, “Shakespeare and Company” published "Ulysses" on Joyce’s birthday, Feb. 2. In 1924 the flood of American expatriates to Paris grew and Dr. A.S.W. Rosenbach purchased the manuscript of "Ulysses" from John Quinn for $1,975.
I think I will give "Ulysses" another try….I
think.
©2011 by Stan Isaacs. The Stan Isaacs caricature is ©2001 by Jim Hummel. This column first posted July 4, 2011.
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