yes yes I will yes
Father’s Day yesterday fell on Bloomsday, a national holiday in Ireland and one of the only ones based solely upon a date in a work of fiction. June 16, 1904 was the setting for all the events in Ulysses, Irish writer James Joyce’s massive doorstop of a novel. I got to say “Happy Bloomsday on Fathers’ Day” to an old friend who happens to be both a father and the only other person I actually know who has read the whole book. I’m grateful to have a reason to care about that and join with other Joyce fans around the planet.
As refresher, here’s the plot of the story that many scholars feel changed the nature of narrative art and is maybe the most important novel of the twentieth century. The hero, Leopold Bloom (thus “Bloom’s Day”), advertising man, buys kidneys at the butchers, serves Molly breakfast in bed, reads the mail, visits the outhouse, attends a morning funeral, runs an errand at the drugstore, inadvertently gives a man a winning tip about a racehorse, bumps into an old flame, stops off for a sandwich and a glass of wine, helps a blind man cross the road, ducks into a museum to avoid his wife’s lover, gets into an argument at Barney Kiernan’s Pub, ogles a young woman at the beach, makes a hospital visit to a woman in the throes of a difficult childbirth, spends the evening in the red-light district with Stephen Daedalus, feels paternal about him and sees him home safely, returns home to Molly as Odysseus did to Penelope.
I’m nobody’s Joyce scholar, I don’t even really understand all of Ulysses, even though I’ve read it several times now. I just fell in love with the language, the sentences, the compound words he made up, the puns, the observable influence he’s had on countless writers since, like Kerouac, for example.
I still reread sentences like this and gasp at the craftsmanship. “His listeners held their cigarettes poised to hear, their smoke ascending in frail stocks that flowered with his speech.”
Sylvia Beach, founder of Shakespeare and Company Bookstore in Paris and the only person who was willing to publish Ulysses, said “he treated people invariably as his equals, whether they were writers, children, waiters, princesses or charladies. What anybody had to say interested him, he told me that he had never met a bore…. If he arrived in a taxi, he wouldn’t get out until the driver had finished what he was saying. Joyce himself fascinated everybody, no one could resist his charm.”
I think I’d have liked him, the man, as much as his writing. I’d like to have that said about me.
So why am I writing about James Joyce and Ulysses anyway? I’m writing out of a place of intensely personal pleasure that his sentences have afforded me over the past thirty five years. My first exposure to Joyce in college left me cold. I didn’t get it at all. When I finally just read Ulysses in my own way appreciating it for however I could, which was the unmatched poetic language, I was hooked.
What I’m expressing is my gratitude, geeky subject matter though it is, for something enduring in my life that has provided me with joy. I don’t know what those things are for you. What I do know is that any occasion we get to be grateful for something long-lasting in our life counts as a blessing.
My question is “What is that thing for you?” Maybe there are many of them that go way back. Books aren’t all there are for me either and I’ve written about those as well. Some experiences and people have cast a very long shadow. It’s just that June 16 was yesterday and it put me back in that place of memory.
Joyce wrote, on June 16, 1924, the 20th anniversary of Bloomsday–
“Twenty years after. Will any one remember this date?”
Isn’t that the human cry? Will anyone remember me?
And we want the world to say, like Molly, yes yes I will yes.
