kellegous.com

Today is Bloomsday. This same day, 100 years ago, is the setting of a not so ordinary book that chronicles an ordinary man’s journey through the streets of his very ordinary town thinking shockingly ordinary thoughts. The irony, as people thrill themselves pointing out, is that it takes more than an ordinary devotion to wade through all its 768 dense pages of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Some seem to enjoy the challenge and ultimately find it rewarding or even inspiring, while others find the maze of allusions and literary styles so disappointing that an angry amazon.com review is unavoidable. Even critics could not decide if it should be hated more for being pretentious or “underbred”. Those who hate it puzzle at the way fans keep turning it over and over hoping that somewhere in the folds is just one more drop of meaning, while those who love it just keep wandering far and wide over its eighteen episodes looking for whatever it is we each look for in literature.

As should be obvious, I happen to be one of those nuts who found inspiration in Ulysses. I first approached it when I was in graduate school, having already read Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Dubliners. I even read most of Portrait while riding on busses around the Irish country side. By that point, I was hooked on Joyce and naturally wanted to continue on to the novel which still tops the Modern Library’s 100 Best Novels list. I picked up a copy one day at a book store somehow choosing one with a defective spine. The spine I fixed with a little clear packing tape after it began to separate when I reached the Wandering Rocks episode. About forty pages in the Hades and Aeolus episodes were improperly glued during binding and been subsequently ripped along the edges so that if you run your thumb over the pages it falls open at the same point each time. I knew the novel’s packaging well; I carried it for months along with a copy of Gifford’s notes. The book of notes, in case you haven’t seen it, is as large as the novel itself. I began very slowly into to the Telemachus episode and really didn’t launch into a determined reading until later that summer on a week long trip to the Cayman Islands. There, I would find a place to sit in the shade with a lapful of books since I also kept a notebook with me while reading glancing back and forth between the notes and the text. Several times I was asked if I was studying for a test and I had to admit with some shame that it was only “pleasure reading”. When I returned from the Caribbean and the fall semester began, I was surprised to discover that a course on James Joyce was added over in the literature department. My degree requirements made it impossible for me to take the class for credit so I just sort of hung out there. I finished reading just after the semester ended. My head was swollen with facts taken from Gifford’s notes and I was reeling with creative energy.

The novel infected me, as it seems to do others, with an extreme awareness of tangents of thought. I would find myself typing an email that contains the word imperative and feel compelled to also work into the same sentence the word categorical because Kant’s theory was somehow relevant. I found that I did the same thing when I was reading, often making associations that were purely personal and could not have been intended by the author. But really, that’s sort of the beauty of Joyce’s writings. People condemn Ulysses for being a novel about a common man that is completely inaccessible to common man, but the truth is that it’s a celebration of man as the reference point of his own world. And of course, with man at the center of his world are the dueling forces of his own importance and his humanness – complete with the physical shame of it all. While it offended a few at the time, a complex firing of neurons is as apt to bring thoughts of sex organs as Aristotle. It is communal values, where community is the center of the world that persuades us to tell folks about our Aristotelian thoughts and keep the other “less admirable” thoughts to ourselves. In mind of everyman, regardless of scholarly standing there is a muddle mess of memories all gooed together in a fluid of associations. This is the setting for Ulysses. And as intelligent as she was, even Virginia Woolf thought about farts on occasion.