Bloomsday At 100
Bell, Robert H.
BLOOMSDAY AT 100 Two reflections on James Joyce's legacy Robert H. Bell loomsday, June 16, 1904, is the day anatomized, commemorated, and celebrated in James Joyce's Ulysses. Striking testimony...
...Ulysses has inspired a holiday to rival St...
...Bloom's values are broadly liberal and humane, yet characteristically Jewish in their emphasis upon this life and this world...
...He al-ways insisted that however complicated his techniques, his meaning is clear...
...he embodies and articulates traditional Jewish values and concerns...
...Joyce regards his world variously, with rigorous irony, satiric austerity—yet with unflagging magnanimity and pervasive humor...
...Joyce's characters live in a vividly rendered world...
...Of its thirty-three thousand words, sixteen thousand are used only once...
...That incongruous, disconcerting mix of the sublime and the ridiculous, the spiritual and the secular, typifies Joyce and Ulysses...
...Joyce's vision of Dublin on June 16, 1904, is so compelling that it has entered our consciousness, become part of what we feel and know, remember, and imagine...
...Woven into the dense fabric of Ulysses are correspondences that connect mundane matters and mythic models—particularly the Bible, Homer, Dante, Mozart, and Shakespeare...
...An important part of Joyce's spiritual legacy is his concept of the epiphany, adapted from the feast celebrating the revelation of Christ to the Magi...
...An extraordinary variety of tones and styles resound in Dublin on this day of days...
...Yet Ulysses features the traditional qualities of fiction, intriguing characters confronting and creating their fates in a lifelike time and place...
...Joyce has become an Irish industry in some ways as trivial as leprechaun spotting and shamrockery...
...Bloom has other instincts and attributes Joyce regarded as "Jewish...
...Joyce's resourceful language, endlessly inventive, invites comparison with Shakespeare's verbal virtuosity...
...Don't you think there is a certain resemblance between the mystery of the Mass and what I am trying to do," he re-marked, "...by converting the bread of everyday life into something that has peiulanent artistic life" for spiritual "up-lift...
...In a less pontifical mood, he agreed that his writing was "trivial...
...Once you are dead you are dead...
...Dublin on June 16, 1904, pulses with life: the sights and sounds, the smells and textures of the city...
...Yet Bloom is regarded as Jewish for several good reasons...
...Old rusty pumps: damn the thing else...
...Lots of them lying around here: lungs, hearts, livers...
...Yet just as Joyce forsook but never forgot Dublin, he abandoned his faith but kept its categories (in Hugh Kenner's formulation...
...Also quadrivial," he added...
...Bloom himself converted twice, to Catholicism and to Protestantism...
...He is not even circumcised...
...Readers continue to be exhilarated, nettled, and perplexed by it...
...While Joycean reconstruction of time and place is phenomenally accurate, other tidbits have metaphoric or symbolic implications...
...Striking testimony to the enduring power of Ulysses is that we mark not the birth of its author or the publication of the book but the imagined day of the fiction...
...His masochistic fantasies remain disturbing...
...Though Bloom's macho peers are fools to mock his tenderheartedness, and they stupidly misconstrue his loving kindness as effeminate, Bloom is maddeningly passive and objectionably flaccid...
...There are hints that Bloom's Irish-named mother was Jewish...
...He called his Dubliners a "chapter in the moral history of my country," " an attempt to galvanize the creative energy that would help his fellow citizens to "revolt against the dull inelegance" of the city...
...While his life is dull, bland, his perceptions are vivid, robust...
...One notorious episode recapitulates the history of language from primitive utterances all the way on, or down, to contemporary slang and drunken babble...
...Leopold Bloom is "Jewish" in a partial and elusive sense—like Woody Allen, "Jewish, with an explanation...
...Bloom's Jewishness is central...
...In contrast, he defended the freedom of humanity in opposition to all airless and merely logical orthodoxies...
...Bloom's inner life abounds with vibrancy...
...Fundamentally paradoxical—a comic epic, antic and grave, mordant and heartbreaking—Ulysses is an encyclopedia of modernism and a gospel of postmodernism...
...One suspects that Joyce associated these inclinations with "Jewishness...
...Now his stubborn skepticism becomes openly satirical: "The resurrection and the life...
...In these "sudden spiritual manifestations," he perceived or discovered the miraculous meanings of mundane materials—commonplace gestures, everyday things, the vulgar speech of "Dear dirty Dublin...
...He identifies with Jewish history and tradiJoyce regards his world variously, with rigorous irony, satiric austerity—yet with unflagging magnanimity and pervasive humor...
...Just be sure to get my tie right...
...Scores of references and allusions in Ulysses associate Bloom and Judaism...
...Come forth, Lazarus...
...But Bloom's thoughts, his reflections, are unusual...
...The world he inhabits may be prosaic but his consciousness is bright, engaging...
...A pump after all, pumping thousands of gallons of blood every day...
...Seat of the affections...
...Trained by Jesuits, Joyce admired their intellectual rigor and valued their lucid explication of complicated matrait painted, he instructed the artist, "Never mind about my immortal soul...
...Joyous delight and exuberant energy are sustained despite dismaying pain, suffering, and loss gaiety (in Yeats's phrase) "transfiguring all that dread...
...Unimposing, incapable of the casual banter enjoyed by his companions, especially over drinks, he has little to say and what he says is rarely notable...
...That last day idea...
...Most important, Bloom thinks of him-self as Jewish...
...terial...
...While many of Bloom's cohort waste their re-sources in pubs, Bloom rarely indulges and worries constantly about being a good provider, husband, and father...
...Frustrated by such oppression, Joyce himself left Dublin, not coincidentally, in 1904...
...He married an Irish girl named Molly Tweedy and they "practice" no particular faith...
...Maybe, at last, on the centenary of Bloomsday, we can celThe great artificer 0 Commonweal 17 May 21, 2004...
...He is a re-cent winner of the Cherry Award for Great Teachers...
...On his quest for the abiding significance of everyday experience, Joyce became a "priest of the eternal imagination," a potent rival to the priests he flamboyantly repudiated...
...Bloom views the world with sharp skepticism and persistent inter-est...
...he knows only bits of Jewish theology, learning, lore, and tradition...
...Molly's famous last words say yes to Bloom, and affirm the force of Joyce's art, now and in time to be: "and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes...
...Author of Jocoserious Joyce: The Fate of Folly in "Ulysses," he is completing A Reader's Companion to David Foster Wallace's "Infinite Jest...
...In Joyce's secular redefinition, epiphanies "show forth" mysteries hidden behind or within something very ordinary...
...Bloom wonders in the cemetery...
...By strict religious criteria, Bloom is hardly or barely Jewish...
...One fine day it gets bunged up: and there you are...
...He is certainly one of the most lovable characters in literature...
...Although Joyce might have been pleased that his works are still being read, that his name is remembered with affection and festivity in his own country, where it was once condemned and reviled, the commemorative program outlined by the Irish Tourist Board would hardly have been to his taste...
...Ulysses, this great bright book of life, will continue to thrill and woo us unto the crack of Bloom...
...he loves pork...
...Mark Patrick Hederman n June 16, 1904, Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom, one of literature's most unlikely and endearing couples, each journeyed through Dublin in James Joyce's Ulysses...
...As he lay dying in Zurich in 1940, a priest asked Nora, still a Catholic, if he should ad-minister last rites...
...As a novelist, Joyce became a great arranger...
...Dubliners refused to examine the darkness underpinning the veneer of their shabby respectability, Joyce thought...
...Ulysses depicts Dublin, street by street, shops and pubs, bridges, municipal buildings and statues, flotsam and jetsam...
...Broken heart...
...Newspapers, horse races, trams, power outages, a procession, advertisements, songs, bric-a-brac—all vibrating...
...The twin forces of politics and religion had entrapped the Irish in alcoholism, sexual repression, and poverty...
...In 1904, at age twenty-two, Joyce left Ireland forever with his life-long companion, Nora Barnacle, and repudiated Catholicism forever, more or less...
...Knocking them all up out of their graves...
...Joyce specified respect for family as a "Jewish" trait...
...Patrick's Day...
...Oh, no," she replied, "I could never do that to him...
...Dubliners, Joyce's seminal 1914 book of short stories, describes the paralysis of his native city...
...Joycean language reaches for the heavens and plunges to the lowest depths—from the paradisial "heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit" tothis hellish vision of Stephen's mother, dead of cancer: "Pain, that was not yet the pain of love, fretted his heart...
...He is not observant...
...Bloom is also a deeply bourgeois, profoundly Irish, highly domestic character, steadfastly linked to his wife, parents, and children...
...Richard Ellmann begins his biography of Joyce—both the 1959 and 1982 editions: "We are still learning to be James Joyce's contemporaries, to understand our interpreter...
...Conceiving a Jewish hero in Dublin, Joyce makes that anomaly as problematic as possible...
...He is generous and compassionate, idealistic and public minded, charitable and tender...
...No wonder the great Judaica scholar Gerscholm Sholem concluded, "Well, the rabbis might not say that Bloom was a Jew, but I do...
...Bloom demonCommonweal 16 May 21, 2004 strates a traditionally Jewish respect for learning...
...What price the fellow in the six feet by two with his toes to the daisies...
...However frightening or disturbing its material, Ulysses revels in the felicitous possibilities of language...
...Bloom is an archetype of the modern protagonist, marginal, in a sense deracinated, tenuously connected to his culture...
...There is more than a bit of the schlemiel (to cite that useful Gaelic term) about Bloom...
...And he came fifth and lost the job...
...His vision is ecumeniForging the conscience of his race Commonweal 15 May 21, 2004 cal, encompassing many voices, and his writing is drenched in Catholicism, the faith and institution that shaped and provoked him...
...Joyce also conceives Bloom with some stereotypical "Jewish" deficiencies, especially as remarked by his Irish companions...
...But Joyce is too many-minded, too complicated, too keen on ironies and competing possibilities, to create a simply admirable, lovably Jewish hero...
...Designated by an interviewer a "Catholic writer," Joyce mildly insisted that he was better understood as a "Jesuit writer...
...His grandfather was a Hungarian Jew named Virag Lipoti who emigrated and converted...
...Last day...
...To Joyce enthusiasts all over the world, that day became known as "Bloomsday...
...No intellectual, not always deeply informed, he is always curious and probing...
...Joyce's coinage for his mixture of laughter and solemnity is "jocoserious...
...The hero is an outsider, someone "other" in the predominantly Catholic society of Dublin in 1904...
...In a memorable scene at a Catholic funeral, Bloom feels estranged...
...This year being the centenary, Ireland is holding a festival from April1 to August 31...
...He's perceptive, wondering, commanding, and often amusing...
...He is a good man, arguably the "best Christian in Dublin...
...Passionate ambivalence to Catholicism pervades Ulysses...
...No touching that...
...Silently, in a dream she had come to him after her death, her wasted body within its loose brown graveclothes giving off an odour of wax and rosewood, her breath, that had bent upon him, mute, reproachful, a faint odour of wetted ashes....A bowl of white china had stood beside her deathbed holding the green sluggish bile which she had torn up from her rotting liver by fits of loud groaning vomiting...
...Joyce called his book an epic of two races, Irish and Israelite...
...Get up...
...But not entirely...
...Like Stephen Dedalus, James Joyce was a rebel, exile, and apostate, an avowed foe of what Stephen bitterly denounces as "the holy Roman Catholic and apostolic church...
...Joyous delight and exuberant energy are sustained despite dismaying pain, suffering, and loss—gaiety (in Yeats's phrase) "transfiguring all that dread...
...Ulysses has the inclusive scope of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and the Oxford English Dictionary...
...We come to know intimately Stephen Dedalus, Leopold and Molly Bloom, their thinking and feeling, suffering and longing...
...Robert H. Bell is Kenan Professor of English and founding director of the Project for Effective Teaching at Williams College...
...Unforgettably (and melodramatically), Stephen taps his skull and proclaims, "in here it is I must kill the priest and the king...
...Having his por-tion...
...Joyce, like Shakespeare, is myriad-minded—providing and requiring multiple perspectives...
...Once banned, often excoriated, still dauntingly difficult, Ulysses has become the canonical twentieth-century novel...
...Joyce's revision of Dublin in 1904 becomes a vision of world without end...
...In his miniature odyssey, he is the Wandering Jew...
Vol. 131 • May 2004 • No. 10
