Bloomsday At 100
Hederman, Mark Patrick
strates a traditionally Jewish respect for learning. No intellectual, not always deeply informed, he is always curious and probing. Bloom's values are broadly liberal and humane, yet...
...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...
...The same might be said for the press on which the original works of Joyce were printed...
...Knocking them all up out of their graves...
...Frustrated by such oppression, Joyce himself left Dublin, not coincidentally, in 1904...
...Bloom views the world with sharp skepticism and persistent inter-est...
...Aloysius's and Shelley's and Renan's water along with my own...
...Broken heart...
...Joyce described Finnegans Wake as written "to suit the esthetic of the dream, where the forms prolong and multiply themselves, where the visions pass from the trivial to the apocalyptic, where the brain uses the roots of vocables to make others from them which will be capable of naming its phantasms, its allergies, its illusions...
...It allows for Bloomsday pilgrims to walk across the waters of what Joyce described as "anna livia plurabelle," enacting perhaps their own odyssey from Irish paralysis to Joycean freedom...
...He realized that there was more to life than deductive Jesuit philosophy...
...Author of Jocoserious Joyce: The Fate of Folly in "Ulysses," he is completing A Reader's Companion to David Foster Wallace's "Infinite Jest...
...Now his stubborn skepticism becomes openly satirical: "The resurrection and the life...
...The name has a certain psycho-logical resonance, for Joyce pioneered an artistic way into the underground darkness of the unconscious...
...Once you are dead you are dead...
...I am nauseated by their lying drivel about pure men and pure women and spiritual love for ever: blatant lying in the face of the truth...
...The bridge's engineers tell us that "the main arch steel-work was formed on a large hydraulic press (thought to be the largest horizontal open press in the world)...to produce complex multiaxis bends as specified for this uniquely de-signed structure...
...Joyce also conceives Bloom with some stereotypical "Jewish" deficiencies, especially as remarked by his Irish companions...
...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...
...The reason Joyce had to use such an esoteric and opaque style in his final masterpiece, Finnegans Wake, is that, as he explained, "one great part of every human existence is passed in a state which cannot be rendered sensible by the use of wideawake language, cut-and-dry grammar and go-ahead plot...
...Irenaeus, the glory of God cannot be other than man and woman fully alive...
...His masochistic fantasies remain disturbing...
...He is certainly one of the most lovable characters in literature...
...He despised Freud and Jung, for example, referring to them as Tweedledum and Tweedledee...
...Another axis had to be established between consciousness and the unconscious, bridges had to be designed which would allow access to this underground and unexplored world...
...What price the fellow in the six feet by two with his toes to the daisies...
...In contrast, he defended the freedom of humanity in opposition to all airless and merely logical orthodoxies...
...The bridge itself took six months longer than anticipated to construct because of its unusual design...
...Lots of them lying around here: lungs, hearts, livers...
...To Joyce enthusiasts all over the world, that day became known as "Bloomsday...
...The two main parabolic arches of the bridge create two continuous, tilted, tied arches as the support spans for this unique steel structure...
...Joyce's magisterial work is such a bridge...
...Dublin or Duibh Linn, as the name is written in the ancient annals, means a black pool...
...He is the author of The Haunted Inkwell: Art and Our Future (Columba...
...Ironically, it is a kind of cathedral as well, one that incorporates the whole of humanity, unconscious as well as conscious, nighttime as well as daytime, male as well as female...
...In a 1906 let-ter to his brother Stanislaus he says: if I put a bucket into my own soul's well, sexual department, I draw up Griffith's and Ibsen's and Skeffington's and Bernard Vaughan's and St...
...But Joyce is too many-minded, too complicated, too keen on ironies and competing possibilities, to create a simply admirable, lovably Jewish hero...
...For him, the center of gravity was no longer reason or consciousness...
...There is more than a bit of the schlemiel (to cite that useful Gaelic term) about Bloom...
...But not entirely...
...Get up...
...One suspects that Joyce associated these inclinations with "Jewishness...
...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...
...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...
...In this sense he was a contemporary in spirit of the Surrealists, of Proust, of Freud, of Jung, of Rilke and all those who were embracing the new century's awareness of human possibility...
...He's perceptive, wondering, commanding, and often amusing...
...Mark Patrick Hederman writes from Glenstal Abbey, Limerick, Ireland...
...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...
...Maybe, at last, on the centenary of Bloomsday, we can celThe great artificer 0 Commonweal 17 May 21, 2004 ebrate something of the freedom that Joyce sensed as our destiny...
...Joyce has become an Irish industry in some ways as trivial as leprechaun spotting and shamrockery...
...s it happens, the city Joyce made famous has recently developed a number of features suggesting that its inhabitants are at last becoming aware of the human and artistic possibilities Joyce undertook to investigate...
...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...
...And he came fifth and lost the job...
...Last day...
...The twin forces of politics and religion had entrapped the Irish in alcoholism, sexual repression, and poverty...
...This year being the centenary, Ireland is holding a festival from April1 to August 31...
...Dubliners refused to examine the darkness underpinning the veneer of their shabby respectability, Joyce thought...
...In a memorable scene at a Catholic funeral, Bloom feels estranged...
...For Joyce, as for the second-century bishop and martyr St...
...He is a good man, arguably the "best Christian in Dublin...
...One fine day it gets bunged up: and there you are...
...Bloom's inner life abounds with vibrancy...
...Dubliners, Joyce's seminal 1914 book of short stories, describes the paralysis of his native city...
...The world he inhabits may be prosaic but his consciousness is bright, engaging...
...If Milton felt called to explain the ways of God to humankind, Joyce felt obliged to explain the ways of humankind to God...
...The words with which he ends A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man may well be taking flesh three generations later: "I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race...
...And I am going to do that in my novel (inter alia) and plank the bucket down before the shades and sub-stances above mentioned to see how they like it: and if they don't like it I can't help them...
...Robert H. Bell is Kenan Professor of English and founding director of the Project for Effective Teaching at Williams College...
...Old rusty pumps: damn the thing else...
...Having rejected the orthodoxy of the Catholic Church, he embraced with passion and rigor what could be called an orthodoxy of humanity...
...A Commonweal 18 May 21, 2004...
...In a similar way, the two main parabolic arches of Ulysses are the journeys of Stephen and Bloom through the streets of Dublin...
...That last day idea...
...In Ulysses, I have recorded, simultaneously, what a man says, sees, thinks, and what such saying, seeing and thinking does, to what you Freudians call the subconscious...
...Finished in gleaming white, it provides not only a most elegant sculptured connection between the teeming city and the house of "The Dead," but also twin pedestrian walkways and viewing areas on each side of a central four-lane section carrying road traffic...
...The architect, Ian Ritchie, says that this creation should be viewed as the spire of an underground cathedral encompassing the whole city of Dublin, and, perhaps, the whole country of Ireland...
...It was one of the last works of Belfast's Harland and Wolff, makers of the Titanic...
...Ulysses, this great bright book of life, will continue to thrill and woo us unto the crack of Bloom...
...I like to think that the bridgebuilders' vocabulary captures what Joyce was trying to do in his novels...
...A pump after all, pumping thousands of gallons of blood every day...
...Bloom's values are broadly liberal and humane, yet characteristically Jewish in their emphasis upon this life and this world...
...Not that Joyce was in any way appreciative of his contemporaries...
...He felt that they were pillaging a reality that artists alone were capable of expressing...
...No touching that...
...But Bloom's thoughts, his reflections, are unusual...
...A new bridge across Dublin's River Liffey was officially opened on Bloomsday 2003...
...He is a re-cent winner of the Cherry Award for Great Teachers...
...Come forth, Lazarus...
...Seat of the affections...
...While his life is dull, bland, his perceptions are vivid, robust...
...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...
...I said to the Judas Tree speak to me of God, and the Judas Tree burst into Bloom...
...In 2003, the so-called Millennium Spire was finally completed and now stands 120 meters tall in the center of O'Connell Street...
...You mighteven say that the purpose of Joyce's works was similar to the goals of the bridge designers: "to develop bend geometry...
...This "James Joyce Bridge" links Ellis Quay on the north of the river to Ushers Island, the location of the actual house described in Joyce's masterful story, "The Dead...
...Bloom wonders in the cemetery...
...The "new conscience" that Joyce was forging in the smithy of his soul was not the Catholic rational ordering of life borrowed from Aristotelian or Thomistic principles...
...Costing €9 million, the bridge was designed by Santiago Calatrava Valls...
Vol. 131 • May 2004 • No. 10
