Sunday, June 22, 2008
Opinion

The holiday you missed

To say that Joyce had a way with words is like saying Atlanta gets a tad warm in August...

The death mask of Irishman James Joyce, author of “Ulysses,” one of Dublin's most famous literary masterpieces.
FRAN CAFFREY/AFP/Getty Images

By R.E. Kamm

Everyone has heard of St. Patrick’s Day, but there’s another Irish festivity that just crept past us unremarked, silent as a neglected grave.
 
It’s called Bloomsday.

   The name derives from the novel “Ulysses,” written by the Irishman James Joyce and published in 1922. The entire story takes place in Dublin on June 16, 1904, and involves a protagonist named Leopold Bloom—ergo, Bloomsday.

Mind you, “Ulysses” isn’t just any novel. It’s one of the most important pieces of literature in the 20th century. It didn’t just change the literary landscape; because of it, they had to make a bigger literary map. The novel’s bare and basic plot is borrowed from Homer’s “The Odyssey,” and though having a passing knowledge of Odysseus—the Romans called him Ulysses—and his trials is suggested before reading, the book is certainly no strict retelling of an ancient story.

       And to say that Joyce had a way with words is like saying Atlanta gets a tad warm in August. British writer and literature critic Martin Amis once wrote that Joyce “makes Beckett look pedestrian, Lawrence look laconic, Nabokov look guileless.” But Joyce’s novel isn’t exactly beach reading. Amis acknowledges that quitting “Ulysses” at the halfway mark is a “common fate with the common reader.”
      Marilynn Richtarik, a professor of Irish literature at Georgia State University, also admits that Joyce’s novel is difficult and can’t be understood with just one reading. But she gives first-time readers the following advice: “At bottom, it is the story of a couple undergoing a marital crisis and a young man trying to come to terms with the death of his mother. If you keep their human predicaments at the forefront of your consciousness while reading, you will not go badly astray.”

       Last June, here in Atlanta, I decided to celebrate Bloomsday for the first time, and invited my father to come along. I walked into a local Irish bar that shall remain unnamed, a slightly worn, college-era copy of “Ulysses” in hand, excited to celebrate Joyce and to introduce my father to his legacy. We sat at the bar, and when I asked the barkeep about Bloomsday, he gave a blank look and replied he had never heard of it. I was surprised and a little embarrassed in front of my father—maybe he thought I was making up this whole Bloomsday nonsense. Nonetheless, we drank our pints and I read a bit from the book for my father and another pubgoer beside us who seemed somewhat interested. The bar wasn’t crowded, and I felt self-conscious or perhaps like a literary weirdo, so I didn’t read much. 

       This year I decided to research Irish pubs in Atlanta and find the ones that celebrated this special day, so I wouldn’t look like a fool reading aloud from the text such phrases as “the ineluctable modality of the visible” or “the snot green sea … the scrotumtightening sea” or one of Amis’ favorite lines, “The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.”

      I called several Irish pubs, and to my surprise, only one had a Bloomsday celebration scheduled: Fadó, in Buckhead. Its general manager, Brian Russell, says that not only does Fadó attempt to get Irish session musicians to play each year on June 16, but that it also has people read monologues from the novel.

      But why celebrate the fictional events of a book so difficult? Shouldn’t a book be reader-friendly and easily accessible from the first page? Remember the first time you had a pint of beer? Though for a few it was love at first quaff, many of us weren’t exactly fond of the initially strange taste. We had to learn to like it, and it wasn’t easy. But once one acquires the taste, one learns how wonderful the brew can be.

       The same can be said for “Ulysses.” It can be quite rough, at first, but the more one reads, the more beauty one sees and the more meaning one will take away.

   So, though Bloomsday has passed, it’s not too late to crack open the book and begin reading this beautiful and otherwordly prose. In the end, you may even enjoy it. SP