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Edited on Wed Jun-16-04 11:20 AM by bloom
"Sixteenth today it is," thinks Leopold Bloom, and the 16th it was, in June 1904. James Joyce, age 22, would walk out that very night in Dublin with Nora Barnacle, whom he later wedded. "Ulysses" is set on that day ? Bloomsday, as it has come to be called ? in honor of Joyce's meeting Miss Barnacle. Many Joyceans have made of Bloomsday a literary Mardi Gras, an odyssey through Dublin using the points of Joyce's compass, a day to celebrate Irishness and the peculiar verbal fecundity of that nation. In a novel full of celebrated talkers, it is Bloom, Jew and Irishman, who hovers, voice and thought, over the proceedings. As one barroom patron in the novel says, show Bloom a straw on the floor and "he'd talk about it for an hour so he would and talk steady."
All these years later, one somehow thinks of "Ulysses" as being of that day, June 16, 1904, though it was published in February 1922. It is still as defiant a comedy as ever, as fictional as a gazetteer, willing to make a hash of the genres its author inherited. Now and then, a critic feels the need to tilt against "Ulysses," to complain of a byzantine difficulty in certain passages, to lament Joyce's leaps of logic and illogic, his utter sacrifice of plot. But by destroying plot ? reducing it to a kind of geography ? Joyce succeeds in reinventing time. Bloomsday is the most capacious day in literature. Only the hours of Lear's suffering last longer, and there time passes in a stage direction. Language has almost never had a surer substance ? a stronger temporal beat ? than Joyce gives it in the thoughts of Leopold Bloom and his wife, Molly, along with Stephen Dedalus and Dublin's assembled hordes.
"Ulysses" has come to stand as the apogee of "elitist" literature, a novel that carries a kind of foreboding in its very title, the prospect of a hard road ahead. But there is really no less elitist novel in the English language. Its stuff is the common life of man, woman and child. You take what you can, loping over the smooth spots and pulling up short when you need to. Dedalus may indulge in Latinate fancy, and Joyce may revel in literary mimicry. But the real sound of this novel is the sound of the street a century ago: the noise of centuries of streets echoing over the stones."
Also - google has a tribute today.
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