By yesterday, sundry Irishmen — and along with them countless lovers of literature from around the world — will have gathered in Dublin to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Bloomsday, when Leopold Bloom, the protagonist of James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” set out on his labyrinthine June 16, 1904 walk through the streets of the city, a walk that turned into a sojourn through the inward preoccupations of the human soul, and into the most revered work of fiction in the 20th century.
Would that I were able to say that I’m filing this column from the capital of the Irish Republic. Alas, no. To celebrate that most famous day in English fiction, I’ll have to settle (given my deadline last Monday, I’m writing in the future tense) for joining the festivities of the Capital James Joyce Club, at Politics & Prose bookstore, and the enraptured, heh, spirit-raising crowds at the James Joyce Irish Pub and Restaurant, in Washington, where marathon readings from the great 1922 novel will be given, and where we will again encounter Buck Mulligan, Stephen Dedalus, along with hundreds of other characters, and, most notably in the final 50 pages, Bloom’s wife Molly, who meditates on the day her husband proposed to her, a meditation that equals any of Shakespeare’s soliloquies for the way it works its linguistic magic on the brain.
Ireland — sad Ireland, with its emotional 700-year old history of rebellion against British subjugation — has given more than its share of literary masters, from the playwright Samuel Beckett to the novelist Jonathan Swift, from the poet W.B. Yeats to the literary wit Oscar Wilde, and from the lyricist Brendam Behan (who was given to tossing his typewriter out of a pub window after making neat work of a bottle of whiskey) to the irascible belle lettrist George Bernard Shaw.
“What Dublin is about is finely crafted words,” said the Irish- American writer and editor of Irish Pages. “People live and breathe literature here.”
Which hits a chord, for it reminds me of the classical world of Arabs in Damascus, Baghdad and Cordova, when fine writing — that in its prime affected and was affected by the rising ecstasies of a vibrant civilization confident of its cultural ascendancy — was considered the measure of man, writers challenged, then exorcised, taboos placed on their use of idiom, and told it all in words as vivid as the language could provide.
Note the graphic economy of Arabic poetry (poetry being then the primary vehicle of Arab self-expression) and how to the poet no turn of phrase was inviolate or exempt from public use. Note, conversely, how use of language, especially that of the public discourse, in modern Arab society is fatally infirm, its contagion spreading to the nerve centers of private life, further enfeebling attempts by the individual to communicate verity and spontaneity.
In a way, the degradation of language — language being the consciousness of a culture — has become both cause and symptom of the senility of an Arab world saddled by censorship, lurching toward despair in a new century. “Language seeks vengeance on those who cripple it,” wrote the literary critic George Steiner. And well it might.
Meanwhile, let us re-joyce in “Ulysses” on this Bloomsday Centennial, which lovers of literature around the world are celebrating. To us, James Joyce composed the greatest work of fiction of all time, true, but also to us literature has no greater gourmand of words. He was a wordsmith who caught in his net the live tangle of subconscious life, marshalling for his use battalions of words whose thrust and vital sensuousness carried all before them. That is why, like classical Arabic poetry, “Ulysses” is best recited, not read or studied, its words passed over the tongue much in the manner of a taster of rare vintage.
Good news for those who missed out on being in Dublin yesterday: Officials in the capital have planned to stretch the Bloomsday Centennial over the whole summer. Among the marathon readings, scholarly seminars, and extended tours, Dublin city libraries will mount a show designed to make Joyce’s complex work more accessible to lay readers, among whom I’m one. So, will see you there then.
