What would James Joyce make of today's 100-year celebration of Bloomsday, the marking of the fictional events of June 16, 1904 in Dublin chronicled in Ulysses? I think he'd be thrilled; Joyce created a complex system for Ulysses to challenge the notion of written media. He revelled in the new form, and was precise in timing the movements of Leopold Bloom, Stephen Dedalus and the other characters. I think he'd get quite a charge out of the hallowed nature of this day among Joyceans, and about the millions of man hours of literary detective work that has gone into analyzing his masterwork over the last eight decades.
Why do fans retrace the steps of the 19 "wandering rocks" in the 10th chapter and stage round-the-clock readings of Ulysses on this day every year? I think it has to do with what my old Columbia professor Wally Gray always emphasized about Ulysses: that it is a profoundly optimistic and human book. Nothing of import happens in Ulysses - Joyce was quite determined to substitute the mundane and human for the soaring and fantastic episodes of the Odyssey. We are the gods, the titans, and the monsters, and each day is a voyage of uncertain end.
That humanity is, to me, its greatest success. I've read Ulysses cover to cover only twice - once at Columbia and again a few years later at the start of my journalstic career. But I do revisit snippets often; Joyce's work as a whole is Biblical in that way. I'll read Molly Bloom's soliloquy, or "Ivy Day in the Committee Room" from Dubliners just to listen to the language in my head, maybe grab a little inspiration. I particularly love the highly domestic 4th chapter of Ulysses, where Bloom makes breakfast for his unfaithful wife. Ulysses is not a perfectly-crafted work of fiction, it deserves its reputation as a difficult read. But it does not deserve its reputation as elitist - it is not. Indeed, it elevates commonality in human experience quite succesfully, and many parts of highly accessible, and meant to entertain.
That's why I also think Joyce would love what the Internet has meant to the study and consumption of his work, from today's Google logo search to this fantastic hypertext version of Ulysses, complete with Java-powered maps of Dublin with moving character icons to Web cam images of some of the novel's settings.
