{"id":72597,"date":"2014-06-13T11:30:16","date_gmt":"2014-06-13T15:30:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=72597"},"modified":"2014-06-15T13:48:23","modified_gmt":"2014-06-15T17:48:23","slug":"bloomsday-explained","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/06\/13\/bloomsday-explained\/","title":{"rendered":"Bloomsday Explained"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Djuna_Barnes_-_Joyce\"<\/a>

Djuna Barnes, Joyce<\/i>, 1922.<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cBloomsday,\u201d the James Joyce scholar Robert Nicholson once quipped, \u201chas as much to do with Joyce as Christmas has to do with Jesus.\u201d The celebrations of Ulysses<\/em> every June 16\u2014the date on which the novel is set\u2014attract extreme ends of the spectrum of literary enthusiasm. Academics and professionals mingle with obsessives and cranks, plus those simply along for the ride. The event can be stately and meticulous or raucous and chaotic\u2014or, somehow, all of the above.<\/p>\n

A telling instance came a few years ago, when the Irish Arts Center arranged a Bloomsday picnic<\/a> in New York\u2019s Bryant Park, under the rueful shadow of the Gertrude Stein statue<\/a>. (Stein disliked Joyce.) Aspiring Broadway types were enlisted to circulate in period costume before bursting into popular songs from 1900-era Ireland. I spoke to one of the performers, a young Irish actor who had recently moved to New York. Had she read Ulysses<\/em>? \u201cI plan to,\u201d she said, and in my memory, she adds, \u201cI\u2019m told it\u2019s a grand book by them that knows.\u201d The kicker was when the Irish finance minister, in town for summit meetings, got up to say that his government would take as inspiration the balanced daily budget that appears in Ulysses<\/em>. The problem? Leopold Bloom\u2019s spreadsheet in Ulysses <\/em>works out only because he omits the money he\u2019s paid to Bella Cohen\u2019s brothel. No one pointed out the irony.<\/p>\n

The admixture of expertise and fanboyism that marks Bloomsday, perhaps unique among literary gatherings, is remarkable\u2014but no more so than Bloomsday\u2019s emergence as a cultural event, one that attracts mainstream attention<\/a> and participants from well outside the readership of Ulysses<\/em>, by which I mean to include all those who profess to have read it. A novel written in 1922 and legally unavailable in the U.S. until 1934, a novel hailed to this day as the pinnacle of modernist obscurity and density, one that, as novelist Jacob M. Appel<\/a> recently put it, \u201cisn\u2019t exactly hopping off the shelves in airports,\u201d has earned an international holiday. Of all the literary celebrations that might blow up, why Joyce, why Ulysses<\/em>, and why Bloomsday? <\/p>\n

The answer lies in the celebrity and cultural capital of the Joyce brand, the result of Joyce\u2019s machinations and the way he\u2019s been taken up in mainstream U.S. culture. When Joyce started work on Ulysses<\/em>\u00a0a hundred years ago, he was a rather cultish figure, having recently published A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man <\/em>and Dubliners<\/em>, after many roadblocks for both. This limited but fervid devotion played into Joyce\u2019s career: through the efforts of Ezra Pound, Ulysses<\/em> and its author became something of a cause c\u00e9l\u00e8bre for modernist coteries. Pound secured Joyce patronage (largely from women\u2014Joyce\u2019s career is unthinkable without the interventions of Harriet Shaw Weaver, among others), enabling him to leave off teaching to write (the dream of many). A series of public legal incidents catapulted the novel into wider public consciousness: the seizure of copies of The Little Review<\/em> that contained the \u201cNausikaaa\u201d chapter, Joyce\u2019s campaign to prevent Samuel Roth from selling a pirated edition, and the 1933 case \u201cThe United States of America v. One Book Called \u2018Ulysses,\u2019\u201d in which Judge John Woolsey determined that Ulysses<\/em> was art, not smut. In the 1930s, Joyce appeared on the cover of Time <\/em>and Stalin\u2019s list of banned authors, and generally became famous as the epitome of literary difficulty and elitism.<\/p>\n

Joyce, of course, was adept at cultivating his own myth, whether developing an iconic image for photographs<\/a> or talking about his technique. Simply consider his decision to base a novel on the episodes of the Odyssey<\/em>; then consider his bruiting that about. What better way, asked the late Hugh Kenner<\/a>, to get your book discussed? Though Joyce maintained (disingenuously, in my mind) that anyone could read and enjoy Ulysses<\/em>, he also quite famously said, \u201cIt will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that\u2019s the only way of insuring one\u2019s immortality.\u201d<\/p>\n

Indeed, the very style of Ulysses<\/em>\u2014or rather, its myriad styles\u2014serves as a constant reminder of its author\u2019s genius, asking readers to think beyond the plot and consider the motivations for each stylistic change. For example, in the novel\u2019s sixth chapter, readers suddenly encounter new typography: boldface headers for sections of text, untraceable to any character thought. Why? Because the setting is a newspaper office, so there are headlines, dummy. Chapter 12 starts off with a first-person narrative \u201cI,\u201d the only chapter featuring this technique. Why? Because it is the chapter based on Homer\u2019s Cyclops episode, and the \u201cI\u201d represents the single Cyclopian eye (and the limited perspective it produces). (Dummy.) The experience of reading Ulysses<\/em> is partly the experience of deciphering such logic. While usually we read novels and keep track of what motivates characters, for Ulysses <\/em>we keep track of the tricks up the author\u2019s sleeve; we\u2019re thinking about a figure outside the narrative.<\/p>\n

Joyce\u2019s contemporaries in the cinema world were doing something similar. When Charlie Chaplin performs circus acrobatics<\/a> to the delight of the big-top crowds, the joke is only partly that the circus audience mistakenly thinks the Little Tramp is part of the show, a virtuoso, when in fact he\u2019s trying to survive the situation. The larger joke is that we understand that the on-screen audience has almost gotten it right; the Tramp of the story is no virtuoso, but the actor portraying him is. Like Ulysses<\/em>, the movie requires us to think beyond the fictional realm being represented to the genius in the real world.<\/p>\n

The protean techniques in Ulysses<\/em> mimic the operations of film stardom. Stylistic innovation is the central facet of the modernist legacy, signaled by Pound\u2019s exhortation to \u201cmake it new.\u201d In Ulysses<\/em>, narrative style turns out to reflect techniques of the most popular medium of the day. Modernism and celebrity culture emerge as two sides of the same cultural coin. The popularity and the populist tinge of Bloomsday events start to look less surprising against this context.<\/p>\n

\"Bloomsday_(9054949487)\"<\/a>

Patrick Kavanagh and Anthony Cronin at the church in Monkstown, June 16, 1954. Photo: National Library of Ireland Commons<\/p><\/div>\n

In the decade or so after Joyce\u2019s death, in 1941, Bloomsday was instituted in Dublin; among the first participants were poet Patrick Kavanagh and novelist Flann O’Brien. The group role-played scenes of the novel. Around this time, references to Joyce began popping up in mainstream American\u00a0culture, starting with Sunset Boulevard<\/em><\/a>, with the novel usually deployed as a sign of elite literary culture and cachet. Perhaps the most famous sighting is the iconic photograph of Marilyn Monroe brandishing Ulysses<\/em><\/a>, attempting to shed her bombshell reputation. Of course, this image plays on our questions of whether the novel is readable and whether anyone, much less a Hollywood star, actually reads it. These questions permeate the Ulysses<\/em> legacy, but the answers hardly matter to the culture at large. Yes, many people read Ulysses<\/em> (as Monroe apparently did), but, as our Bloomsday celebrations show, one need not penetrate the mystery in order to recognize, and partake of, its prestige.<\/p>\n

The highest-profile New York event on June 16 will be \u201cBloomsday on Broadway<\/a>,\u201d which is a hot ticket most years, simulcast on WNYC and heard around the world. At Symphony Space, actors, writers, and celebrities\u2014Stephen Colbert and Alec Baldwin have appeared in recent years\u2014will perform excerpts expertly. In between, commentators will celebrate Ulysses<\/em>, but if this year is like years past, they will do so with testimonials and platitudes: elevation, not explication. If you have to ask, you\u2019re missing the point, which is to recognize the stature of a book without necessarily comprehending it. All you need to understand is its un-understandability. This incomprehensibility, which everyone can understand (to paraphrase Stein<\/a>) signals the way Joyce and his famous Ulysses<\/em> mediate between literary modernism and modern celebrity culture and the attendant concerns of branding and iconicity. In this way, it turns out that Bloomsday has a great deal to do with Joyce; it may be that Santacon<\/a>, not Christmas, is the most apt comparison.<\/p>\n

Jonathan Goldman<\/a><\/em> is an associate professor at the New York Institute of Technology, Manhattan. He is the author of <\/em><\/em>Modernism Is the Literature of Celebrity<\/a> and coeditor of <\/em>Modernist Star Maps: Celebrity, Modernity, Culture.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cBloomsday,\u201d the James Joyce scholar Robert Nicholson once quipped, \u201chas as much to do with Joyce as Christmas has to do with Jesus.\u201d The celebrations of Ulysses every June 16\u2014the date on which the novel is set\u2014attract extreme ends of the spectrum of literary enthusiasm. Academics and professionals mingle with obsessives and cranks, plus those […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":708,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[2672,6461,1120,947,2677,946],"class_list":["post-72597","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-bloomsday","tag-celebrity","tag-ireland","tag-james-joyce","tag-leopold-bloom","tag-ulysses"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nBloomsday Explained by Jonathan Goldman<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"June 13, 2014 \u2013 \u201cBloomsday,\u201d the James Joyce scholar Robert Nicholson once quipped, \u201chas as much to do with Joyce as Christmas has to do with Jesus.\u201d The celebrations of\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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