Ulysses, Ulysses, soaring through all the galaxies

I have never taken part in Bloomsday. Perhaps I should say: I have never deliberately taken part in Bloomsday, though I – like everyone and everything else – could be said to participate tangentially. In the world of Joyce, a connection between any two things is implicit in their existence, and remains only to be spotted, plotted, or forgotted. This was also a legacy of Einstein’s: that no atom could be satisfactorily defined without reference to every other, i.e. to the rest of the universe.

Objectivity never stood a chance.

Infinite interconnection is an idea both beguiling and intuitively true, but long displaced by a default fragmentation. It’s easy to miss or disregard those connections as we go about our daily lives. Were we to afford them our devoted attention, we would surely become infinitely distracted – as we do, momentarily, when our gaze falls on the infinite star map of a clear night sky. The great physicists of the last century rediscovered Indra’s Net, and in Ulysses Joyce mapped it onto a day in Dublin for the perpetual puzzlement of posterity (or at least some of its scholars).

Or did he?

The Irish answer: he did and he didn’t.

Confession no.2: I have not read Finnegans Wake. At least, not from start to finish, not yet. I read Ulysses only last year, so I’m catching up slowly. This is no place for a book review, but I’ll put on record that I loved every exasperating cascading serenading page of Joyce’s masterpiece. When I finished it I raided the Joyce corner of my mother’s bookshelf for Joyce-related essays, memoirs, and biographies. So I am on a course leading to Finnegans Wake, but before it there is Richard Ellmann’s biography, which I have more than half a mind to begin reading today. It’s either that or the reissued 1922 text of Ulysses.

[Image: Image of James Joyce (detail) by Louis le Brocquy, 1978; oil on canvas, 70 x 70 cm.]

This post was originally intended to be a long and careful tribute to Joyce – “that bizarre and wonderful creature who turned literature and language on end”* – but instead it is medium-sized and extemporaneous. The post title, by the way, refers to a French–Japanese cartoon my sister and I were enchanted by in the 1980s.

1980s, 1880s, 3080s, it’s all the same and it’s all in bloom.

If you are interested in taking part in the general merriment of Bloomsday, the James Joyce Centre website has information aplenty; if time and geography are against you, here is a short recording of Joyce reading from Finnegans Wake. (After 8½ minutes you can beginagain.) The accent and musicality of his speaking voice are a delight, and there is accompanying text here, if you wish to read along.

I leave you with a poem:

Invocation to Joyce

Scattered over scattered cities,
alone and many
we played at being that Adam
who gave names to all living things.
Down the long slopes of night
that border on the dawn,
we sought (I still remember) words
for the moon, for death, for the morning,
and for man’s other habits.
We were imagism, cubism,
the conventicles and sects
respected now by credulous universities.
We invented the omission of punctuation
and capital letters,
stanzas in the shape of a dove
from the libraries of Alexandria.
Ashes, the labor of our hands,
and a burning fire our faith.
You, all the while,
in cities of exile,
in that exile that was
your detested and chosen instrument,
the weapon of your craft,
erected your pathless labyrinths,
infinitesmal and infinite,
wondrously paltry,
more populous than history.
We shall die without sighting
the twofold beast or the rose
that are the center of your maze,
but memory holds the talismans,
its echoes of Virgil,
and so in the streets of night
your splendid hells survive,
so many of your cadences and metaphors,
the treasures of your darkness.
What does our cowardice matter if on this earth
there is one brave man,
what does sadness matter if in time past
somebody thought himself happy,
what does my lost generation matter,
that dim mirror,
if your books justify us?
I am the others. I am those
who have been rescued by your pains and care.
I am those unknown to you and saved by you.

Jorge Luis Borges

Translated by Norman Thomas di Giovanni.

* Description by Richard Ellmann in the preface to the revised 1982 edition of his biography of Joyce. I edited the post to include the quote and this footnote.