The people's Bloomsday
FOR MY MONEY, the greatest reference to James Joyce's "Ulysses" in popular culture appeared in "The Freak Brothers Come Down," an issue of Gilbert Shelton's underground `60s comic "The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers" in which the comic's hippie heroes try to pass one drug-free day. What follows are many frames of silence, awkward small-talk, and squalid mundanity as the Brothers realize how empty their lives are without chemical assistance. At one point, Phineas Freak takes a large volume down from a shelf and asks his roommates, "So. . . have either of you read Joyce's `Ulysses'?" When the other two reply with silence, he leafs distractedly through the pages, muttering, "Well, it's. . . um. . . really good," then puts the book aside.
As we note the 100th anniversary of Bloomsday -- June 16, 1904, the date on which "Ulysses" (published in 1922) takes place -- even Phineas's half-hearted gesture toward appreciation seems unnecessary. The opening of the literary canon has spared us from having to express unfelt reverence for anointed texts -- particularly works, like "Ulysses," that a minority of readers are able to finish or comprehend. While the book remains a fixture in academia, its cultural capital, like that of many difficult modernist classics, has withered. Novelist Roddy Doyle and critic Dale Peck made headlines earlier this year with some anti-Joyce comments. ("I will say it once and for all, straight out: It all went wrong with James Joyce," Peck wrote in The New Republic, lamenting the author's influence on 20th-century literature.) Meanwhile, a one-star reviewer on
The collective impression of the book as a favorite of the fading cultural elite misses one important element: "Ulysses" is enjoying a healthier life as an item of popular culture than it ever did as a literary masterpiece. The book's troubled publishing history -- including refusals by every publisher and an obscenity ban that blocked the book in every English-speaking country for its first 12 years in print -- is familiar literary lore, but scholars have only recently begun to appreciate how these events helped promote "Ulysses" as the great high-low crossover work of literary modernism.
Joyce has enjoyed stints as a hero to feminists (Molly Bloom's soliloquy being the original vagina monologue), a dirty-book favorite (if you know where I can get one of the bootleg stroke-book versions of "Ulysses" circulated by pornographers in the 1950s and `60s, please let me know), and even -- as Gilbert Shelton recognized -- a groovy icon of the counterculture.
This kind of appeal grows as the book ages and approaches the limits of copyright protection. (Depending on whom you talk to, "Ulysses" may already be in the public domain in the United States.) Dublin tourist officials estimate 50,000 pilgrims will turn up in Joyce's (and his fictional hero, Leopold Bloom's) hometown on Wednesday. Bloomsday has become the world's de facto literary holiday; observances will take place in cities everywhere.
"Bloom," a new screen adaptation of the novel starring Irish actor Stephen Rea as the title character, will be screened across the country on Bloomsday. (Its local premiere, at Boston College, is sold out). Meanwhile, Fritzi Horstman's documentary "Joyce to the World" examines Bloomsday celebrations worldwide, from reenactments by kimono-clad actors in Japan to a smut-pageant in Dublin's former red-light district (immortalized in the book's "Nighttown" chapter), as a fun and vaguely lowbrow phenomenon.
More striking than fan appreciation is the way the book has been absorbed into the culture. The stream-of-consciousness technique, once considered revolutionary, now seems slightly old-fashioned; but popular and literary writers alike have adopted idiosyncratic punctuation and fragmentary grammar to represent the process of thought. And as "Bloom" director Sean Walsh says, Joycean technique has permeated the movies. "I think that cinema audiences have grown accustomed to films that make use of complex or multilayered structures," he said in a recent interview, "and this has certainly helped us in terms of being able to produce or present an intricate adaptation of `Ulysses."'
Many might agree with Dale Peck that Joyce's influence on literature has been a pernicious one. But while the baggy works of Thomas Pynchon and assorted postmodern heroes probably wouldn't exist in without "Ulysses," these folks tend to be sloppy at the level of sentence construction in a way Joyce never was. Besides, influence is notoriously difficult to quantify. Would voiceover narration have become the accepted film language for thought without Bloom's 18-hour monologue? Would the Beats have taken their ambitious language trips absent the fireworks of the later chapters of "Ulysses"?
Yet the greatest influence of "Ulysses" may be in the original controversy over its outr material: the "cloacal" obsession with evacuation that H.G. Wells decried, the book's assorted episodes of self-abuse, Bloom's fetishistic interest in ladies' undergarments (he is, in his wife's words, "mad on the subject of drawers"). All these things were shocking in 1922, and the book retains a surprising ability to astound, but take a look around at a Victoria's Secret commercial or "South Park" or the "American Pie" movies. Contemporary American culture is all about bowel movements, masturbation, and underpants. If we no longer need "Ulysses," it's because we're all living in Bloom's paradise.
Tim Cavanaugh is the web editor for Reason magazine (www.reason.com). 