The Irish author, James Joyce (February 2nd, 1882 - January 13th, 1941), was controversial during his life and remains so since his death. His work has been questioned and debated for decades, as have his politics and his personal beliefs. For me personally, he is a writer of great talent and insight, a personality of significant complexity and intellect, and one of the 20th century's greatest writers. Born in Dublin, he was the eldest of ten children, and although the heart of his writing remained in that city, he spent the vast majority of his life living and travelling in Europe.
The body of work that exists today is perhaps not as large as that of many other authors, but it is significant and is still constantly reinterpreted and debated. His short stories – Dubliners - are quite well known and often appear on school syllabi. His shorter novels – Stephen Hero, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Finnegans Wake – are also reasonably well known and still studied. His poetry still finds its way into collections, but his only play, Exiles, is rarely, if ever, mentioned or staged. It was rejected by W B Yeats upon publication in 1918, and the first London production was staged by Harold Pinter at the Mermaid Theatre in 1970. It is rarely, if ever, played, and Padraic Colum – a contemporary of Joyce – dismissed the play because it had ‘the shape of an Ibsen’ and therefore could be viewed as a derivative of the Scandinavian's works.
But there is also Ulysses, Joyce’s longest and most challenging work. That book is the reason why today is Bloomsday. I started reading Ulysses as a teenager and as background for A Portrait, which was on my exam syllabus. I kept my second-hand copy secreted away in a cupboard because the book had been banned previously. Indeed, it wasn’t even available for publication in the UK until the 1930’s. At school, the book was like gold dust. The boys wanted to read it because it had been banned. Some of the other girls took a marmite approach – it was either loved or hated - and others just wanted to see if it really didn’t have punctuation as rumoured. And on that point, yes, it does have punctuation, but not for all sections, and there’s a reason for that.
As for me, I just wondered at the excellence of the wordplay, the wit and the concept of the book. All the action of the story takes place on June 16th, 1904. The basic story of the book is that of the three principal characters, Leopold Bloom, Molly Bloom and Stephen Dedalus, all of whom appear in other works. The book isn’t just about who did what to whom in order to further the plot. The text looks at the thoughts, feelings, motives, and the innermost subconscious of the characters as they move through their single day.
I have always found the structure of this book fascinating. It’s not neatly divided into sentences, paragraphs, scenes, and chapters. Indeed, some sections look and read as though they are stage plays or TV scripts. There’s so much in this book that each time I pick it up to check something, or to read a section, I see something new, something I haven’t thought of, or noticed before, a tiny detail that has suddenly become obvious, a new enigma or puzzle for me to solve.
The book took Joyce over seven years to complete, during which time he had lived in three different cities. Although it was partially serialised in an American literary magazine between 1918 and 1920, it wasn’t actually published as a single and complete volume until 1922, by which time Joyce was living in Paris. There were numerous reprintings and revisions prompted by Joyce.
As a collector I was stunned to see a ‘first’ edition of Joyce’s Ulysses on display in a glass case in a library I visited some years ago. Trying to find a definitive edition for my own collection was almost impossible, as well as financially unattainable. However, I do have my facsimile of the 1926 edition, which sits on one of my many bookshelves.
May I wish all Joyce fans a fabulous Bloomsday today.
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