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A Quick Note on Bloomsday

Love that transcends through art.

By Mel PaczkaPublished 3 years ago 4 min read
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Image done by me

Today 16th of June, we celebrate the Bloomsday. Today is 117 years from the day Joyce´s novel Ulysses took place, in 1904, and his first date with the love of his life Nora Barnacle happened.

If you have read any of my other stories you might now by now I am a bit obsessed with Joyce. Getting to read Ulysses in my second year at University really did change my life and many perspectives I had on art. Even though I would love to talk about everything that goes on in Ulysses I find it an impossible task, so instead I will give just a sneak peak to entice you to reading it if you haven´t.

Is it really that difficult?

This is one of the most widespread myths around James Joyce. His novels Ulysses and Finnegan´s wake are said to be extremely difficult or near impossible to read. Well, as I said in my bookstagram post it is not true. Yes, they are hard to read when you are caught off guard, but there are guides and I would totally recommend to hear the audio book, available for free too, in youtube while you read it. There are two reasons why I am so sure of this.

As a native spanish speaker understanding many of the terms and slang he used in the novel was hard. I got a dictionary, and once I heard the audiobook I realized many things are written in the way they sound rather than how grammar tells us they should be written.

To hear the Irish accent in the novel just made it 100 times better for me. It got amusing.

The writing of Ulysses is an anti-epic retelling of The Odyssey. Many of the chapters and characters of Joyce are supposed to be parallel to The Odyssey´s chapters and characters, so we must take it so. The thing about these two works is that they are episodic. No one really reads all the Odyssey on a run. We know and quote parts of it because that is how that is supposed to be. The same happens with Joyce´s Ulysses. If you sit and try to read it all you are going to fail. Each chapter has a place in structure, but also a theme, a symbol, an organ, and a time.

Reading Joyce´s novel chapter by chapter, giving yourself the time to do research about his slang, the places, and even the characters will make it way easier to understand, and trust me you will laugh at his jokes. Besides, each chapter experiment in an amazing level with literary resources of every kind. Reading it and looking for every resource is worth at least 4 years of research trust me. Specially the chapter Aeolus which I still need to read with the guide of resources at my side.

It is about having fun

Sometimes the names of great writers like Shakespeare, Dante, Tolstoy, tend to impose and even stop us from enjoying what we are reading. With Joyce you can forget all about solemnity. In a book where you read a character write a poem and then clean his snot with it, and the other fart while seeing a monument there is no place to be all serious the entire time.

If you remind yourself that his claim was a humorous critique to the Irish catholic society, to recalcitrant nationalists, and sometimes even the “intelligent” students that thought themselves so smart, you can give yourself a break for not completely understand early XX century Irish slang. The importance of Joyce is the freedom he gave himself with the plot, and the literary resources that to his time felt somewhat stiff everywhere. The experimentation and feeling was the most important in his work, not to satisfy academics with three-piece suits and big offices, -Which of course didn´t happen and he was widely criticized.

It is also about love

Well, after nerding out I also want to remind everyone that this day is, as well as the date in the novel, due to him meeting Nora. The story if you want to look for it is really romantic in a strange way, as is most of his life. To even think the love they had for each other through the years, and the erotic letters they wrote to each other is amazing.

Joyce was, I dare say, as much in love with his wife as he was with art. One can see that he only had those two in mind while writing Ulysses, just as Bloom is obsessed about his wife Molly despite everything they undergo. Maybe it is not the perfect love story or even an ideal one, but it was theirs and in a time when things were rather different in the world. So I keep today´s celebration as a celebration to love and writing,

Mel.

literature
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