Bloomsday: Just Say Yes I Do Yes I Will Yes

By David Gehrig

Greatest novel of all time? Could be. Great excuse for an annual Irish celebration? Absolutely.

It's not exactly a shocker that the canon-keepers at Modern Library put Ulysses on top of their millenial list of the "Greatest Novels of All Time." After all, it's their book too. They brought out the first US edition in 1933 after they sunk who knows what into lawyers' fees defending it against charges of pornography. Every Modern Library edition since then has included the legal imprimatur of Judge Woolsey indicating that, while you might hesitate to show your copy of Ulysses to the deacon, at least you don't need to hide it from the cops.

But the Modern Library also has another list, unscientifically voted on by visitors to their website. And once you've mucked out the various proto-fascist cult manifestos ballot-stuffed to the top -- somehow I doubt America truly believes that eight of the ten greatest novels ever written were by L. Ron Hubbard or Ayn Rand -- there is Ulysses again, sitting comfortably in the top five, remarkable for such a notoriously challenging book. Though it's been the bane of many an insomniac grad student, and the number of folks who've finished it is considerably smaller than those who began it once with the best of intentions, those who've actually borne down and slain the beast don't regret it. Like Citizen Kane or Sgt. Pepper, Ulysses changed the rules of the game through nothing more than the sheer power of its inventiveness, and if it doesn't seem quite as innovative now as it did in 1922, that's because generations of lesser lights have pillaged it so relentlessly.

Ulysses follows events in Dublin on a day -- June 16, 1904, specifically -- without much in the way of events to follow. Leopold Bloom is an ad canvasser of no notable success, an amiable middle-class middleman with some half-founded pretentions of taste and scholarship. But Bloom is also an outsider; among the million souls of crowded Dublin in 1904, only one person in a thousand is Jewish like Bloom -- CU positively seems like Tel-Aviv in comparison -- and Bloom knows what's being said behind his back. He encounters the insufferable wannabe poet Stephen Dedalus, the sort of walking library who puts the "anal" in "analytical" yet never quite gets around to composing anything -- or bathing. Bloom's melodiously adulterous wife, Molly, closes the novel with an unpunctuated stream-of-conscious thought monologue that might just be the best chapter of prose ever written, and certainly one of the hardest to read. And it all takes place against the meticulously detailed background of Dublin itself -- from high to low, from birthing room to funeral procession, from eloquence to flatulence, and stocked with characters that are anything but stock characters.

June 16, 1904, has come to be known as Bloomsday. For nearly half a century, the anniversary of Bloomsday has been the object of pilgrimages to Dublin -- and the excuse for parties around the globe. Yet, as far as anyone has been able to determine, Bloomsday arrived in Champaign only one year ago, landing safe in the beer garden at Mike and Molly's. The brainchild of local musician Lisa Boucher, CU's Bloomsday came into being through a strangely diverse squadron of co-conspirators, dancers, readers, singers, frustrated former English majors, frustrated current English majors, and a not inconsiderable amount of Guinness. The beer garden was packed. Volunteers read aloud dozens of passages and no one was killed in the process. Music sessions broke out time and again. Stepdancers took the stage for a few exuberant numbers. As a whole, the event was a harmonic convergence between lovers of Irish music, text geeks (and I'm raising my hand here), and jovial inebriants (golly, I notice my hand's still up).

Bloomsday No. 99 -- that's right, we're approaching the Bloomsday centennial, folks, so this is your last chance to practice before the main event -- will take place this Sunday, June 15th, at Mike and Molly's, 105 N. Market in Champaign, beginning at 4 PM and going through the evening. Volunteers of all stripes and competencies will be cajoled into joining the reading of passages from Ulysses. There will again be live music and stepdancers kicking up their heels.

For more information about Bloomsday plans -- or to sign up for reading -- contact Lisa Boucher at lisa@fpmrecords.com.

     -- Force, hatred, history, all that. That's not life for
     men and women, insult and hatred. And everybody knows
     that it's the opposite of that that is really life.
     -- What? Says Alf.
     -- Love, says Bloom. I mean the opposite of hatred.

Bloomsday links:

Dyoublong (Irish Times)
The Brazen Head
All About Bloomsday
Ulysses for Dummies
A nice overview of the book