Blooms-Morning After

It always amuses me, the fuss over "Bloomsday", as if Ulysses had been required reading at school, and was a familiar and fondly-recalled experience for the entire English-speaking world.  It won't be long before someone thinks to make it a national holiday, and it appears printed in calendars, along with all those other anniversaries, meaningless to most of us.

I had the misfortune to study English at a university that dealt with the literature of the entire twentieth century in the first year; we studied it for an eight-week term, were examined in it at the end of the year, and then forgot about it.  Joyce, typically, might have been given a week's attention, perhaps two.  Next!  As I had already read Ulysses, and Dubliners, and Portrait of the Artist, it was one of the easier weeks for me.  I did take a look at Finnegans Wake, decided puns in Sanskrit were not my thing, and slowly backed away.

I say I had read Ulysses, but I had come nowhere near to understanding it.  I doubt many English English students ever did, though in many ways James Joyce was English literature in the 1960s and 70s, a bottomless playpit of linguistic cleverness, in which to exercise one's own linguistic cleverness.  I'm sure I wrote a perfectly acceptable essay on it, pointing out the structural links to Homer, the revelling in style-for-style's-sake (one lacked the critical vocabulary, back then, to detect the  ironic presence of the "post-modern" in the work of the arch-modernist), the multi-layered humanity, the delightful taste of the language on the tongue, the sheer artfulness of it all.

But I didn't understand it.  At all.  For a start, I couldn't have pointed to Dublin on a map.  I couldn't have pointed to "Ireland in 1904" on a map, either.  The Prof asked me yesterday morning, "Why is Bloom Jewish?" and I realised I had no idea.  I'm pretty sure I had no firm idea of what it meant to be Jewish (or anti-semitic, come to that) -- or even what it meant to be Irish -- when I originally read the book, aged 18.  (I have told you I was an idiot, haven't I?)

Well, by the end of the day I was considerably wiser.  The BBC has done us all all a service by dramatising the book in nine chunks broadcast yesterday.  What a revelation!  The cleverness fell away, and the human drama emerged, like one of those optical tricks where the apparent foreground recedes and the rabbit becomes a woman in a large hat.  The breadth and depth of Joyce's humane sympathies shone through, and I  pulled my old copy from the shelves, amazed by what I had missed all those years ago, that multiplicity of voices.  Yes, they were really there, but I had simply lacked eyes to see, ears to hear.

If you have the remotest interest in Joyce, and missed yesterday's broadcasts, then do make the effort to listen: they're all available on the BBC iPlayer.  I also recommend this article by Colm Tóibín, writing in yesterday's Guardian Review on Joyce's Dublin.  His insight into the world of "The Dead", the last and greatest story in Dubliners, is acute.  It would never have occurred to me to link Dublin, Barcelona, Calcutta and Edinburgh in the way he does -- capitals without parliaments, cultures divided by language -- but then I'm English, aren't I?



Photograph: Bert Hardy/Hulton Archive/Getty Images