I love Ulysses. Do I fully understand it or it’s 1000s of literary allusions? No. Do I understand 1/10th of these allusions? Probably not. Have I read it twice and does the end still give me goosebumps. Yaaaas.
Some context: James Joyce’s Ulysses was a bad-ass, rock star of a novel. When he was writing it, people thought he was nuts. No one would publish it. It was banned for 10 years in the United States under censorship laws. It’s a tome of literary references, Irish history, and homages to almost every kind of literary style. If you care about literature at all, I challenge you to just Google the complete text and jump around in it. No two pages are alike. There is a drama, there is a chapter written in newspaper headlines, there is one sentence that lasts 40 pages, there is a string of 30+ adjectives describing one of the characters, most of the words Joyce made up – there is shitting, eating, death, sex, and life. So much life. In the novel he captures one day in Dublin and almost everything one day could possible contain.
Phew, sorry, I needed to fan myself. To reiterate: I love Ulysses.
Joyce’s egomania aside, he was kind of an amazing figure. He literally thought through his work that he could be the conscience of the human race. He lived boldly. He sketched his giant, chaotic novel on pages of notebooks, his wife in the next room taking care of their kids like, “Can you get a better hobby? You’re so much better at singing.”
He wrote on.
Ulysses, for me, is about that defiance. It’s about a world telling you what a novel should be, what a writer should be, and being free to completely disregard it. Joyce’s text broke barriers, helped redefine literary history and bring modernism to the front of literary study. A guy who wore an eye patch and got made fun of for his ambition, who lived in a country that everyone considered the armpit of Europe, changed the way people write, the way people see literature, the way people think.
In the context of this week, this defiance, this discovery and glorification of life, took on a whole new meaning.
Orlando.
100 people injured or murdered in a nightclub, a safe space, away from a judgmental society. The shooter himself a figure of tragic proportions. Can any of the LGBT community buried in closets for years and years not feel for a man who took his closeted pain and turned it to violence? He chose the wrong way, but the world had put him in a corner, bred in him the seeds of hatred and self-loathing that gave full blossom to a bloom of blood.
There are many ways to look at the tragedy, ways to discuss social policy, the treatment of LGBT folk, guns, terror, the Islamic faith, ad nauseum.
But it’s Bloomsday.
Violence, terror, hatred, are insanely difficult to stop. They exist as the yin, to the yang of the one remedy to their destructive forces, namely, love. Will we ever stop terror and hate? Will banning guns limit the extent of this kind of tragedy?
Unknown.
I think Joyce’s response to this, however, would be to tell us to live. Live boldly, laugh at boundaries, be audacious. We rarely remember the days spent within our limits, but treasure those that push us outside of them: trips to new places, that first bold kiss, that work report that kept us awake until the early morning hours. Hate took 49 men and women. Souls lost tragically. What is left behind is only their lives, how they touched others, how they chose to spend their waking hours.
All things aside I hope the tragedy reminds people to live fully. Just as Joyce wrote his book as an act of defiance that we can also live defiantly, love defiantly, laugh defiantly. I challenge everyone in the next week, when you find yourself at the very edge of who you are and feel the urge to hide your unique soul, bravely push forward. Be. Simply be.
I think it’s best to end with the final passage of Joyce’s work. I’d say spoiler alert but I honestly barely understand if it does spoil anything (and… really, who beside me and about 10 English majors is going to read it?). In the English class that I studied the book our teacher said that the final passage can be interpreted a lot of ways – a proposal of marriage, an orgasm – but to many it’s simply an epic embracing of life. It ends with one of my favorite lines in literature. A phrase that in the wake of this tragic week, I hope we use to answer questions of love that life throws at us:
O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.