It's the month of Bloomsday, and the Joyce articles roll past my hungering eyes. Here is Louis Menand, in The New Yorker, summarizing the life. Excellent, also enjoyable, especially on the subjet of what happened on the first Bloomsday, 16 June 1904. And here is Michael Chabon, in The New York Review (alas, behind the subscriber wall, but I'm a subscriber), ostensibly on Finnegans Wake, but including along the way a song of praise for Leopold Bloom that serves as quite a concise statement of why many of us love Bloom (and Joyce). Chabon writes that on his first reading of Ulysses he, being an aspiring writer, was most taken with the character of Stephen Dedalus. Bloom? An old guy, and a loser.
Then, in the spring of 2010, I made my second complete ascent of Ulysses, and came down hopelessly in love. . . . Leopold Bloom was only an old dude, to me, that first time through; charming, touching, good-hearted, but old: a failure, a fool, a cuckold, crapping in an outhouse, masturbating into his pants pocket. His uxoriousness was beyond my understanding, as was his apparent willingness to endure humiliation. His lingering sorrow over the death of his infant son meant, I am ashamed to admit, very little to me at all. When I read Ulysses again I was shocked to find that, first, I was now mysteriously a decade older than Leopold Bloom, and second, that the tale of his stings and losses, his regrets and imaginings, was as familiar to me as the sour morning taste of my own mouth. Where a bachelor had seen Bloom's devotion to Molly as pathetic, a husband saw it as noble and, at the same time, as simply her due. In Bloom's retention, into middle age, of his child-sharp powers of observation, his fresh eye (and ear, and nose) for nuance and telling detail; in his having managed to sustain his curiosity about the people and the world around him after thirty-eight years of familiarity and routine that ought to have dulled and dampened it; and above all in the abiding capacity for empathy, for moral imagination, that is the fruit of an observant curiosity like Bloom's, I found, as if codified, a personal definition of heroism.
Ulysses struck me, most of all, as a book of life; every sentence, even those that laid bare the doubt, despair, shame, or vanity of its characters, seemed to have been calibrated to assert, in keeping with the project of the work as a whole, the singularity and worth of even the most humdrum and throwaway of human days.
James Joyce: not just for PhD candidates.
