A Pilgrim’s Digression

If It’s June 16, This Must Be Bloomsday

And Bloomsday it is. I can no longer recall exactly when I first read this book. It was sometime in the mid-nineties. I was a college student studying English literature. I’ve read it many times since; I took a whole course on this one novel in Graduate School. To this day it remains in my mind the most fascinating and amazing of books. Joyce beggars comparison with other writers because there has never been one who has insisted on putting on paper every stray thought, every scrap of knowledge ever to cross his path. Joyce does exactly that. Ulysses and Finnegans Wake are unofficial encyclopedias of the early twentieth century, of Ireland and the other places Joyce inhabited, of Joyce’s mind which in itself was an expansive region comprising so much of human knowledge. Some have compared him to Shakespeare, and certainly this is the only apt comparison. Joyce drew heavily on Shakespeare. Stephen Dedalus’ long meditation on Hamlet in Ulysses demonstrates that much. And certainly Shakespeare in many ways harnassed for his use the knowledge of the time in which he lived. Just as critics can delve the esoteric depths of Shakespeare’s use of slang, or Shakespeare’s references to popular culture of the time, so scholars can do the same for Joyce. Joyce and Shakespeare are indeed brothers of a kind. Ulysses, the pretentious novel about “nothing,” is about everything. That is the tie that binds the two greatest literary geniuses together over four centuries.