Bewleys Hotel, Dublin, Day 73. Ulysses
11:31 AM. ‘Hey guys, we check out at 12.’
Joe’s voice woke the rest of us up, and we cleaned our room of last night’s card game mess. As we were leaving, I mourned the loss of one of my good athletic socks. Strangely, around the same time, I picked up a random black sock in the middle of the floor and absent-mindedly put it in my pocket, where it stayed forgotten for the whole day. I consider the sock as the equivalent to Ulysses’ character Bloom’s potato ‘heirloom’, kept in his pocket all day in which the epic takes place. Mine just had a different significance: a strand of these four days of Dublinianianianian adventure.
Cheap food, short on money—all of us. Except for Kat and Briar, who caught a 6am flight back (1 hour of sleep *snicker*). My stomach did somersaults throughout the afternoon, repulsed at my greasy choice of kebab and chips (that is, friessss). We, the guys and Anna now, sat in a park near an elementary school, upon a statue of the opened palm of a hand. Vinnie on the thumb, Mo on the wrist, Joseph and I on the bottom-middle of the palm, and Anna watching us. We had to move to a bench eventually.
As the three guys chilled, Anna and I walked. Over. tothemuseumIhadbeenwaitingfor. The centre of gravity upon which the loose thematic reference of this blog surrounds: Ulysses. James Joyce, an idol of a few months. Ever since UC Berkeley’s English 125: British Literature: 1900-1945. I saw it. An edition of his Ulysses from ten years after the first publish date. Torn and faded blue cover, white lettering. U L Y S S E S. My heart on fire, my eyes drinking the sustenance of a literary reality. In this Dublin Writers’ Museum, jump to jump of only the authors I knew or found curious:
Title page of Swift’s famed work. ‘travels into several remote nations of theworld by lemuel Gulliver By Dean Swift’ 1804. Ed. (random:) Chair—used by Handel at first perform Messiah at Musick Hall at Fishamble St, Dublin 13 April 1742--. Beckett. Good ole Samuel B. Progenitor after Joyce—sorta. His phone on display: red buttonofrejction for all calls he never wanted. Green buttonforfriends when they called. Playbill of first-FIRST-showshowofshowshowWaitingforGodot! Oh! Rhyming low.
Ulysses. Back to it. Another copy next to th e blue: Joyce’s handwriting. Signed a copy. Copy. His capital ‘J’s differ—the symbolic use of arbitrary defiance to typographic order upon a page, lettering not uniform. L e t t re er rerere. Lettering defiant. Joyce, James. James Joyce. JJ JJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJ—
Breakdown of lang. ONBLOG. Uly-ss-es, the creator of liberated words, ‘gibberish’ worth analyzing, My heart set fire to eyes impressed. Upstairs: boring portraits, faded book covers, yadadddaaddada, WAIT! A piano. Small, brownupright. Joyce. It was his. Pry it, pry it, playplayplay—locked. But the foot pedals. Work. I want to be better. Work. Like. Work. Joyce. Work. Work.
Writingthisdown. Same sheet all day. I wrote words last night, amidst enchant: lost paper, still the memory: My cigarette—a sheet of paper / A breath of words to write / my unprofound thoughts. Unprofound—twist ending, psychological layer not actually negati—not not, it is. The word ‘cigarette’—I don’t smoke. But the same feeling of excuse to break a moment outside, seems similar. Release of words. Somersault, somersault, on the pained hour bus ride back. Anna in headphones, my pointer and thumb in writing.
After that literary experience, I felt this last day in Dublin was worth staying for. In case the above confused you, Ulysses is a modernist novel (termed a ‘psychological epic’) by James Joyce, written in serialized form from 1918-1920, then published in its entirety 1922. As the title suggests, the allusion is to Homer’s Odyssey and every chapter is entitled after one of Homer’s, though the connection to the original story is so far engrained in a linguistic layering of metaphor and allusion that it is not obvious upon first glance—that there even is meaning to the work. It is considered the great psychological epic of modernism. The whole 780ish-page novel covers one day: June 16, 1904. A day intentionally ordinary. The greatness of it is its pure modernism, its breakdown of a linguistic style in every chapter, hence the previous paragraph’s linguistic breakdown. Liberating.
Anna and I reunited with the guys at the airport and we met up with Caitlin, Fiona, Emma, Bella, and Alex (Lauren had to catch a different flight due to complications in not getting a flight confirmation weeks ago). I got a chance to read more of Frankenstein and an hour-flight and two-hour taxi drive later, here we are. Back at UEA in Norwich. And I am back in Norfolk Terrace.
Norfolk Terrace, Day 73. Ulysses, the hardest book I have ever read. The challenge was rewarding, though. I really felt myself realizing a new way to read, of simply seeing words recreate themselves from fragment into phrase into sentence, nonlinearly. I write this blog as a travel blog, but I keep it ‘Ulyssian’ in the sense of finding my voice in a new guise of writing. Ulysses made me want to throw it across the room, made me say aloud ‘Joyce, you’re an a—’, made me finally break from engrained convention of reading for a bit and soak in roots of creative liberty and the arbitrariness of any linguistic creation. Literature is inspired—but the words are human. That is why I love and hate Ulysses with a literary passion.
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