Chekhov’s Mistess

June 16, 2006

Musings on Bloomsday and the Future of the Book

 

I’m not sure why I attend Bloomsday on Broadway every year. It could be boring to sit there while people read without directly participating myself, but for some reason I love it. I think I mostly love it because they make it fun – there’s no pretense whatsoever at the Bloomsday on Broadway celebration, and it’s spirited. And I’m amazed that it’s just about a book, that people all over the world get together and read this one book (and not just on Bloomsday, I might add), and that’s heartening when it seems like the world at large might be slipping down the slope of literacy every day.

With literature there’s an ineluctable (a Joyce word: “the ineluctable modality of truth”) nexus of exclusivity and inclusiveness; that is, literature is inclusive because anyone can pick up a book and read it with no economic or other barriers and it’s exclusive because the going can get rough sometimes and it takes a lot of energy to dig for the hidden treasure that could change your consciousness once you’ve uncovered it. That’s the beauty of it and I can’t think of any book that embodies that idea more than Ulysses.

I’ve read Ulysses once entirely through and several times partially as well as going to about five Bloomsdays. I’ve read several books about Ulysses, some more about Joyce, most notably the Ellman biography, and pretty much everything the man ever wrote – including letters, essays, poetry, theater, his short stories and ”Portrait of an Artist…” – except for Finnegans Wake and the early version of Portrait, Stephen Hero. Despite Joyce’s relatively small body of work, it is a vast mine of style and allusion. For that it takes energy and a certain mindset to get in there. Anybody can read and enjoy it, but the good stuff takes work.

I also think that Bloomsday underscores the importance of the text itself. It really comes alive with people reading it. Sitting there in a theater, it’s too dark to read it yourself (although I’ve tried). The text is separated from its physical form and takes on new meaning and even becomes clearer for many who found it impenetrable when reading it themselves. As an aside, I would say that literature was oral before it came to be in the form we now take for granted and Joyce, who studied books such as Saintsbury’s ”History of English Prose Rhythm,” brought his book back to that realm. Reading his work aloud changes and enhances its meaning.

While wondering if the physical form of a book matters at all, I began to think about the history of the Ulysses manuscript. Besides the famous censorship and battles to get it into the United States and other countries, Ulysses had a very difficult time making it from Joyce’s hand into type. Notably, there’s one story about a typist who’s husband saw the profanity in the book and threw it into the fire. Luckily, another copy was recovered. But there were literally thousands of errors in the manuscript that were corrected along the way and it wasn’t until sixty years after its publication until the task of correcting thousands more was completed.

The story of the Ulysses manuscript is rich enough to take up an entire book of its own, and indeed it has, most notably Bruce Arnold’s The Scandal of Ulysses. Today, it seems doubtful that any such adventures happen to a book on its way to being published. Sure, someone might lose a laptop or crash a p.c. before they’ve backed up, but none of that is very interesting compared to the tale of Ulysses or, for instance, T.E. Lawrence’s manuscript of Seven Pillars of Wisdom, which was burned in a fire and had to be completely re-written. Nowadays most everything can be retrieved (if you don’t believe, try writing something that the FBI wants to get ahold of) and it seems that books have lost their form completely as they ultimately become a collection of ones and zeros.

The only real link between these two ideas, other than a bit of nostalgia as we move into a new era, is that Ulysses seems larger than life and every aspect of the book adds to that sense. Maybe there’s only room for one book like that every century or so (of course, John Baker points out that a lot of amazing work came out in 1922, the year Ulysses was published), but I hope not.

I think that it’s inevitable that books will lose their physical form as we know it now, but it’s not inevitable that literature will adapt and change, perhaps like Joyce’s masterpiece, reaching back into the ways of old when literature was passed from voice to ear into our consciousness. Will writers write differently? Will readers remember what they read? Are there books being written today that will transcend their form like Ulysses has?

• posted by Bud Parr
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