Yesterday, June 16, was Bloomsday, so called because it is the day that the action of James Joyce's Ulysses, concerning a day in the life of Dubliner Leopold Bloom, occurs. It is sometimes said that the action of the novel is confined in its entirety to Thursday, June 16, 1904 (chosen by the author for its personal significance, the day he met his wife) but the famous conclusion transcribes the two-in-the-morning, stream-of-consciousness reverie of Bloom's unfaithful wife, Molly. (Ulysses is, among other things, a mock-heroic epic, the various episodes modeled on those of Homer's protagonist on his way back to Ithaca after the war, and so you would not expect Molly to be cut from the same cloth as Penelope.)
I have marked the last several Bloomsdays by re-reading "The Dead," the concluding story of Dubliners. Yesterday, however, the day at an end with no start having been made on that long story, I opened my paperback The Portable Joyce and read in bed Harry Levin's introduction, then "The Sisters," the opening story of the collection. The stories in Dubliners chart the consciousness of progressively older people, so in "The Sisters" a young boy is accompanied by his aunt to pay their respects to the deceased Father Flynn. They kneel at the coffin with one of the priest's elderly sisters and
I pretended to pray but I could not gather my thoughts because the old woman's mutterings distracted me. I noticed how clumsily her skirt was hooked at the back and how the heels of her cloth boots were trodden down all to one side.
This mundane detail may serve as an introduction to the world according to James Joyce. Not much happens in these stories. There is, at the beginning and again at the end of "The Sisters," the suggestion of some kind of scandal surrounding Father Flynn, but that is not what the story is "about," and indeed it trails off at the end when it seems we might be on the verge of a full revelation. But there is no revelation. Instead, we behold a boy noticing the wardrobe malfunctions of the deceased priest's elderly sister while pretending to pray.
Comments