Today is Bloomsday, so-called because June 16, 1904, is the day in which the action (except, toward the end, for the wee hours of the 17th ) of James Joyce's Ulysses takes place. Joyce went on his first date that day with Nora Barnacle, his future wife, and she made quite an impression upon him.
The novel's fame rests to significant degree on its reputation as perhaps the quintessential modernist text in English. Its difficulty is well known, as is its complicated publication history, brought on by the censor and Joyce's frank treatment of sexual themes. But these elements tend to obscure the fact that the novel's subject matter--family life and the marital relations of a middle-aged Dublin couple--is rather unsensational.
In Dubliners, a collection of stories in which Joyce claimed to have intended "to write a chapter of the moral history of my country," the main characters become progressively older as we proceed through the volume, first young children, then adolescents and young adults, and, finally, in the last, longest, and finest, "The Dead," another middle-aged married couple, Gabriel and Gretta Conroy, take center stage. It is really one of the best shorter works of fiction in our language, and I try to reread it every Bloom's Day. In the course of the action (to summarize with gruesome sketchiness), the reader and Gabriel himself are made to feel his inferiority to one of Gretta's first suitors, who caught his death singing in the cold outside her window. Gabriel, meanwhile, is the sort of fellow who thinks it very important to wear galoshes, and at the end of the story, alone with his wife in a hotel room after a party and watching the snow fall in the streets, slowly covering everything, his own sense of loss merges with the sadness of all life, its waste and futility.
If you've meant to try Ulysses, but feel intimidated by its reputation, I'd suggest you start with Dubliners. Read "The Dead" carefully and remember that, despite all the publicity surrounding his modernist methods, Joyce's theme of themes concerns the problems of these older married couples.
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