Re: re: re: re: re: Joyce: a private summerlong Bloomsday.

I. JOYCEXPERIENCE

One dubiously sunny Irish summer day in Dublin I was walking along the city's eastern beach-rim when my friend told me that this wasn't just any eastern beach-rim--the kind of place in, say, Barcelona or Sydney where you might casually toss Frisbees--but in fact literary holy ground: Sandymount strand. A sophisticated modernist shiver, dressed in a bow tie and a bowler hat, with a pince-nez and a small mustache, sauntered up and down my spine.

We had been reenacting, accidentally, the "Proteus" episode of Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus's morning beachwalk: probably the most famous moody-brooding in world literature since Hamlet's soliloquies. The episode's opening phrase, "Ineluctable modality of the visible," is one of the best-known moments in the world's least-read best-known novel--most likely because it's the last thing most people see before giving up on Ulysses forever, the point at which the balance between the accessible and the arcane tips decisively in the wrong direction. Stephen's memories are treated as immediate experience; dialogue is ambiguously imagined; obscure medieval philosophy shares the stage with a urinating dog; language becomes a hash of morphemes flipped vigorously with a spatula ("contransmagnificandjewbangtantiality"). Books of annotations--those finely printed, pragmatically bound, vaguely shameful volumes of academic pornography--become necessary.

Reading Ulysses at home, from the geographical irrelevance of a desk in New York, I could never quite picture Sandymount strand. On the question of landscape, Joyce is particularly (maybe uniquely) unhelpful: in place of the nineteenth-century novelist's orienting panoramic, he gives us only highly stylized microdescriptions filtered through the overlapping cheese-cloths of Stephen's consciousness. Even the name Sandymount strand-lilting, alliterative--suggests a fantasy world somewhere in the vicinity of Brobdingnag or Narnia. Between the novel and its annotations, I had managed to conclude with some confidence that it was a beach bordered by rocks, but in my imagination it was only a theo-philosophical Baywatch set, as blank as the margins of the perpetually open dictionary from which I learned that a strand is just a beach and that modality means "of or relating to structure as opposed to substance."

As either luck or the omniscient narrator of my life would have it, I had choked "Proteus" down again only a few days before that beachwalk (it was step three in my eighteen-step program to read the entire novel over the summer), so I was primed to soak in the magic of the actual place. My soul trembled with soul-trembling tremble-touches. On first glance, however, there was nothing to get excited about; the beach dutifully fulfilled all my generic expectations of beach-experience. The salt-sticky seawind was indistinguishable from domestic American seawind. The customary range of seaside particles percussed solidly under my tennis shoes. Families flew kites. A man surfed on a board attached to a parachute. I should have expected this--the elevation of the trivial (cat meow, cheese sandwich, bowel movement) to aggressively difficult High Art was step one on Joyce's famous aesthetic agenda. But I had always thought of Dublin trivia as inherently exotic. It wasn't. And yet, post-Joyce, it was. As I stood there watching scruffy independent off-leash Irish dogs enthusiastically chase sticks, I had a muted little epiphany--an epiphony. I saw that the families, the dogs, and the parachute surfer, who had all seemed at first like casual, free beings moving according to whim, were actually only tracing out pre-authorized shapes on a permanent grid of Joyce-defined meaning. Sandymount strand was a fictional stage that just happened, secondarily, to be a real place: life-sized, three-dimensional, antique and yet updated every second with modern touches--bird nests, neon signs, garbage. It had been infused with trivnificance, the paradoxical colonization of trivia by art: trivia significantly fictionalized for its very triviality, and hence no longer trivial. And once you saw that, it was everywhere.

In "Proteus" Stephen thinks, iambically, "These heavy sands are language tide and wind have silted here," and to the Joyceconscious modern walker, Sandymount strand is language. Every sensation trickles down through fourteen dense pages of print: the "lacefringe of the tide," the "whitemaned seahorses" of the waves farther out, the "fourworded wavespeech": "seesoo, hrss, rsseeiss, ooos." As I walked, the events of "Proteus" played out for me in vivid imaginary realtime. I watched Stephen Dedalus, slim and hunched over the end of a cane, dressed in black for his beastly dead mother, slumping lazily toward the rocks. I didn't see him, of course, the way I saw the flock of sailboats clustered near the horizon--he didn't even know I had, the human equivalent of the translucent third eyelid a sea lion uses to swim underwater. I watched him flinch from a barking dog. He sat on some boulders (in Ulysses, "piled stone mammoth skulls") and wrote on a scrap of paper. Then he picked his nose and laid the dry snot on a ledge of rock. I stared, for a very long time, at the actual rock.

This was my first Joycexperience: imagining snot on a rock. It immediately restructured my experience of the book. Ulysses became not exactly a novel but something else, either the 783-page footnote to a city or a book that bad subsumed that city as a footnote to itself. They're like opposite ends of a telescope: look through Dublin and see a giant Ulysses, through Ulysses a tiny Dublin. It's impossible to tell which generated the other or which requires the other more urgently as explanation.

My Joyceconsciousness radiated …