Daughter of the Ring of Fire » Blog Archive

Jun

2009

Happy Bloomsday

Posted on 14:30, June 16th, 2009 by EKSwitaj

Read my latest story, "The All-Nighter", at 52|250.

Part of my love for James Joyce’s Ulysses stems from it being profoundly a book of exile both metaphorical and literal. Leopold Bloom and Molly Bloom both have been exiled from marital sexuality since the death of their son, though we see this primarily from Poldy’s perspective. He exiles himself from his house in order to attend a funeral and generally go about his business. She, in her bed, is exiled from his daily world, even speaking a language not quite his, though it is beautiful and ecstatic and Yes. Stephen Dedalus has returned from his self-imposed exile overseas, is exiled (by choice) from his family, and early on in the book, exiled from the Martello tower where he had been staying. That this latter exile is in part due to the actions of an Englishman echoes the way that English imperialism and mistreatment led to mass emigration from Ireland.

James Joyce, too, was in self-imposed exile as he wrote the book, and it shows. His meticulousness about streets and landmarks is the meticulousness of an exile. When you live in a place, the precise landscape doesn’t seem so essential as when you are trying to remember it from another country. At least, in my peripatetic life, that has been the case.

The language of Ulysses is also that of an exile, questioning the bounds of a native tongue as if it were foreign. (This is one of many ways in which Joyce’s work as an EFL teacher influences his work; he had many opportunities to hear his own tongue spoke as a foreign one.) In places, the same could be said for the treatment of narrative, though the underlying story remains. Both of these tendencies reach their peak in Finnegans Wake, however.