E-Mail This Article to a Friend Ulysses 101 A centennial salute to Joyce and Bloomsday BY AMY FINCH
	yes I said yes I will Yes.: A Celebration of James Joyce, Ulysses, and 100 Years of Bloomsday Edited by Nola Tully. Foreword by Frank McCourt. Introduction by Isaiah Sheffer. Vintage, 155 pages, $11 (paper).

From stately, plump Buck Mulligan’s morning shave to Molly Bloom’s sprawling wee-hour soliloquy, James Joyce packed enough complexity to intrigue and torment readers of Ulysses till the sun burns out. "I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries," Joyce himself said of the masterpiece that took him about seven years to write and helped change the face of fiction when it was published in 1922. Such was his method of achieving immortality.

But Joyce’s key word there might be "professors," since Ulysses (not to mention its successor, Finnegans Wake) has a tendency to scare off non-professorial types before they even crack open the fat, 700-plus-page masterwork. The slim new yes I said yes I will Yes. offers the daunted a fascinating introduction to Ulysses and its author. Edited by critic and photographer Nola Tully, with a foreword by Angela’s Ashes author Frank McCourt and an introduction by playwright and lyricist Isaiah Sheffer, the book has as its subtitle "A Celebration of James Joyce, Ulysses, and 100 Years of Bloomsday." Joyce set Ulysses on June 16, 1904, so it’s been exactly one century since he had his first rendezvous with Nora Barnacle, the artless country girl who became his lifelong companion and the inspiration for Molly Bloom. (Or so goes the theory regarding Joyce’s choice of date.)

The distance of three-quarters of a century makes it difficult to imagine the impact Ulysses made when it was first published. The book’s plot is pretty humdrum — it’s an account of a single day in the life of everyman Leopold Bloom. But using Homer’s Odyssey as template and touchstone and incorporating high literary references as well as trips to the toilet, Joyce presented all aspects of life as worthy of contemplation. Ulysses may be imposing, and readers may approach it with solemnity, but that’s the last thing he wanted. In a 1922 interview with Vanity Fair, Joyce said of Ulysses, "there is not one single serious line in it."

It would doubtless please him to know that Bloomsday has turned into a festive occasion in cities around the world, with people gathering to read aloud from Ulysses. Sometimes they’re professional actors, as is the case for New York City’s "Bloomsday on Broadway" (co-created by Sheffer, who also acts as host, director, and performer in the event); sometimes they’re simply fans of Joyce’s often-musical writing style. As Sheffer writes, hearing sections of Ulysses read aloud is "one sure-fire, proven, and time-tested way of overcoming one’s fear of ‘that big, forbidding, incomprehensible epic’ that you didn’t manage to master in college." (6)

In fact, reading yes I said yes I will Yes. is itself one way to shore up the courage to launch into the world of Leopold Bloom. The book is a welcoming mélange of biographical and historical detail and thematic explanations, and it includes unforgettable early reactions to Ulysses. This is how, in an undergraduate report, Tennessee Williams described the book: "A great deal of dullness. Then some dirt. Then more dullness. Then a great deal more dirt and a great deal more dullness." He was, at least, impressed by Molly Bloom and thought that the book would benefit by being whittled down to her soliloquy and nothing more.

Virginia Woolf’s reaction? "Never did I read such tosh." At one point she and her husband, Leonard, were asked to publish the book and declined. "I don’t believe that his method . . . means much more than cutting out the explanations and putting in the thoughts between dashes." It’s a curious assessment given Woolf’s own interior-focused technique.

Some, of course, saw nothing but genius in Ulysses. Edmund Wilson pronounced it "perhaps the most faithful X-ray ever taken of the ordinary human consciousness." Vladimir Nabokov called it "a divine work of art" and humbly avowed, "Oh, yes, let people compare me to Joyce by all means, but my English is pat ball to Joyce’s champion game."

Considered in some quarters pornographic (it was listed in catalogues next to such dirty works as Raped on the Rail), Ulysses was banned from the United States until 1933. yes I said yes I will Yes. includes a portion of US District Judge John M. Woolsey’s decision to allow the novel into America. Woolsey concluded that "whilst in many places the effect of Ulysses on the reader undoubtedly is somewhat emetic, nowhere does it tend to be an aphrodisiac."

Emetic or not, Ulysses endures. And despite Joyce’s bluster about keeping the professors busy, he did betray a hint of doubt: On the 20th anniversary of Bloomsday, he wrote in his notebook, "Will anyone remember this date."

Arts & Society presents a Bloomsday celebration this Wednesday, June 16, at 8 p.m. at the Boston University Theatre Lab, 855 Commonwealth Avenue; call (508) 696-0539.