Happy Bloomsday!

Today is June 16, and that makes it Bloomsday. What, you may be asking, is a Bloomsday? Well, James Joyce wrote a novel called Ulysses which follows the wanderings of one Leopold Bloom around Dublin on June 16, 1904. This novel has many very devoted fans who gather in pubs around the world every June 16 to celebrate Bloomsday by drinking Guiness and reading the book out loud to each other (man, I never get invited to the cool parties).

Now Ulysses is hands-down my absolute favorite book of all time. But it's also a book that many people start and just can't finish. It's a lot of work, and unless it's your sort of thing, it's not worth the work. I get that. It's just so much My Sort of Thing. Someone at Backspace recently asked me why I like it so much. I hadn't really thought about it before, not in the sort of way that I could articulate it anyway. So it took me a while to come up with my response:

I think how I came to it is a huge part of why I like it, so here's the backstory of me. I've been obsessed with myths all my life. As a kid I made a point of reading all the mythology books I could find at the library: Greek and Roman, Norse (my fave), Asian, anything I could get my hands on. They were the truest thing to me: I believed in them all (still do, actually). But I was bugged by how they were condescended to in subtle (and not so subtle) ways. There was a definite "can you believe people used to actually believe in these things?" vibe. To me, the myths were always stories that pointed to deeper, darker, and universal truths. I didn't realize I wasn't the only one who took them this seriously until a high school teacher handed me THE POWER OF MYTH. I was instantly hooked, quickly moving on to all of Joseph Campbell's other books. And Joe Campbell was always talking about this writer named James Joyce...

ULYSSES to me is really about how all these deep, dark myths are still in us and with us in our everyday lives. Now, there are a lot of novels that use mythology or mythological figures (AMERICAN GODS and THE LONG DARK TEATIME OF THE SOUL are also faves of mine), but these generally involve characters physically interacting with the gods. The myths are something external. In ULYSSES the myths are internal, and they are a part of everyone. I think a lot of writers who wanted to write a story based on the Odyssey would feel inclined to make at least one of the characters some sort of mythological scholar, so they could explain everything to us. ULYSSES is about a completely ordinary schmo living out a myth, and he doesn't even realize it. I understand that Joyce had a special disdain for Carl Jung, which seems ironic, as they seem to be saying the same things. Myths are within us all; they are not just part of our culture, they are part of who we are. You don't have to know the stories to live the stories.

I also just love the style of it. It begs to be read out loud. Joyce was not a reader with a thesaurus; no two words have exactly the same nuance of meaning, and he put a great deal of effort into picking exactly the right words in exactly the right order. Most passages do at least double duty, meaning one thing on the surface and something more if you dig a little deeper. I would love for my writing to do that. Take for example Episode XIV: Oxen of the Sun. The only action here is a bunch of men in a waiting room while someone's wife is struggling through a long, difficult labor. Joyce is trying to make the point that all of human history precedes every birth, but of course he doesn't just say so. The story of these men waiting is told in the styles of different periods of history, starting with ancient times and working up to modern times, culminating of course in the birth of the child. How is that for show not tell?

I've been thinking about it more since I wrote that, mostly about the internal versus external use of myths. I've been trying for a while now to express how my novel is different than other novels I've read that are also based on pagan Norse characters. I guess that's what it is. My myths are all internal. You won't be reading any scenes in my book of Odin and Thor feasting together and discussing the plights of their human followers below. Not that there's anything wrong with that - American Gods and The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul are both dead brilliant books - it's just not what I'm doing. For me it's all internal. If the gods exist at all, they exist in the minds and hearts of my Norsemen. Of course that doesn't make them less real.

Of course I haven't been working on the novel in question in over a month. But any day now I'm sure I'll get back on it. You know, when I'm done spending my afternoons hauling rocks around.