Newswise — In "Ulysses," James Joyce captured the progress of Leopold Bloom, Stephen Dedalus, Molly Bloom and other residents of Dublin on June 16, 1904.
A celebration of fictional events may be mind-bending, but all over the world Joyce scholars and tourists will do just that for the centenary of Bloom's day, known as Bloomsday.
In the United States, parties are planned from Saratoga to San Diego. Google lists 46,300 entries for Bloomsday. Dublin will host a major festival, including the opening of director Sean Walsh's adaptation of "Ulysses," titled "Bloom."
Quite an appreciation for a man who wrote in his notebooks: "Today 16 June 1924 twenty years after. Will anyone remember?"
Robert Bell, the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of English at Williams College, finds general agreement that "Ulysses" is the number one novel of the 20th century in the English-speaking world--and his favorite book.
Bell has published numerous articles on Joyce, including most recently a reflection on Bloomsday at 100! in the May edition of Commonweal, and a full-length study, "Jocoserious Joyce: The Fate of Folly in Ulysses."
Bell is the current herald of the Joyce tradition at Williams College, carried on when he first arrived in 1972, by the late James Clay Hunt and Don C. Gifford.
Hunt taught at Williams College from 1941 to 1976. He did not publish on Joyce--in fact he vigorously eschewed scholarly journals, but Joyce was one of his favorite authors, whom he taught regularly to senior English majors. Bell has retained a copy of the remarkable guide to writing a paper on Joyce that Hunt gave his students in 1972. Twelve pages long, it provides students with the information they need to assume the role of Joyce, in order to express his/their artistic souls.
Gifford taught at Williams College from 1951 to his retirement in 1989. He published two indispensable books annotating Joyce, one on "Dubliners" and "Portrait of the Artist" and the other, with his former student, Robert J. Seidman '63, on "Ulysses." Extraordinarily erudite, Gifford was a man of wide-ranging intellect and the annotations are, in the words of his colleague Stephen Fix, "factually oriented and encyclopedic in scope, explaining everything from the Irish slang spoken by Joyce's characters, to details of the political and theological debates that shaped Joyce's imagination."
For a small department in a small college to have three highly regarded professors focus on a writer other than Shakespeare, almost as though they were passing a mantel from one to the other in succession, is unusual.
But this discussion should also recognize another Williams connection with Joyce, lawyer Morris L. Ernst '09, who represented Random House in its efforts to get "Ulysses" published in this country against the efforts of those who wished to ban it. The battle ended with the ruling of U.S. District Judge John M. Woolsey. Ernst wrote in his introduction to the first U.S. edition, "Joyce's masterpiece, for the circulation of which people have been branded criminals in the past, may now freely enter this country. The first week of December 1933 will go down in history for two repeals, that of Prohibition and that of the legal compulsion for squeamishness in literature."
Those who, inspired by the centenary, sit down to read "Ulysses" may still find it tough going. Nevertheless they are far better equipped to do so because of the devotion of Williams College faculty; and that they are able to do so at all owes something to an alumnus.
Williams College is consistently ranked one of the nation's top liberal arts colleges. The college's 2,000 students are taught by a faculty noted for the quality of their undergraduate teaching. The achievement of academic goals includes active participation of students with faculty in research. Admission decisions are made regardless of a student's financial ability, and the college provides grants and other assistance to meet the demonstrated needs of all who are admitted. Founded in 1793, it is the second oldest institution of higher learning in Massachusetts. The college is located in Williamstown, Mass. To visit the college on the Internet: http://www.williams.edu
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