“An Illiterate Underbred Book”: Ulysses and Bloomsday at 100

An illiterate, underbred book it seems to me; the book of a self taught working man, and we all know how distressing they are, how egotistic, insistent, raw, striking, and ultimately nauseating. When one can have the cooked flesh, why have the raw? But I think if you are anaemic, as Tom is, there is a glory in blood. Being fairly normal myself I am soon ready for the classics again. — Virginia Woolf, on James Joyce’s Ulysses

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Self-portrait of an artist as a young girl ?

Why Ulysses? Why do I go back to it? It’s so long. It’s messy. I like long, messy books. My life-long search for an Irishness I could really get behind surely explains in part why I dip into Ulysses when I am feeling discouraged as a writer. I saw/heard the moment I read the first page of “Telemachus” that the language and sound of Joyce’s work was already in my ear, maybe in the way light opera was in Joyce’s. The New York Irish are so embarrassingly Irish, with their shitty, right-wing politics, meat-headed anti-intellectualism, and disinterest in art. I’m generalizing. About what I come from so fully and adore. It’s also me. But I found this “Father said” culture itchy even as a girl. I recognized as I started to write, garbage usually, on a daily basis, that my Irish beloveds were full of lyric and charm. Not lucky charm not gift of gab, but really music. There had to be more to us, as I came to see myself as an artist as a young woman coming of age in New…