This Day in Literary History

February 2, 1922 – James Joyce’s modernist classic Ulysses was published in Paris. The owner of publisher Shakespeare and Company, Sylvia Beach, became interested in the novel after Ezra Pound began promoting it – and two years after its serialization in The Little Review had been halted by censors.

All kinds of things can be – and have been – written about Joyce and Ulysses, and perhaps on Bloomsday (not just the day of the events of the novel, but the day of the writer’s first outing with his future wife Nora) I’ll review some of them. But for today, I’ll confine myself strictly to how Joyce has affected my own writing.

I remember reading somewhere that Joyce once expressed his displeasure with Marcel Proust’s work by saying simply, “He doesn’t surprise me.” (After trying to crack Remembrance of Things Past, only to give it up as a lost cause, a few years ago, I couldn’t agree more.) Well, that could never be said about Ulysses.

In a way, the standard the novelist set for his work is the same one I use for this blog. Every day that someone comes to it, I hope he or she will find something unexpected – something that will cause laughter, pity, a moment of recognition, a new thought learned – in short, surprise.

Joyce liked to say that his portrait of Dublin was so detailed that if the city were ever ever destroyed, it could be rebuilt, brick by brick, by using his book as a model. I’ve found that it may be a great prescription not just for writing a novel, but also a memoir, and I’ve tried to keep that in mind in my stop-and-go attempts to recall the places, events and people that shaped my youth in what now feels like so long ago.