CPXtra


Today is part of the ‘Church Calendar’ for those who are into Irish literature. It’s Bloomsday, the day on which the fictional character Leopold Bloom takes his ‘odyssey’ around Dublin in James Joyce’s extraordinary epoch-shaping novel, Ulysses. Joyce’s novel is a splendidly experimental, hilarious and cryptic reworking of Homer’s Odyssey. Where Homer roamed the earth on his epic voyage, the anti-heroic Leopold roams the streets, pubs, brothels and churches of Dublin in just one day (across 800 pages of scintillating but demanding writing).
 

Joyce’s writing is a wrestle between authority and freedom, reality and imagination, conformity and sensual play. In Ulysses, he toys with the seriousness of history by reconstructing it within the apparent silliness and unimportance of one man’s day about Dublin. No big epic, just little domestic duties, he seems to say.

But the impulse behind this comedy is in fact a deeply serious one. Joyce was distressed about God, death and love, and his writing is a response to that distress.

 “How I hate God and death! How I like Nora!” Joyce wrote as a young man who was angry with religion and with mortality, and longed for deep, intimate connection with another—his future wife, Nora.

Some of Joyce’s tensions would be addressed by a more biblical, less ‘churchy’ and institutional, understanding of the Christian faith that is primarily about relationship with God; that celebrates the goodness that can be found in this life; that is a fan of good sex, good food, good friends, good fun. Authentic Christianity is about God befriending sinners, best demonstrated through the life of Jesus. It’s about God’s love for us, even as we hate him—a teaching that even the most ‘sensual and silly’ of characters needs to take seriously.

For a stick-figure animated summary of the story, click here




(We ask that you please keep all comments to 200 words or less)
C P X | Tuesday, June 16, 2009 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Permalink