James Joyce
Ulisse

There's this kind of day. A long, long, long day. Really long. Sure, the booklet has the wax seal. "Ulysses" by Joyce. So, one might think that the long, long day is the famous June 16, 1904. Posterity has renamed it Bloomsday.

No.

The long, long day (really long) is just any of our days. Yes. We should find the time. But finding the time to consider and ponder the lost time is difficult. Careful: by "lost" time I don't mean "wasted" time. "Lost" in the Proustian sense, meaning "passed."

Yes.

I wanted to talk about Joyce in a certain way. But what's the point? I wanted to say things, all the theories/delights/diarrheas produced about the book. Damn! No. Or at least one, then I'll move on to something else. "Ulysses" by Joyce, namely the ultimate Realist novel hidden beneath the most extreme artifice. Actually, it's simple if you think about it. At least, simple for us, the successors, who think about it after Joyce showed us the way. What's the most important realist novel produced before "Ulysses"? For me, "Sentimental Education" by Flaubert, or the environment inhabited by people who evolve over time. What's the "problem"? The style. And it's paradoxical to think that the problem of a Flaubert novel is the style, given his pen's virtuosity. What was Joyce's upgrade? The interior monologue. Indeed if you think about it, what is reality? People evolving over time in a certain environment. And meanwhile, they think and think and think. And so access to their uncovered brains is the key. Only through writing that hops here and there, left and right, up and down among the roundabout/hide-and-seek/leapfrog/the flies of the neuronal mass can we have a vague idea of reality. If we really want to have it.

Hmm.

Is it really so? Other things come to mind. The Homeric correspondences. Stephen Dedalus-Telemachus Bloom-Ulysses Molly-Penelope the Citizen-Polyphemus Gerty McDowell-Nausicaa... I wouldn't finish anymore. Each chapter would need a review. @[G] could we do this? Maybe I'll do it, at most it will be banned.

Anyway.

I'm digressing. Yes, because one should consider the evolution of Joyce's writing. The epiphanies of the "Dubliners" and then the chapters of the "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" which, with their increasing complexity, followed the development of the protagonist's mind, refining his perceptions over the years. And then "Ulysses" and then "Finnegans Wake." Damn "Finnegans Wake"! Let me just recount what Joyce's brother said: < "Finnegans Wake" was the last delirium of Literature before its complete extinction>.

Wow.

I just wanted to say that among so much more or less interesting bla bla bla, more or less heavy, more or less centered, there is a little thing that comes to mind. And that is that long, long, long day that is not June 16, 1904. Well, it would be each of our days. If only we had the time to realize that we are alive.

There.

Each of our days is June 16, 1904. We just get lost. There are no days or months or years. And there aren't any because we never think about it. Or we no longer have the time to think about it. Lost forever like luminous dots in Space. And in Time. So what's the point? It's saying a big HURRAY to all the things that remind us we're still alive.

HURRAY!