Some
16 years ago, The Boston Globe published an article about a jobless man
who haunted Marsh Plaza, at the center of Boston University. The
picture showed a curious figure in a long overcoat, hunched beneath a
black fedora near the central sculpture. He spent his days talking with
pigeons to whom he had given names: Checkers and Wingtip and Speckles.
The article could have been just another human-interest story about our
society’s failing commitment to mental health, except that the man
crouched in conversation with the birds was John Kidd, once celebrated
as the greatest James Joyce scholar alive.
Kidd
had been the director of the James Joyce Research Center, a suite of
offices on the campus of Boston University dedicated to the study of
“Ulysses,” arguably the greatest and definitely the most-obsessed-over
novel of the 20th century. Armed with generous endowments and
cutting-edge technology, he led a team dedicated to a single goal:
producing a perfect edition of the text. I saved the Boston Globe story
on my computer and would occasionally open it and just stare. Long ago, I
contacted Kidd about working on an article together, because I was
fascinated by one of his other projects — he had produced a digital
edition, one that used embedded hyperlinks to make the novel’s vast
thicket of references and allusions, patterns and connections all
available to the reader at a click.
Joyce
once said about “Ulysses” — and it’s practically a requirement of any
article about the novel to use this quote — “I’ve put in so many enigmas
and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing
over what I meant.” And that has always been part of how the novel
works. For most of the book, what you are reading are the fractured bits
of memory and observation kicking around in the head of a single schlub
named Leopold Bloom as he wanders about Dublin on a single day, June
16, 1904. It’s the sensation of putting these bits together and the
pleasure, when it happens, of suddenly getting it — the joke, the story, the book — that compels you throughout.
This
is why “Ulysses,” through most of the 20th century and into this one,
still catches up all kinds of nonacademic readers who form clubs or
stage readings on June 16. I remember wandering into an all-night
read-a-thon on the Upper West Side, at Shakespeare & Co. on 81st
Street, when I moved to New York in the 1980s. I arrived at the
beginning, in the late afternoon, with good intentions, but staggered
home and then returned the next day for the final chapter and suddenly
realized that, read aloud, the 24 hours of the book’s action take 24
hours to read. The running time in your head is the same as the running
time in the book. For a few minutes, I thought I was onto something
brilliant, until another yawning fan in the bookstore mentioned a set of
connections she had found and I realized, Oh, right, we’re all doing
this. ... [mehr] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/12/magazine/the-strange-case-of-the-missing-joyce-scholar.html
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