attempt at the conversion

At first I wasn't sure if I wanted to undertake this...assignment may I say, but as I was walking back home I couldn't get the idea out of my head.

I remember when I read Ulysses, it was difficult and sifting through all of the information proved to be more of an arduous intellectual task than any other book I had picked up. I thought the same thing...as the anti-joycian, not because she doesn't deserve a name but simply because I have not learned it yet and I do not wish to offend her. Like her, I was a bit confused why someone would want to write about such seemingly trivial things...like going to the market to buy something for breakfast. You could easily ask the same question as to why we as a class have to remember about "the cooler" or "how beaugoin means beautiful eyes?" or "when Jon Nay's 21st birthday party is?" Trivial facts...seemingly no purpose, right? But this seems to be Sexson's purpose.

I remember why I read Ulysses for the first time. It's a simple reason. I came to the conclusion that I was interested in pursuing a doctorate in English Literature somewhere, so after hearing Sexson's speech about Ulysses in a classical literature class about Bloomsday and the trek people make...to celebrate a book, and to celebrate the life of a fictional character on an ordinary day.

Anyone who has been an English major for any amount of time have been at least once asked about the triviality of the degree; something along the lines of "I heard you got your English Literature degree...I hope your parents are proud of your overated book club membership."
Is it? Is it just a degree for people who enjoy reading...stories!?!

If you have been long enough in the major (and have been paying attention) you are provided an answer to this question, which goes something like, "English Literature as a member of the Humanities, is a study of the human condition through the lense of literature, texts, oral traditions...etc."

To me this assessment (or defense) makes sense and it makes sense in the same way that I see value in a 800+ page Joyce novel about a single day in an ordinary man's life. Joyce cannot simply write "and then Bloom went to the store to buy his wife Molly breakfast" but must write about what REALLY happened...for it is true that life is not as simple as some stories and sentences can be. Bloom saw things, heard things, thought things, felt things, and experienced his world in a way much closer to reality.

I will give an excerpt now (feel free to read past if you already agree with me):

His lips lipped and mouthed fleshless lips of air: mouth to her womb. Oomb, allwombing tomb. His mouth moulded issuing breath, unspeeched: ooeeehah: roar of cataractic planets, globed, blazing, roaring wayawayawayawaywaywaywaywayaway. Paper. The banknotes, blast them. Old Deasy's letter. Here. Thanking you for hospitality tear the blank end off. Turning his back to the sun he bent over far to a table of rock and scribbled words. That's twice I forgot to take slips from the library counter.
His shadow lay over the rocks as he bent, ending. Why not endless till the farthest star? Darkly they are there behind this light, darkness shining in the brightness, delta of Cassiopeia, worlds. Me sits there with his augur's rod of ash, in borrowed sandals, by day beside a livid sea, unbeheld, in violet night walking beneath a reign of uncouth stars. I throw this ended shadow from me, manshape inelectable, call it back. Endless, would it be mind, form of my form? Who watches me here? Who ever anywhere will read these written words? Signs on a white field. Somewhere to someone in your flutiest voice. The good bishop of Cloyne took the veil of the temple out of his shovel hat: veil of space with coloured emblems hatched on its field. Hold hard. Coloured on a flat: yes, that's right. Flat I see, then think distance, near, far, flat I see, east, back. Ah, see now. Falls back suddenly, frozen in stereoscope. Click does the trick. You find my words dark. Darkness is in our souls, do you not think? Flutier. Our souls, shame-wounded by our sins, cling to us yet more, a woman to her lover clinging, the more the more (Joyce 48).


To Joyce there is value in the ordinary, in the trivial, that to him, Bloom going to the marketplace holds as much value as Dante's trip into the Inferno. And because of the canonization of Ulysses, we are all forced to agree with him!
By connecting Bloom's day to that of Homer's Odyssey, we are forced to see them in the same light, that a random man's ordinary day is of as much importance as one of the foundational works of Western Literature. In association then our ordinary days are just as beautiful and memorable as Bloom's. His point (one of many) is that there is art and beauty in everyone of our days...we are just not trained to see it or appreciate it. We study literature for the same reason that Sexson has us memorize seemingly trivial things...to get at the greater beauty and knowledge contained in the REAL world...the same way that Joyce and Proust and all artists understood it. The problem is that we can't look at the real world but only "trivial" reproductions of it...like Bloom's day, or was the cooler cleaned out!