“Awake from dream, the truth is known: awake from waking, the Truth is – The Unkown.”
--Aleister Crowley, The Book of Lies
Today is Bloomsday, the day celebrated by literary enthusiasts around the world as the day on which James Joyce’s magnificent novel Ulysses takes place. All throughout Dublin on this day, each chapter of the novel is publicly read at its appropriate time and place, as Joyce assigned each chapter a location and time (except for the final chapter, which occurs after midnight and, metaphorically, outside of time altogether).
Much can be said about the brilliance of Ulysses, but my thoughts on this fine Bloomsday turn mainly to Finnegans Wake, Joyce’s final masterpiece. This novel – and “novel,” in its original sense of “new” is the right word here – is less a traditional novel with a plot than it is a huge, 628-page language experiment.
