Quoiquoiquoiquoiquoiquoiquoiq!

A hundred and eight years ago this Saturday, at least on the pages of “Ulysses,” Leopold Bloom wandered the streets of Dublin. For more than the past thirty years, devotees of Joyce’s great work have gathered for “Bloomsday on Broadway,” at Symphony Space, to mark his journey. In the past, those folks have included Stephen Colbert, Alec Baldwin, Ira Glass, and the great Irish actress Fionnula Flanagan. This year, the lineup includes Flanagan, David Margulies, Paul Hecht, Fritz Weaver, KT Sullivan, and the performance artist Adam Harvey.

The focus of this year’s “Bloomsday on Broadway” is the “Sirens” episode, which is loaded with music. Joyce was a singer as well as a writer (a tenor, he won a bronze medal at Feis Ceoil the same year that Bloom took his gambol) and he pushed language in many directions, including toward the sonic. The section opens with series of phrases more akin to music than to prose:

Bronze by gold heard the hoofirons, steelyringing imperthnthn thnthnthn. Chips, picking chips off rocky thumbnail, chips. Horrid!
And gold flushed more.
A husky fifenote blew.
Blew. Blue bloom is on the
Gold pinnacled hair.
A jumping rose on satiny breast of satin, rose of Castile.
Trilling, trilling: Idolores.
Peep! Who’s in the… peepofgold?
Tink cried to bronze in pity.
And a call, pure, long and throbbing. Longindying call.
Decoy. Soft word. But look! The bright stars fade. O rose!
Notes chirruping answer. Castile. The morn is breaking.
Jingle jingle jaunted jingling.
Coin rang. Clock clacked.
Avowal. Sonnez. I could. Rebound of garter. Not leave thee. Smack. La cloche! Thigh smack. Avowal. Warm. Sweetheart, goodbye!
Jingle. Bloo.

And so on. Harvey, the performance artist, will render those initial lines onstage, at Symphony Space. He’s something of an expert regarding Joyce, having spent the past few decades devoted to “Finnegans Wake,” and had this to say about what he has planned for “Sirens”: “Take it from someone who knows—this is a hard chapter to perform. Joyce himself referred to it as the textual equivalent of a fugue, and I think that’s entirely accurate. Any baroque musician will tell you that the fugue is perhaps the most intricate and complicated musical form in existence, and ‘Sirens’ is an absolute tour de force of interwoven themes, motifs, and interior monologues. The section that’s been assigned to me—the opening two pages—are highly abstract even by ‘Finnegans Wake’ standards.

Harvey continued, “But in reality, I’ve got it comparatively easy—what I’ll be performing is but the smallest fraction of this chapter. The bulk of the load is going be shouldered by Paul Hecht and David Margulies, who are reading the narration and Leopold Bloom, respectively. The word that comes to mind here is ‘herculean,’ but I’m not the least bit worried. These guys have been doing Bloomsday readings a lot longer than I have.”

The Symphony Space event on Saturday will be streamed live from their site, in case you’re not in New York City. And, to get ready, here’s Harvey in a clip he prepared for us from a recent “Finnegans Wake” performance.

And here’s Harvey explaining what is going on in this passage:

The “Finnegans Wake” passage I chose for the video occurs at the final two pages of chapter seven, commonly referred to as “Shem the Penman.” It is a response to a long and detailed diatribe, which constitutes the chapter’s previous twenty-five pages. Hard to tell for certain whether the diatribe is self-excoriation or the complaints and criticisms of a rival, but this is a deliberate ambiguity on the author’s part—in Joyce’s dreamscape of the subconscious mind, all dialogues are potentially internal to a single protagonist. Whether internal or external, the mind-set here is of the artist seeking reconciliation. The line “My fault, his fault, a kingship through a fault” seamlessly blends surrender (the Confiteor—“mea culpa”) with its opposite: defiance (Richard III—“kingdom for a horse”). The struggle of this monologue, then, is between these two poles. The choice is made to surrender, but not to an opponent. Instead, arms are laid before the great mother, embodied famously in the person of Anna Livia Plurabelle: the waters of Anna Liffey, which bring nourishment to the city of Dublin while simultaneously carrying its filth out to sea. “Quoiquoiquoiquoiquoiquoiquoiq!” then, is the onomatopoetic resolution to this conflict—something between baptism and drowning.