Why Reading Ulysses for 24 Hours Matters Perspectives 4

AVO REID ‘26 (HE/HIM)

In 1992, twelve Davidson students conducted the first 24-hour reading of Ulysses, James Joyce’s notoriously dense and sometimes inexpressibly boring tome about a guy walking around Dublin while waiting for his wife to cheat on him. The book is infamous for remaining unfinished. Despite its censorship and serial publication, Joyce responded to razing reviews and accusations of obscenity (for which the book was put on trial by the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, which was somehow real) by stating it was obvious his critics hasn’t finished his book. And so, on June 16th, all over the world, folks choose to eat the elephant in one bite and read the entirety of Ulysses in 24 hours, straight through, experiencing Leopold Bloom’s 24-hour odyssey in real time, on the day the novel is supposed to have taken place. Davidson transposes the date to mid-February. That first reading drew 42 guest readers and two television crews from Charlotte, there to cover the obvious child abuse occurring at their neighborly liberal arts college, exceeded the 24-hour target by twelve hours, and sent one person to the hospital.

The reading has been conducted intermittently in the years since, with varying degrees of participation and enthusiasm from both students and guests. This year, three students from Dr. Zoran Kuzmanovich’s class on James Joyce participated. From 5:32 on a Friday afternoon to 8:45 on a Saturday night I sat, laid, splayed and curled up in Phi Hall and read Ulysses out loud, alternating every page. We finished in 27 hours and 23 minutes. After I tell people about it, in response to questions about my weekend or why I look like I’ve been embalmed, I’m usually asked why I would want to for Bloom. This sounded dodgy to me at first. I didn’t account for the sleep deprivation. Episode 10, which we reached around one in the morning, features different snapshots of characters across Dublin with little to no notice that the viewpoint is moving from one charac - comes the actualization of his hallucinations—character appear out of nowhere; his hallucinations bully him, flirt with him, flirt with him, and say some of the most obscene things I have ever read in my life. Is it exactly the kind of thing to read when you have not slept in 24 hours. In the end it did feel like we had lived a day with this guy. The last episode is an uninterrupted stream-of-consciousness monologue from the perspective of Bloom’s wife. Exhausted and hallucinatory, we were rapt. do something like that to myself. I’m not entirely sure I know, but having done it, I take some cracks at its redeeming qualities.

First: I can, if circumstances necessitate, make the argument that I should be exempted from doing homework for my English class for the next three weeks. At the outset of the class it was specified that we should expect to do about 10 hours of homework per week. I have more or less completed that requirement three times over.

Second: the supposed appeal of the 24-hour reading is experiencing the book in real time; to be so pulled into the work the day passes much like it does ter to another. Bleary-eyed, lingeringly hungry and hoarse from reading aloud, the switches seemed totally natural, consistent with dream logic. Around five in the morning you’re floating in and out of wakefulness; submerged in that kind of half-sleep where your dreams start in vivid 4k the moment your eyes flutter shut. The book happens right in front of you. At around 11 on Saturday morning, we reached Circe , the longest episode which accounts for around a quarter of the novel. It is structured like a play, and we reached it delirious and impressionable. It starts off usual enough, Bloom talking to his friends, you start to get tired again and zone out. Then it be -