“WHEN YOU WET the bed first it is warm then it gets cold.” It may be hard to believe that the man who wrote that sentence—from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)—also wrote Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939), two of the most infamously “difficult” works in the English language. James Joyce (d. 1941) was born in Dublin in 1882, and his middle-class, Catholic community would later inspire fiction like Dubliners (1914), the short-story collection that he called “a chapter of the moral history of my country.” From the concise realism of Dubliners, Joyce’s fiction moved toward experimental uses of language and stream-of-consciousness narration. Joyce’s dense wordplay reaches a peak in Finnegans Wake, a work intended to be read aloud. If you’re up for “a rhubarbarous maundarin yellagreen funkleblue windigut diodying” James Joyce quiz, read on!
1. What Joycean “holiday” do book lovers celebrate on June 16?
2. What Christian term did Joyce borrow to describe a “sudden spiritual moment” when “the soul of the commonest object” leaps out?
3. What is the name of Joyce’s main character in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and the posthumously published fragment Stephen Hero?
4. What famed psychiatrist wrote to Joyce, “Your Ulysses has presented the world such an upsetting psychological problem, that repeatedly I have been called in as a supposed authority on psychological matters”?
ANSWERS
1. In Dublin and many other cities June 16 is Bloomsday, named for the Ulysses character Leopold Bloom, and the day on which the entire book is set.
2. Epiphany.
3. Stephen Dedalus, inspired by the labyrinth builder of Greek myth.
4. Carl Jung. Joyce’s daughter, Lucia, was treated by Jung.