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Actors celebrate the 100th anniversary of the publication of Irish author James Joyce's “Ulysses” on Bloomsday by reciting a scene from the Hades episode at Paddy Dignam's funeral, at Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin, Ireland, 16 June 2022. CLODAGH KILCOYNE/Reuters
Linda Bessner is a Montreal-based writer.
On June 16, 1904, Irish author James Joyce, then 22, went on his first date with 20-year-old Nora Barnacle. At first glance, she thought he was a Swedish sailor. “But when he began to talk, well,” Barnacle later wrote, “I soon saw that he was just an ordinary man in a Dublin jacket chatting up a country girl.” More than a century later, literature lovers around the world still commemorate this romantic encounter on Bloomsday, a day to celebrate James Joyce's Ulysses, a 732-page first edition that depicts the events that take place over the course of a single day.
The most extreme form of these celebrations is the marathon reading of the entire novel. A fixture on college campuses and in Irish pubs, in 2013 Bloomsday Relay Readings took place in 15 countries. It began in Auckland, New Zealand, at 8 a.m. local time with a reading in which “a stately, plump Buck Mulligan appeared from the top of a staircase, holding a bowl of foam crossed with a mirror and a razor,” and ended a day and a half later in Boston with a triumphant reading of “Yes, I said yes, I will make it yes.” With breaks for fried kidneys and Bunbury buns, a public reading of the entire novel often takes around 34 hours.
Ulysses is not the only book that attracts this kind of endurance test; Moby Dick has spawned its own marathon reads, as have The Odyssey, Dante's Divine Comedy, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and of course The Book of Mormon. As a nerdy extreme sport, the appeal of this kind of extended reading offers both the hallucinatory high of pushing the limits of the body and the simple sleepover excitement of staying up late. As a way to bond through art, immersing ourselves in extended reading is tantalizing with a sense of inevitable revelation. Spending this much concentrated time in public communion with a work of art forces us to walk away altered.
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People performing Ulysses on Bloomsday. CLODAGH KILCOYNE/Reuters
Sustained readings can be seen as a kind of participatory performance art, evocative of other kinds of art, “happenings,” that turn the passage of time into matter. Traditionally, many art forms are based on the suspension of time: poetry that immortalizes a moment, painting that captures the face of a model who was and will never be seen again. In contrast, sustained works are built from a continuity of time. The contemporary patron saint of sustained art is perhaps the Serbian conceptualist Marina Abramovic, who famously sat completely motionless for a total of three months at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, gazing into the eyes of the person sitting opposite her. To sit still for seven hours a day, Abramovic underwent a training program designed for NASA astronauts. Visitors flocked to the show, people cried, people vomited. “I did very little, but they get a religious experience out of it,” Abramovic told The Guardian. “Art had lost its power, but for a while MoMA was like Lourdes.”
Some people see the starting point of sustained performance art in a very unexpected place: the craze for marathon dance contests at the beginning of the 20th century. As historian Carol Martin described in her 1994 book Dance Marathon: American Cultural Performance in the 1920s and 1930s, the return of the Olympic Games in 1896 sparked a new brinkmanship. Everyone wanted to know how far, how fast, how high and how long the human body could dance. At first, dance records were child's play. In 1923, a couple in Sunderland, England, set a record by dancing for seven hours without stopping. Just a few months later, at the Audubon Ballroom in New York, a dance instructor beat them by a staggering 20 hours.
In the 1920s, these new contests were seen as fun, innocent entertainment. But in the 1930s, the economic crisis of the Great Depression gave dance marathons a darker character. With high unemployment and food and shelter shortages, dance marathons became a sort of comical showcase of American desperation. The contests offered free food (as long as participants kept dancing through the meal), lasted for months, and allowed participants only 15 minutes of sleep per hour. Cots were rolled onto the dance floor so spectators could watch the exhausted contestants collapse. Sleep-deprived dancers became violent, and after a 27-year-old man died of exhaustion, cities began banning dance marathons altogether. The final world record was set in 1933 by a Minneapolis couple who danced continuously for five months straight, for a total of 3,780 hours straight.
It is difficult not to conclude that the pain the couple endured was an essential part of their allure to the spectators. In photos of these contests, the young girl shows a chilling lack of interest, her head thrown back, her mouth open, her partner holding her knees up to prevent them touching the floor (a reason for disqualification). In the front row of the stands, two ladies wearing pearl necklaces and cloche hats look on with looks of dissatisfaction and interest. There is something eerie about the sight of someone pushing themselves to the limits right before their eyes. The spectators' interest in these feats of endurance is tinged with brutality. Our presence elevates the contest to a kind of ritual sacrifice, a larger community transformed by the suffering of a few.
Things have metaphysical implications that distort our perception of time. In our daily lives, time follows certain routines and rules. We wake up, start work at a certain time, and take a lunch break. We generally divide our day into practical times, each with a set purpose. In some ways, this may seem restrictive, but for many of us, it is also a coping mechanism. We may feel scared when faced with the blank canvas of the time between now and our death. In Catholic texts, the personal measure of everyday life is known as “profane time,” and its corollary, “sacred time,” is an eternal time so long that it confuses the human brain. Historically, we have tended to outsource the practice of faith that brings one face to face with eternity to specialized holy men, or spiritual seekers: monks, knights, mystics, seekers of all kinds.
In our TikTok-speed world, anyone who tries to read can feel like a kind of holy fool, no matter how much time they have. “We have the old-fashioned cool language poets, we have the Fluxus people,” the writer Walt John Pierce recently told Interview magazine. “We have the downtown weirdo socialites, the losers, the writers, the prolific writers, the odd writers, the good writers, the bad writers, the idiosyncratic writers, the recluses.” He was preparing for a 52-hour nonstop reading of Gertrude Stein's The Birth of the American People, which took place in New York a month ago, and which featured such losers as New Yorker book critic Merve Emre and short-story master Lydia Davis.
The works that receive the marathon treatment tend to be the kind of books that are classified as “difficult,” like Stein's or Joyce's works. Sometimes this is for emotional or political reasons. Recently, Toronto's Theatre Centre hosted a 24-hour Palestinian poetry reading, and after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission report was released in 2015, a long reading of the synopsis was organized. But marathon readings tend to focus on works that are formally difficult. Personally, I've been bookmarking Ulysses for about 15 years. Reading aloud is, in a way, an exercise in total immersion in a book, and also a way to avoid the arduous task of trying to understand it. The words flow one after the other, carrying the reader with their rhythm and momentum. You may not be able to follow the story exactly, just as someone who has been wearing out their feet for four months in a competition may not be able to dance exactly.
“Only a few dozen of Melville's troubadours remain, many of them semi-conscious, their heads pressed against pillows propped up against the backs of their chairs, or leaning on their lovers' shoulders,” Luke Winkie wrote in Slate about a Moby-Dick marathon earlier this year. “The room was filled with the dry air of a prison cell, but that didn't stop readers from working their way through the tedious parts of Moby-Dick, never to slow down.” Winkie grew discouraged and stopped reading to get some sleep, but when he resumed the next morning, his avid readers were still going strong. “There was a lot of suffering, boredom, and repetition in the ancient world,” one woman told him. “Our ancestors understood that we had to do unpleasant things to reach a certain emotional state in the end. That's what a marathon is to me.”
That said, reading Gertrude Stein's books for 52 hours straight may not completely change a person. In the early 2010s, author Adranand Finn traveled to Japan to meet one of the legendary “marathon monks” of a Buddhist sect who run 1,000 marathons in 1,000 days, visiting mountain shrines along the way to attain enlightenment. When Finn finally met the man who had accomplished this feat, the author expected the monk to share some hard-earned wisdom he'd brought home from the limits of human endurance. But the monk said that the 1,000 marathons had only given him time to think. And then he asked about Princess Diana. “'What do people think?' he asked, leaning forward and looking at me carefully. 'Was it really an accident? I saw a TV show about it, and it seemed like some dark force was at work, suggesting that she didn't just die in an accident. What do you think?'”
At the end of each self-contained episode, we are usually thrown back into our everyday lives, and the revelations from these sharp bursts of experience are hard to grasp. Perhaps rather than expecting to emerge as something different, like a novel's protagonist, those who engage in marathon reading should expect the book itself to change. It is not the work that refines us, but we that refine the work. Our generosity of time thickens an invisible layer of the book's influence; we snip off a slice of our mortal lives and add it to the work of art's total challenge to eternity.
