Bloomsday and the English Major

This Friday, June 16, I’ll celebrate Bloomsday, the fictional day in Dublin that unfolds throughout James Joyce’s famous novel, Ulysses.

I’ve written about Bloomsday before (see last year’s post, Breakfast on Bloomsday). Joyce’s Ulysses is one of the great novels in the English language. Right up there with Shakespeare. It’s a challenge to read but loved worldwide for its colour, language, humour, poetry and grim beauty.

Much as I love the novel and look forward every year to raising a glass of Guinness to Mr. Joyce on Bloomsday, the fact is: almost no one knows of the novel. Or some know and have tried to read it but never finished. And some just never bothered!

I was fortunate to study it at university. Once it clicked, I was hooked and re-read it every few years. There are always new layers to discover. It’s timeless.

I was a teenage English Major

That’s because I’m an English Major. Or was one at university.

And almost no one is an English Major anymore, according to a March 2023 article in the New Yorker, “The End of the English Major”.

At one US university, English majors fell from 953 in 2012 to 578 in 2019, just before the pandemic. An alarming drop in such a short time, especially considering the university is one of the leading liberal arts colleges in the country (Arizona State University).

In 2018, another university considered eliminating 13 Majors programs, including English, History and Philosophy. It became economically unfeasible to offer them, given the declining enrollments.

In their place, students have been flocking to STEM programs — a common acronym for science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

Enrolling in university when I started in the 1970s, was a grand delay tactic; a liberal arts idyll, removed from the pressures of the broader world … lying under a tree reading Joseph Conrad, W.B. Yeats and Virginia Woolf. Not to mention Joyce and Ulysses.

A liberal arts idyll

I had no idea about my career, and welcomed the chance to dabble in many topics. It was a chance to put off becoming an adult.

I was so lucky! I remember walking down the Main Mall at UBC, past the Astronomy, Seismology, Agriculture, Biology buildings and feeling thrilled. The world was my oyster! There was so much time!

I gravitated toward the Buchanan complex at UBC, the domain of Arts majors, and the classroom of a gifted instructor who immersed me in the poetry of John Keats, William Shakespeare and Alexandr Solzhenitsyn.

I became an unapologetic English Major; lived in a dream world, though I knew there was peril ahead when I was finished my degree and had to enter the working world for real.

Heady days

Tuition in those days was between $400 and $700 per year. I could earn that and living expenses at a summer job. I faced no debt when I finished in 1978. In my heady days working on the student newspaper, we were incensed that we had to pay tuition.

On another note, a glass of beer cost 65 cents at The Pit, the student pub. When it rose to 75 cents, we were ready to revolt!

If tuition today is $6,000 per year, a four-year degree program will add up quickly (along with books, rent and food, transportation, etc). While a debt of $40,000 may not seem that high, it might be out of reach for students who’ve depended on loans to pay for their degrees.

And how will those loans be repaid when all you’ve got to show is a Bachelor of Arts in English?

English Majors were always a dime-a-dozen — even in those days — and no one expected to quickly turn their BA in English into an executive salary. A few friends with humanities backgrounds pursued careers in academia, philosophy and history. But most ended up driving cabs for a few years, or working in finance or business.

A long way home

It took me a long time to find my way. I landed a few writing jobs, freelancing and writing for newspapers and magazines. When the news industry faltered in the 1980s, I went “to the dark side” and worked in public relations. My last job before “retiring” was teaching English as a second language.

The New Yorker article is long and fascinating. Still, it doesn’t convey the satisfaction I feel (and many others) in having been touched by great literature through study and careful reading. The enduring admiration for the ability of language to convey the spectrum emotion, insight, humour, tragedy. The light-filled world and its unsavoury, violent underpinnings.

The inventiveness and courage of a writer like James Joyce who spent seven years writing Ulysses, taking us inside one day (June 16, 1904) in Dublin, inside his exquisite, simple characters and making their lives mythic, like the classical heroes of Greek mythology, like Ulysses himself.

O Molly, O the sea!

The novel ends with an ecstatic soliloquy by the character Molly Bloom, the wife of our main character, Leopold Bloom. It’s a stream of consciousness, a life-affirming reverie of the life force that flows through us all in high moments:

O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and the pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

Final lines from Ulysses by James Joyce

Happy Bloomsday!

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