Pa. state Sen. Nikil Saval plans to finally read ‘Ulysses’ on Bloomsday

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This weekend, the Rosenbach Library and Museum is hosting its annual marathon reading of James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” an event held every year on June 16, or Bloomsday, the calendar day experienced by Leopold Bloom during the entirety of the novel. The Rosenbach owns Joyce’s original manuscript for the book.

One reader will be Pennsylvania state Senator Nikil Saval, a fan of the book who somehow has managed to miss the event twice before. He hopes the third time will be a charm.

“It is a book that lends itself quite well to this kind of presentation and celebration,” he said. “It’s a book that is so voice-y and so full of aural delights.”

Saval described the book as “monumental, musical, bawdy, endlessly contemporary, Shakespearean, a deeply profound book.” He’s looking forward to reciting his assigned passage from the Lystergonians section in which Leopold Bloom has lunch and reflects on food and excrement.

“This might be the best one,” he said. “They’re all good, but this one is punny. It’s gross. It’s like, yeah, it’s great.”

Full disclosure: this reporter will also be participating in the reading of “Ulysses.” I have been assigned a passage from the Lotus Eaters section, in which Bloom considers a public bath and includes — true to Joycean bawdiness — a colorful description of his own limp penis.

Saval agreed to read a passage from the book two years ago but contracted the COVID-19 virus. Last year, he again signed up but got stuck in traffic during a severe storm and got there too late. He nevertheless arrived at the reading inside the Trinity Center for Urban Life and asked the organizers if he could make impromptu remarks about his enthusiasm for the book.

He opened with apologies for being an elected official.

“They were gracious enough to let me wish everyone a happy Bloomsday after I did a very politician-like thing and missed my reading time,” he told the audience in 2022.

Since well before he became a state senator three years ago, Saval has been a lover of books. He was a senior editor of n+1, a semi-annual intellectual journal of literature and politics, and regularly wrote for the New Yorker magazine about architecture and design.

His introduction to “Ulysses” came as a graduate student at Columbia University when he was struck by both its modernist rigor and sly humor. He later earned a doctorate in English literature from Stanford University.

“Whereas my whole life was consumed by writing and literature before, now it’s only a part of it,” he said while sipping an iced coffee at Shot Tower in South Philly.

“I don’t know that I inhabit the state senator role fully comfortably. I hope that stays true,” Saval said. “It’s a weird job. I love the job a lot, but I don’t know that it benefits to always feel at home.”

It’s been a weird but not unusual few days for Saval. Last Friday he joined about 1,000 students, faculty, and alumni of the University of the Arts to decry the sudden closure of their school.

“I stand with you as a cultural worker, as someone who works in the arts,” Saval told them through a megaphone. “There is no place I could feel more at home right now.”

Then on Wednesday, he was arrested in the street for joining unionized Aramark workers protesting their employer, an event much in line with his progressive politics and focus on labor and housing.

It’s rare for the quieter pleasures of literature to play an outsized role in the work of a freshman state senator, particularly one also raising two young children aged 3 and 5. “I read a lot more children’s books these days,” Saval said. When asked about the possibility of crafting policy for the arts sector at the state level, Saval was careful not to give it lip service. For arts funding legislation to work, he said, it needs to be taken seriously by a broad swath of the Commonwealth.

“It would take a campaign. I do think about it, but it’s not something you can just assert or take casually,” Saval said. “By comparison with several other states, we are much more parsimonious in arts funding. So it would take a real effort, which I think the arts deserve, but we would need the work of a real Commonwealth-wide campaign.”

Saval’s appearance at the Bloomsday festival, first and foremost, will be as a fan of the book. But he will not completely pause his role as a state senator, which has been shaped by the pleasure he takes in literature.

“Literature is what helps us to imagine how to be human, what it means to imagine possibilities and future projects,” he said. “You can’t have politics that is just focused on the immediate and what needs to be done in the present moment. You need a vision. We need a society that can survive and sustain itself, and can sustain a great literary culture.”

The Bloomsday celebration, including the marathon recitation of “Ulysses” by dozens of readers, takes place from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. on the 2000 block of Delancey Street in Rittenhouse Square, outside the Rosenbach Library and Museum. Saval’s section is expected to occur sometime around 1:30 p.m.