Read the national temperature

WHEN Bloomsday (June 16) comes round every year, our nation’s collective guilt resurfaces. The ineluctable question is raised again: have you read Ulysses?

Of course, most people haven’t. The prevailing excuse is that it is simply too hard. Ulysses is not only an odyssey of two central protagonists’ minds, it is also an odyssey of the collective consciousness of the nation.

The last lines of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man tell us how Joyce intends to “forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.”