Read the national temperature
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.”
That is precisely what is achieved in Ulysses. Reading the book is challenging, but infinitely rewarding. It is absolutely necessary to read it in conjunction with Homer’s Odyssey.
The first chapter changed my perception of Irish history forever. When an old lady arrives to deliver milk to the students in the Martello Tower, Haines, the Englishman, tries to practise his Irish with her.
The old lady does not understand, and asks him if he is speaking French.
She replies: “I’m ashamed I don’t speak the language myself. I’m told it’s a grand language by them that knows.”
Today, 101 years on, Irish is an official language in the EU. Later, Stephen Dedalus proclaims to Haines: “I serve two masters, an English and an Italian... the imperial British state... and the Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church.”
These lines capture the sense of cultural deprivation and religio-political domination that made up the Irish psyche until very recently.
One hundred and one years on, the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, in an ironic twist Joyce would have enjoyed, bears the name Haine (French for hate).
Haines’ reply to Dedalus might well be spoken by the secretary of state today: “I can quite understand that... an Irishman must think like that, I dare say. We feel in England that we have treated you rather unfairly. It seems history is to blame.” Indeed, and the nightmare of history from which Stephen is trying to awake still overshadows that troubled province.
Ulysses is an attempt to take the temperature of a nation. Towering in scope, infinite in suggestion, it still speaks to us across the years, asking us this question: have we read ourselves?
Gearóid Coleman
1 Ballintree Square
Tyrrelstown
Dublin 15
