Precisely because of its complexity and also its radical linguistic and content experimentalism, the Joyce novel it had a rocky road before achieving universal acclaim. She had it particularly in her country, Ireland, perhaps so absorbed by its problems and conflicts that it did not fully realize that it had given birth to one of the greatest literary geniuses of the twentieth century.
Undoubtedly Joyce was far ahead for a society with strongly traditionalist and even archaic veins like the contemporary Ireland of Ulysses. Undoubtedly the cosmopolitan, uninhibited, open and future-oriented Ireland that emerges from Joyce's novel, and as Ireland is today, was not the nation of the first twenty years of the twentieth century still under the hated British rule and stubbornly resolved to become a free republic.
However, the relationship between Ireland and Joyce, the latter truly a European citizen at ease anywhere, deserves an investigation that the Irish themselves are carrying out with sincere commitment.
We offer you a brief in this regard speech by Jude Webber, Irish correspondent of the “Financial Times”.
A decade of centenarians for Ireland
For James Joyce's literary alter ego, history could be the nightmare he's trying to escape. For many of us, that nightmare may be reading Ulysses itself.
Notorious for the impenetrability of certain parts, the Irish classic turned 100 on 2 February, just as Ireland enters the final year of its decade of centenarians – an ongoing commemoration of the events between 1912 and 1922 that were crucial to its history in the same way that Ulysses proved to be a crucial work for the world literature.
So if ever there was a time to talk about what is Ireland's least read book, now might be the time. Indeed, Paschal Donohoe, the Irish finance minister and bibliophile, said that in 2021 the Ulysses was his “big Covid project”: he has finally found “the courage to take it in hand and start digging into the extraordinary world” it contains.
A guide to reading Ulysses
On the occasion of the centenary of the Anglo-Irish treaty of 1922 with which the British handed over quasi-independence to the provisional government - celebrated in a exhibit at Dublin Castle – certainly some Irishman took the still untouched volume of Ulysses out of the shelf, published in Paris in 1922 a few weeks before the treaty itself.
A reading guide came from Dan Mulhall, the ambassador of Ireland to the United States, who has just released Ulysses: A Reader's Odyssey. Mulhall proposes a pragmatic approach: if some parts of the book prove too tough, just skip them.
Mulhall's work also offers a compelling reason to reckon with the novel: “Ulysses is an odyssey across the English language…it's an odyssey of character…but it's also an odyssey across the world in the early 20th century. century,” he said at the book's online launch. “And it so happens – she added – that the themes of the novel are once again current 100 years after the publication of the book”.
Ulysses, loosely modeled on Homer's epic tale of Ulysses' return home after the Trojan War, takes place in a single day in Dublin - June 16, 1904 - and Mulhall sees in it the representation of "a society at the moment of change". Ireland indeed.
Joyce, the expatriate
Joyce, however, wrote the novel as an expatriate in Trieste, in the then Austro-Hungarian Empire, as well as in Zurich and Paris. He wrote it while raging there First World War and in the immediate turbulent post-war period.
Ireland, at that time, was immersed in profound upheaval: the Dublin lockout of 1913-14, a huge and crucial industrial dispute, the Easter Rising of 1916, a bloody armed rebellion against British rule which led to the Proclamation of the Irish Republic, the War of Independence of 1919-21, the Partition of Ireland and the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1922.
Just over two weeks after Ulysses was published, the British handed over Dublin Castle to Nationalist leader Michael Collins. 1922 was also the year in which civil war broke out between supporters and opponents of the treaty and the year of the founding of the Irish Free State.
Joyce lighting
Séamus Cannon, president of the Friends of Joyce Tower Society (based in the 19th-century fort just south of Dublin where Joyce lived for a week in 1904 and where Ulysses opens), says the Civil War years “not I'm a centenarian that people feel comfortable with. So it's nice to have Joyce to commemorate."
Just the Sinn Féin, the nationalist party founded in 1905 by Anglo-Irish treaty negotiator Arthur Griffith (peeped in Ulysses), is solidifying its position as the most popular party north and south of the border. It is expected to prevail at Northern Irish elections of May 2022 and also in the Irish Republic elections to be held in 2025.
Joyce, Cannon hypothesizes, "would have considered himself an Irish nationalist, but not a violent one" and would also have poked fun at the revival of the Irish language. In Ulysses he makes a character speak Irish for the one and only reason that the hated English do not understand him.
Joyce may, too, have enjoyed the satirical novelist's attempt Flann O'Brien to translate Ulysses into Irish, which O'Brien did not do, but others actually did. The writer, who is one of the greatest exponents of Irish literature today, motivated this idea as follows: "I said to myself: if they don't read it in English, I will put them in a position to be able to boast that they haven't even read it in Irish". So difficult is Joyce's legacy for the Irish.
From: Jude Webber James Joyce enlivens Ireland's uncomfortable centenaries, “The Financial Times”, January 27, 2022
