It was no surprise that a man I met at the Good Friday Agreement anniversary dinner in Queen’s University the other night had a copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses on his person.
That would be a common enough occurrence in academic circles. The revelation in this case, however, was that he had the entire text printed on a coin, held in the palm of his hand.
Not just any coin, it’s true. This was one of the special €10 models minted back in 2013 and also featuring a piece of Joycean text, infamously complete with typo.
Below the official misquotation, it carries a portrait of the author wearing his trademark round-rim glasses. And it was in Joyce’s left lens, my fellow dinner guest assured me, that Ulysses had been printed in full. Not having brought a high-powered microscope to dinner, I had to take his word for it.
The Dromcollogher cinema fire disaster – Frank McNally on a fateful day in 1926
The spirit of 1965 – Kevin Rafter on Ireland’s first television election
Grief and remembrance – Ronan McGreevy on Dublin’s Armistice Day in 1924
The Night Mayor – Oliver O’Hanlon on Jimmy Walker, New York’s colourful political kingpin
The man with the coin was Michael J Naughton, a professor of physics at Boston College and a specialist in very small things, including – I quote from his web page – “nanoscale devices for biochemical sensing and neural optrode interfaces”.
He also likes to read Joyce. And the idea of combining the day-job with his literary interests came to him back in 2014 when, after leaving a physics conference at BC one day, he met friends from the humanities side of the college who were attending a Joycean-themed conference of their own.
Before you could say “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”, Naughton had crossed the gulf that traditionally separates his world and theirs. After that, one thing led to another. Soon he was creating a nano-edition of Dubliners, then the focus of centenary celebrations.
He and a graduate named Fan Ye first experimented on silicon wafers, before progressing to an Irish florin, the old two-shilling coin.
The technique involved giving the coin a polymer coating, printing on that with an electron beam, and finally applying a chemical solvent, until the text of Dubliners was etched on the florin in the small space between the word “Éire” and the harp.
But a perfect technique deserved a perfect canvas. It found one in the commemorative Joyce coin, given to Naughton by BC English professor (and Mullingar man) Joe Nugent. So it was that first Dubliners was imprinted on the Joycean lens; then, on a second coin, Ulysses.
Staring with wonder into the miniaturised latter – to the naked eye, the 265,000 words of Joyce’s epic were a tiny, square blur – I felt like the nameless narrator of another classic novel: Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman.
Written in 1940, that masterpiece of comic weirdness was partly inspired by the mind-blowing ideas emerging from the world of physics in those years, including Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. But via the person of Policeman MacCruiskeen, it also features an amateur nanotechnologist, far ahead of his time.
In one scene, he shows the hero an ornate miniature sea-faring chest he has made, admirable in every detail. Then he produces from within it another chest, identical but smaller. And so on until, first, the tools used to open them, then the chests themselves, become invisible, at which point MacCruiskeen hands the unnerved narrator a magnifying glass:
“When I saw the table it was bare only for the twenty-nine chest articles but through the agency of the glass I was in a position to report that he had two more out beside the last ones, the smallest of all being nearly half a size smaller than ordinary invisibility. I gave him back the glass instrument and took to the chair without a word. In order to reassure myself and make a loud human noise I whistled The Corncrake Plays the Bagpipes.”
Well, it need hardly be added that the Boston College nanoscientist is a fan of Flann O’Brien too, and as with Joyce, his devotion has gone beyond mere reading the books.
Like many Naughtons in the US, Michael J has roots in Roscommon. Visiting them some time ago and standing on the right bank of the Shannon, he found himself gazing out upon the small, river island of Snamh Dá Éan.
This is mentioned in the history annals as long ago as 807AD. It is also supposedly the point where St Patrick crossed the Shannon. But it was immortalised in modern literature by the same Flann O’Brien, via his debut novel At Swim-two-birds.
Most Flannoraks, including the diarist, have visited it only on the page. Naughton was determined to go there in person. Nanoscience was of no help, for once. Instead, he got a boat over and imprinted himself on the island in full.