History was a nightmare he wanted to escape, but Stephen Dedalus still made a pretty good job of decoding it. Not so those unfortunate senior certificate students to whom the very act of doing the history exam brought finger cramps and low blood sugar for want of the lunch their friends were already munching.
History is very nearly history, as Bart Simpson might put it. If the trend continues it will become as rarefied a subject choice as Greek.
Generations of Irish people were drowned by too much of the stuff. Now they hardly risk enough of it to get their feet wet.
Conspiracy theorists may suspect this as a piece of social engineering: it could turn out quite neatly for the powers-that-be or will-be.
No more arguing about 1916, the Plantation, the Great Hunger or de Valera's legacy to the Irish State.
No rows about King Billy, Brian Boru and that heathen Dane who so criminally slew him in a tent at Clontarf, of all places.
John Bruton's government's decision to start changing history's subject status might have alerted some fans to the dangers now being exposed in the class of 2000 as poor results and even less interest.
History at Senior Cert level, particularly Ordinary Level, is too hard, too long, and therefore points-poor.
Why bother unless you harbour ambitions of being a contestant on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? Better change that to your local pub quiz.
Unless things are changed, and fast, the history we consume in the future will be packaged as entertainment, born of biopics or short biographies and delivered to us shorn of its radical edge.
Programmes will favour controversy over hard fact. Celebrity history will rule.
We will wonder about the sex lives of saints and scholars, instead of looking at their lifetime's work. (Yes, it can be interesting, but only as footnotes to the main event).
Whoever the spin doctors place in the history books will be the next heroes.
And we will believe them, uncritical and unknowing as we seem set to be.
Our research data will consist of visiting interpretative centres on wet weekends and holidays, wondering why a pile of shale or a heap of musty old papers could ever have motivated the passions history analyses - anger, jealousy, the lust for power.
The story of the winners will be cast in stone.
Retro will pass for history. We'll hear Abba or Morrissey and think we are having one of Hegel's historical moments.
Our imaginations will be formed by the restless patter of easy information scraps sinking into wet sand. No context, no edge, therefore no understanding.
Inevitably we'll be condemned to repeat ourselves.
If the trend continues we just won't have a clue. We'll forget the stuff that made us, from the mother's mothers to the mothers' mothers' mothers, as well as the father's fathers and their fathers' fathers, and so on.
The kind of tracings Irish people have always used to source each other, and everyone else, will cease for want of simple facts.
I confess my vested interest in the history debate. The girls' school I changed to for senior cycle didn't do history, the way it didn't do honours maths. I took my chances and signed up at the tech, not for intellectually upright reasons but because it meant I could go out and date on Tuesday nights. My plan was nearly scuppered because my parents found me lurking with a boy when I should have been at night class and punished me by confiscating my desert boots, a form of shoe favoured aeons ago.
They assumed I'd return forthwith to classes: I did not, or only occasionally.
When the exam loomed, I borrowed the class notes, read furiously but selectively until dawn, and passed.
I don't remember who the boy was but, tinged by that sense of romance and adventure, the love of history lasts.
MICHAEL Woods might think radically. The history exam at Ordinary Level resembles a hostile interrogation requiring you to answer with a mnemonic skill which burns brain cells so fast you are almost guaranteed never to remember half those facts again.
How can dates and places measure a historical mind?
The purpose, surely, is analysis and the kind of curiosity that detectives share.
There is too much ground to be covered, given the expanded nature of historical commentary and the ever-increasing proliferation of historical fact.
Not enough focus to enable students to get inside one or two historical phases.
Dates, as I discovered, are an integral part of studying history. But they don't yield enough insight to get you results when it counts.
The history Joyce rejected was one formed partly by the nets of nationality and religion. Although the storyline's political emphasis changed somewhat later in the 20th century, the history he pilloried never stopped pushing the story of the few.
Dramatists such as Brian Friel and Frank McGuinness alert us to the powerful insights yielded by an imaginative understanding of how power constructs and corrupts whole communities.
Without that knowledge, the education system might as well be sponsoring a nation of drones.