Madam, - When June 16th 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 first chapter in the novel 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. Today, the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, in an ironic twist Joyce would have enjoyed, bears the name Hain. Haines's reply to Dedalus might well be spoken by the Secretary of State today: "I can quite understand that. . .an Irish man 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 the question: Have we read ourselves? - Yours, etc,
GEARÓID COLEMAN, Ballintree Square, Dublin 15.