In the land of the blind

On the way in today I was re-reading the Cyclops chapter of Ulysses, the chapter told in the first person by a character identified only as I, in which Bloom, the main character, an Irish Jew, walks into a bar and after a lengthy political discussion (man those Irish can talk up a storm, and talk about the colorful verbiage...) is eventually chased down the street by a bellicose drunken racist nationalistic windbag known only as "the citizen" after Bloom suggests that not only was Jesus and all of his family Jewish, but his Father in Heaven was as well. Bloom just escapes before being beaned by a biscuitbox that the citizen tosses after him down the street.

If Joyce was writing the same scene in America today, the citizen of course would be known as "the patriot", and there is only the surface language to separate his over-the-top racism, nationalism and religious bigotry from that of Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity and Co. dominating the public face of the right in our country right now. Which was exactly Joyce’s point. Joyce, who had so little tolerance for nationalism that he deliberately chose to become a permanent exile as an adult, a man without a country, clearly had nothing but contempt for bigotry of any stripe (which was why he deliberately made his main character an explicit outsider). His main literary device in writing the chapter is to alternate the local extremely colorful Dublin patois of the first-person "I" with paragraphs employing the language of legal documents, mythology, children’s books, society pages, and on and on, while spewing out endless lists of names of figures both fictional and historical throughout history, as if to say (among other things), regardless of the costume, this scene occurs over and over again in some fashion or another in every society, in every age, over and over again. Which was one reason, among many, I loved the book as much as I did – this constant revelation that Joyce is playing out, that then is now, that history in many ways just plays itself out the same way over and over again in different costumes. And I can right now hear the poor man turning in his grave at this huge act of literary reductionism...