In the first chapter what impressed itself most upon my mind was the inescapable (ineluctable?) tensions that seem to cause so much grief in the mind of Stephen Dedalus and within that narrow view the same tensions writ large upon the peoples of Erin herself. "I serve two masters," he states. The Church and the Queen... The Ireland we sees is in the same boat and it is a decaying land which never really recovered from the famine of the last century.
It's a sad irony that only character we encounter who speaks Irish is and Englishman, one of two we meet. The young Haines is an earnest scholar who loves Ireland as only a man who rarely travels beyond the Pale can, collecting its sayings and its folklore with all due dillagence but incapable of understanding its people as they exist in his own time. Mr. Deasy is almost easier to cope with but honestly I don't care for either them at all. I thought when the old man said by way of excusing his rudeness that he had rebel blood as well that it was in every way like a man excusing a racist joke or comment with the phrase, "Some of my best friends are black."
The only possible reactions to the absurdity of empire in the years before the Easter Uprising seem to be stark depression or bitter laughter, which rather explains Mulligan. I rather like the aggressively inappropriate Buck Mulligan. Blasphemy seems to role out of him like fog over the Liffey. He has no regard for property or commerce but is generous, at least to Stephen and with regard to possessions he's no longer using. In short, he's a lot of what people hate about the overtly intellectual class and I love him for it.
On a similar note, I will say that in reading Joyce it's rather helpful to have been raised Catholic and to have cultivated a rough but working knowledge of Irish history. I think if either of those were otherwise the lengthy ramble down the strand and through the mind of Kinch wouldn't have been as fun. I didn't know as much about the reality of Ireland in the days after the Parnell and before the Easter Uprising but it's easy to imagine the sentiment of the day standing in stark contrast to the optimism of the British at the turn of the century, lording over fully a third of the earth with seemingly limitless potential for scientific and technological advances.
Really this was fun for me, and I almost feel bad about it. Ulysses isn't Finnegan's Wake, intentionally obscured by a thick layer of brogue, but it is one of the more complained-of books English students slog through from time to time. I therefore expected to struggle a great deal with the language but I found that the sound and sense of it was playful enough to be more like an entertaining riddle and any confusion could usually be sorted out by reading a phrase or two aloud. I hope you're enjoying this as much as I am.
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