The Jakarta Post
Please Update your browser
Your browser is out of date, and may not be compatible with our website. A list of the most popular web browsers can be found below.
Just click on the icons to get to the download page.
Popular Reads
Top Results
No results found. Please check your search term and try again
Can't find what you're looking for?
View all search results
Popular Reads
Top Results
No results found. Please check your search term and try again
Can't find what you're looking for?
View all search resultsA trip through old Dublin, in Jakarta
What is it? says John Wyse. —A nation? says Bloom. A nation is the same people living in the same place. —By God, then, says Ned, laughing, if that’s so I’m a nation for I’m living in the same place for the past five years.
Change text size
Gift Premium Articles
to Anyone
Share the best of The Jakarta Post with friends, family, or colleagues. As a subscriber, you can gift 3 to 5 articles each month that anyone can read—no subscription needed!
Puteri Indonesia 2022 Laksmi DeNeefe Suardana holds a copy of James Joyce’s Dubliners, provided by sponsor Periplus Bookstore, after her reading of excerpts from Joyce’s Ulysses at the Embassy of Ireland’s Bloomsday literary reception at the World Trade Centre, Central Jakarta, on June 14. (JP/Michael Hegarty)
W
hat is it? says John Wyse. —A nation? says Bloom. A nation is the same people living in the same place. —By God, then, says Ned, laughing, if that’s so, I’m a nation for I’m living in the same place for the past five years.
The quotation is from one of the most memorable scenes in James Joyce’s masterpiece Ulysses. We are in Barney Kiernan’s pub in Dublin on June 16, 1904 and “the Citizen”, a grandiloquent, puffed-up, super patriot, is holding court at the bar.
As he lists the glories of Ireland’s past, including the somewhat unlikely Irish heroes of Charlemagne and Christopher Columbus, it is clear that the target of his bombast is Leopold Bloom. Bloom is a Dublin-born Jew, and therefore in the eyes of the Citizen, probably not a real Irishman at all.
The scene is redolent of its time and place, early 20th century Ireland. A society riven by questions of nationalism and ethnicity, that would later explode in a decade of political turbulence and violence, and which led eventually to the creation of an independent Ireland.
More from The Weekender
Siapa Anda? Mengapa Anda?
What begins as a small grammatical curiosity becomes a larger question about language, culture and the way we understand ourselves in relation to others - and, ultimately, about what we risk losing in a world increasingly impatient with reflection, ambiguity and the humanities.
A passport to the kingdom of the sick
A breast cancer diagnosis, a journey to the kingdom of the sick and a determination to describe what lies there without metaphor, euphemism or the word “fight.”
The weight of time
Richard Mille’s newest ultralight timepiece pares down haute horlogerie to its mechanical necessities, proving that sophistication often comes from knowing what to leave out.
