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A 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.
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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)
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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.
