 us in his book, Ulysses, A Reader's Odyssey. I'm Brian Weaver and I'm a librarian here at the San Francisco Public Library. I'm joined by my colleagues, Lynn Mace, who will be monitoring the chat and hosting the Q&A portion of this program at the end, and Lisa Weddle, who will be handling our YouTube streaming. While we're waiting for everyone to join us, I wanna take a moment to acknowledge our community and to tell you some things happening here at the library. On behalf of the San Francisco Public Library, we wanna welcome you to the unceded ancestral homeland of the Ramaytush Aloni, who are the original inhabitants of the San Francisco Peninsula. And as the indigenous stewards of this land and in accordance with their traditions, the Ramaytush Aloni have never ceded, lost nor forgotten their responsibilities as the caretakers of this place. As guests, we who reside in their traditional territory that we recognize that we benefit from living and working on their traditional homeland. We wish to pay our respects by acknowledging the ancestors, elders, and relatives of the Ramaytush community and by affirming their rights as first peoples. Our program today is part of two series of events that the San Francisco Public Library is offering, Summer Stride and Blooms Bay. That is not a typo, I will explain momentarily, but first, Summer Stride is the library's annual summer learning, reading, and exploration program for all ages and abilities. From June through August, we promote author talks, reading lists, book giveaways, STEM learning, mindful experiences in nature, workforce development, opportunities for teens, and meaningful connections for all ages for our diverse community. Also, if you read, explore, and learn for 20 hours during Summer Stride, you can pick up a prize at any one of our branches, which is a 2022 Summer Stride library book tote bag free train art by Bay Area Illustrator mini fan. More information about Summer Stride and how to track your 20 hours can be found at sfpl.org slash Summer Stride. I'll post the links in the chat after I finish talking here. And then the other series of events we're offering is Blooms Bay, which is a play on the word Blooms Day, which was yesterday, but Blooms Bay is more than just a day this month and the next, the Consul General of Ireland, San Francisco Public Library, Mechanics Institute, Irish Culture Bay Area, the United Irish Cultural Center and the Irish Studies Program at the University of California, Berkeley, have organized a citywide multi-event celebration in honor of the centenary of the publication of James Joyce's Ulysses. Blooms Bay started on June 1st and continues through July 31st at various locations with activities for all ages. Today is the last Blooms Bay event we're offering at San Francisco Public Library, but tomorrow there will be a celebration and open mic at the United Irish Cultural Center here in San Francisco. And as I mentioned here at the main library, we have two ongoing exhibits, Transcultural Joyce, the reception of James Joyce in World Literature, which is on the third floor of the main library and International Joyce, which is on the sixth floor in our Skylight Gallery. The exhibit Transcultural Joyce, which runs until July 21st, is a display of books in 19 languages by authors inspired by James Joyce. It discusses James Joyce's influence over 100 years on European, Latin American, Middle Eastern and Asian writers. For the exhibit International Joyce, which goes until October 13th, we've partnered with the Consulate General of Ireland to present a small display of the life of James Joyce. This exhibit talks about his life in Ireland, his education, his travels through Europe, and eventual residence in Paris. It also discusses the writing of his books, Dubliners, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and of course, Ulysses and Finnegan's Wait. And lastly, we have Ulysses at 100, a display of the general collections, in the General Collections and Humanities Center here on the third floor of the main library, of some of the many books we have by and about James Joyce. You can read more about the Blooms Bay events and exhibits at the library on our website. I'll post the link to that when I finish talking here. But now for our main event, Daniel Mulhall's Ulysses, A Reader's Odyssey. And before I introduce Ambassador Mulhall, I just want to let you know that the ambassador is going to read from and talk about his book until around 1.45 p.m. We'll have a Q&A with the ambassador from 1.45 to 2 o'clock. If you have questions you'd like to ask him, please put them in the Q&A area. My colleague, Lynn, will be monitoring those questions and will moderate the Q&A session at the end. All right, allow me to introduce Ambassador Daniel Mulhall. Ambassador Mulhall was born in Waterford, Ireland. He has spent more than 40 years in the Irish diplomatic service and is currently Ireland's ambassador to the United States. Having previously served as ambassador in Kuala Lumpur, Berlin, and London. In 1998, he was part of the Irish government's delegation at the negotiations that produced the Good Friday Agreement. Over the years, he has written and lectured extensively on Irish literature, including the writings of James Joyce. Throughout his diplomatic career, he has drawn on literature to help tell Ireland's story internationally and has worked tirelessly to increase the impact and reach of Irish writing around the world. The ambassador's recently published book, Ulysses, A Reader's Odyssey, is, and I'm quoting my colleague, John Smalley here, a warm and highly enjoyable introduction to James Joyce's classic modernist novel, Ulysses. While Joyce's astonishing novel is quite international in its references and appeal, it is also profoundly Irish. As Mulhall observes, no other writer managed or even attempted such a lavishly forensic portrait of Ireland. And that is why, especially for Irish people, reading Ulysses is an invaluable adventure. With his deep knowledge of Irish literature and culture and his lifetime of experience with Irish history and politics, Mulhall is the ideal guide to the novel's Irish settings and characters. I now turn the mic over to our guest, Ambassador Daniel Mulhall. Welcome, Ambassador, thank you for joining us. And thank you very much for the invitation to be here and thank you very much for inviting me and for giving me this opportunity to speak to people about Ulysses on the west coast of the United States. This is, I'm going to call today Zoom's Day because I've spent this morning an hour this morning or more talking to a group of people at the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin and now I'm going so many time zones away from Ireland to speak with people in San Francisco. So what I want to do is I want to speak about five odysseys because I see Ulysses, of course, it's based on Homer's odyssey so it's appropriate to think of it in terms of odysses. But I think of five different odysseys. The odyssey, my own personal odyssey with the book, the reader's odyssey with the book, the odyssey of language, the odyssey of character, and the odyssey of what I call the ways of the world. I'll explain all of those things in sequence. First of all, my personal odyssey, it didn't start, we don't consume Ulysses with our mother's milk in Ireland, that's for sure. At least they didn't when I was growing up anyway. I didn't really have any chance to read Ulysses at school, although I did read the portrait of the artist as a young man which is on the school curriculum at that time and probably still is. And I didn't also study Ulysses at college because at university, because even though I studied English literature, I was English literature major, history major, but Ulysses was not part of the curriculum at that time. Presumably it was seen as too advanced or too risky, too dangerous maybe for the faith and morals of young Irish students back in the early 1970s. That's all changed, of course. Ulysses has now become an iconic part of Irish culture, so it was not until I first encountered Ulysses in America, in Kansas City in the summer of 1974. I was on a student work travel program called the J1 program where a lot of our students in those days came to America to earn some money that they could then use to pay for their education for the year ahead. And I spent summer in Kansas City at Rockhurst, what's now Rockhurst University, Jesuit University at Kansas City. And one evening or one day, I wandered over to the local bookshop at the university and I came across a copy of Ulysses and I bought it. I bought it home that evening to read it and I read the first two chapters very quickly, no problem with those, and then I reached the third chapter, the third episode of Ulysses, ineluctable modality of the visible. And that was enough to stop me in my tracks and I ended up putting the book aside, but I didn't get rid of it. I kept it. I brought it with me on my diplomatic assignment, my first assignment to New Delhi in 1980 and the book has been traveling the world with me ever since. I had a leather bound in New Delhi and I have had it in my possession all those years since then. And I have increasingly become familiar with the book and I decided eventually a few years ago that I should try to write a book about that book for the centenary of Joyce's novel. So it has been part of my odyssey, my diplomatic odyssey around the world. This book has accompanied me and I've used it to try to explain the Irish story to people around the world who may have no other connection with Ireland other than the fact that they are interested in our literature in WBH and James Joyce and Sean O'Casey and Samuel Beckett et cetera. I first came across that phenomenon when I was in New Delhi in the early 1980s. I was a young diplomat but I was invited to speak at the All India English Teachers Annual Conference. There were 1500 teachers from all over India at that conference. And I gave my speech about James Joyce's Ireland and I talked about the nets of language, religion and nationality which Joyce said he wanted to fly through to gain his freedom and he felt he would have to leave Ireland in order to be emancipated from those nets which were holding him back from achieving his full potential. After that talk I gave, I met a young teacher from the state of Assam in the northeastern part of India and she told me that she was teaching a portrait of the arts as a young man in the state of Assam, that remote part of the northeast of India. So I gave her, she said she had never possessed a copy of Joyce's novel. She was working on the basis of stencils whereby passages from it were stenciled and made available to the students because books were more difficult to obtain in those days than they are today perhaps because we didn't have the same facilities to access books, at least in remote parts of India in those days. So I immediately gave her a copy of my copy of Joyce's novel and I hope that that novel has been useful to that teacher who was now be close to retirement I guess and that it has had its innings, it had a good innings in Assam in the northeast of India over the last 40 years. And then in Germany when the copyright on USAIS expired in 2011, two German radio stations produced complete readings of USAIS, one of them over 24 hours and the other one over a period of a number of months where a segment was read every day in German on the radio, so national radio in Germany. So this all proved to me just how important our literature is in giving on the profile in the world that we wouldn't have if we didn't have the same rich literary tradition we have epitomized by James Joyce's USAIS. The second odyssey I want to talk about is the odyssey for the reader because as I see it, every reader who approaches James Joyce's USAIS is involved in an odyssey because it's a journey. It's not like a detective novel you might read it at one session you might read it over a weekend or whatever because the story will draw you on USAIS is not like that. So it can be a very short odyssey it sometimes can last only a paragraph or not a paragraph but maybe a couple of chapters the first two chapters are fairly easy to read as I mentioned and a lot of people get stumped when they reach episode three and give up that's fine, that's fine, you tried no shame in giving up because the latter chapters in particular of USAIS are very difficult and I understand it when readers flounder unable to get through the novel in total and for others they will get through the novel they will find a way of getting through it they will buy books like mine to help them their other books as well of course and will somehow navigate their way through the difficulties to the bends, the turns of the river that make this a complicated piece of writing to come to terms with and then there are those for whom the odyssey of reading USAIS will become a lifelong obsession I met somebody yesterday at politics and prose bookshop would tour me he'd read the novel ten times and he's one of these people who's kind of obsessed with it and there's no harm in that either because you know if you want to be obsessed with anything why not a book, books are civilizing thing no reason why you shouldn't get into it and the problem with you this is and indeed the great glory of the book is that it is both it is a deep well or a high mountain I always think of it as Mount Everest not everyone gets to climb Mount Everest but the view is wonderful up there if you can get there some people only get to the foothills that's fine too but it's the kind of it's the kind of book that every time you delve into it you'll find new things even I at this stage find new things in the book that I didn't appreciate when I was writing my book USAIS and readers honesty so there's a lot in there and that the amount of stuff that's in the book makes the book a difficult read but it also makes it a worthwhile read because everything that you can discover in the depths of the book are things that will enhance the reading experience for you the third Odyssey I want to talk about is the Odyssey of language and here I want to I want to read a little bit from not from my book but from USAIS and Joyce in this book he really does stretch the resources of English language and he does things which nor the writer has really ever done so he does things that that make it difficult for the reader because and I'm talking here about the about the Cyclops episode which is quite a good story in its own right it could be a short novel it's so long and it has a story about Leopold Bloom in this pub being challenged by people who question his nationality and don't really believe he's a proper Irishman and eventually Bloom hits back against these people but the book is full of these incredibly exuberant sites which are not part of the story but they kind of they draw the reader they're very funny in places they're very amusing they're quite diverting although they're not germane you could skip them all and you wouldn't miss anything very much in the book so they're they're curious addition to the book and this is one of them and this is about the citizen who was and I describe him here Joyce describes him here a broad shoulder deep chested strong limb frank eyed red-haired freely freckled shaggy bearded white mouth long nose long headed deep voice bear knee brawny handed hairy legged ruddy face scenery arm hero from shoulder to shoulder he measured several L's rock-like mountainous knees were covered as was likewise the rest of his body were ever visible with a strong growth of tawny prickly hair in hue and toughness similar to the mountain gorse the wide winged nostrils from which bristles of the same tawny hue projected were such capaciousness that within their cavernous obscurity the field out might easily have lodged her nests he wore a long unsleaved garment of recently flayed oxide reaching to the knees in a loose kilt and this was bound about his middle with a girdle of plastic straw and rushes beneath this he wore trues of deer skin roughly stitched with gut his nether extremities were encased in high Balbrighan buskins dyed in lich and purple the feet being shod with brogues of salted cowhide laced with the windpipe of the same beast from his girdle hung a row of sea stones which dangled at every movement of his frame and these on these were graven with rude yet striking art the tribal images of many Irish heroes and heroines of antiquity and not just in the hundred battles the Ardrey Maliki, Arch Mcmurray, Shane O'Neill Father John Murphy, Owen Rowe, Patrick Starr RedGear, Donal Redgem, McDermott, Elnore Brownie Michael Dwyer, Francy Higgins, Henry Joy McCracken Goliath, Horace Wheatley, Thomas Conniff, Big Wuffington the valetage blacksmith, Captain Moonlight captain Boycott, Dante Alliere, Christopher Columbus The last of the Mohegan's, the Rosa Castile, the man for Galway, the man for Magicalo, the man in the Gap, the woman who didn't, Benjamin Franklin, Napoleon Bonaparte, John L. Sullivan, Cleopatra, Svorning, Dailies, Julius Caesar, Paracelsus, Thomas Lipton, William L. Michelangelo, Hayes, Muhammad, the bride of Lambamore, Peter the Hermit, Peter the Packer, Dr. Rosalene, Patrick W. Shakespeare, Brian Confucius, Myrta Guttenberg, Patricia O. Velasquez, Captain Nemo, Tristan Nizal, the First Prince of Wales, Thomas Gupkinson, the bold soldier boy, Aaron the Bogey, Turpin, Ludwig B. Thioven, Colleen Bourne, Wadler Healy, Angus the Colady, Dolly Mound, Sidney Parade, Ben Hoth, Valentine Great Rakes, Adam and Eve, Arthur Wellesley, Boss Groke, Herodotus, Jack the Joint Killer, Gautama Buddha, Lady Gaddaima, the Lily of Calarney, Balor of the Evil Eye, the Queen of Sheba, Aki Nable, Joe Nagel, Alessandro Volta, Jeremiah Donovan-Rossa, Don Philip, or Sullivan Bear. So you have to wonder what's going on there. And as I see it, what's going on is that Joyce is lampooning the narrow definitions of nationalism. And some narrowly focused nationalists tend to believe that the whole world is part of their nation. I'm often accused the same thing myself of trying to turn everyone in the world into being Irish. But anyway, that's what a diplomat has to do, I guess. But the point I'm making here is that the first version of that list of 90 names had only nine names on it. And those names were all genuine, the Irish figures, whereas some of the people in the Cleopatra, Adam and Eve, and so forth clearly weren't Irish, Christopher Columbus, Benjamin Franklin. So I think what he's doing here is he's kind of, he's lampooning the habit of nationalism, the habit of nationalism in different countries to claim more for their nation than is really warranted by the facts of the case. So it's an adventure in language. And you have, for example, the Sirens chapter, episode 11 of Ulysses, which is written in a kind of a musical prose, which is almost like a symphony that's being composed by Joyce, where he's focusing on the music of the words in many cases. It has a kind of an overture as well as the symphony that follows. And some of the words from the overture are picked up in the symphony. So it's a symphonic chapter. Then you have episode 13, which is set in, which is set on Sandy Montstrand, which is written in the form of a romantic novel using the language of romantic novel. Episode 14 is written in a series of pastiches of the evolution of the English language from Anglo-Saxon to 20th century American commercial language, advertising language. So you have really the history of the English language being mimicked in this one chapter. And it makes it difficult, of course, for the reader to come to terms with it, because he's got to break through the linguistic barriers in order to get at what Joyce is trying to say. Not always easy. In chapter 15, you've got a surrealistic play where characters living, dead, inanimate, all appear as characters in this bizarre drama, which goes on and on and on, and could have done with a good editor in my view. Episode 16 is set in a cabin shelter, and it uses very precise, rather leaden, rather dead language. No great literary flair to it, and the language is almost obscuring and clouding what's actually happening in the chapter, because this is the chapter where Bloom and Steve, the two main characters, get together for the first time, but the language Joyce uses almost hides. It militates against any intimacies developing between the two characters in the novel. And then the second last chapter is in the form of a catechism with very elaborate pseudo-scientific prose, again, making it quite difficult for the reader to figure out what Joyce is getting at. And then finally, Molly Bloom's soliloquy, the last episode, is 65 pages with not a single punctuation mark of any kind. So again, a fairly difficult read. So Joyce was challenging his readers. He wanted them to not to be comfortable, not to sit back and get into a comfort zone. Every chapter challenges the reader to come to terms with a different form, which is why I take the view that the 18 episodes of Ulysses are actually like 18 separate works of art, and they can be read separately. You don't have to be read in sequence, and you could read the easier ones first and then try and graduate to the ones that are a little more difficult, and some of the ones towards the end are very difficult indeed. So that's the odyssey of language that Joyce has taken us on, takes the reader on. The fourth odyssey is an odyssey of character, because in Ulysses, we have three main characters. Now, it's a rather odd structure for a novel, because you expect in a normal novel that the characters would be continually, you know, their stories would three characters, they'd be woven into each other and that they would, each character would appear in each chapter. Nothing like that happens in Ulysses. The first three episodes focused entirely on Stephen Dedalus, and from reading the first three chapters, you would think that the novel is about Stephen Dedalus, that he is the main character, that the novel should be called Stephen Hero or something like that, or whatever, Telemachus, which is the Homeric name for the younger member of the family. So it looks as if we're dealing with a novel that's a continuation, really, of a portrait of the artist as a young man, and it takes up the story of Stephen after he finishes his story in a portrait, and then takes it forward in various ways. But then Stephen, for three episodes, disappears from the novel. Leopold Bloom is nowhere to be seen in the first three episodes, and then from episode four onwards, he's ever present, not always the main character in an episode, but always there. Stephen comes back, I mean, Bloom is in four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, and all the chapters up to chapter 18, which is devoted exclusively to Molly Bloom. So, and then Molly doesn't appear in the first three episodes, appears in the fourth, and doesn't come back onto the 17th episode. She's missing for most of the novel, although the people in the novel, the minor characters are constantly referring to her, and Bloom is obsessing about her all day long. So these three characters, what to make of it? Well, I think there are two major characters, and one less major character, one more minor character, because for me, at least Stephen is very definitely the lesser character of the three, even though he's in the novel a lot more than Molly is, but his character is one of, clearly he was based on James Joyce. He's a kind of an alter ego of Joyce's, but Joyce can't have been very impressed by this kind of character that he conjures up, because he's not a very likable character, rather pompous person, rather self-possessed, rather, you know, rather pretentious really, a bit priggish. So there's a lot of things about Stephen that you wouldn't necessarily admire, and I think he was Joyce's warning to himself, of this is what you would have become as you remained in Ireland, and therefore I say in my book that Stephen needed to go abroad, needed to maybe go to Trieste, or then he might be able to write the great novel that he'd hoped to write. So not a particularly impressive or likable character really is Stephen. He's there really as a foil for Leopold Bloom, because we see Leopold Bloom more clearly when we're comparing with, you know, with Stephen, and how odd Stephen is, compared with the kind of very normal kind of down-to-earth kind of character we have in Leopold Bloom. Then Bloom is an unsuccessful advertising salesman. He's got an unfaithful wife. He seems to have a lot of acquaintances in Dublin, but no friends, even when he travels out to the cemetery with some, you know, with three characters from the novel, three minor characters, he doesn't have any real rapport with them. You know, they keep referring to as Mr. Bloom. He's not really a friend of theirs. He's an acquaintance. We know that people talk about him behind his back. We know that a lot of Dubliners suspect him either because of his Jewish background or because they think he's a Freemason and Freemasons were not very popular in early 20th century Dublin. And so therefore, he has no reason to be happy. He's unsuccessful in his business. His marriage is falling apart and he hasn't got many friends around the place in Dublin. He's lost his son 11 years before and is still mourning the loss of his son. His father committed suicide. This is a bad, bad lot that Bloom finds himself in. And yet he somehow comes through the challenges that face him in the course of Unices. He doesn't exactly triumph like Odysseus. He doesn't slay the suitors that surrounded his wife when he gets back. No, he doesn't even try to take vengeance on or to confront even Blazes Boylan, who was having a sexual encounter with his wife during the afternoon when Bloom was wandering around the streets of Dublin. But he draws a kind of a soul or satisfaction from his life, even though his life is very unsuccessful by any normal standard. And that, I think, is really part of the point Joyce is making that this is not the kind of hero we're used to coming across in 19th century literature where a story will be based around some character who may, not saying he's heroic, but has qualities at least that the writer is trying to lionize. And in the case of Bloom, he's this cautious, understated, rather low octane character. But the point about him is that, unlike the challenges that face Odysseus during his trip back from the Trojan War back to Ithaca, Bloom faces none of those physical challenges. He never risks his life anywhere, which Odysseus does all the time. We see lots of Odysseus's crew getting gobbled up by different elements that are arranged against Odysseus, stopping him from getting back home to Ithaca. With Bloom, it's more of a he's, he's, he's navigating the hurdles of daily life. And that's the point about him. He's not a hero. He's an ordinary person who's challenged by the difficulties of everyday life. And he exhibits what I would call the heroism of everyday life. And then there's Molly. Now, technically, Molly is a minor character in Ulysses, but she's not. And even though she's only in the novel for maybe 80 of the novel's 800 pages, because of the quality of Molly, of her personality, her vivaciousness, her dynamic approach to life, her independent-minded view of things, her instinctive intelligence, I would say, and her candor. Molly is an equal of Leopold Bloom, even though 600 pages of the novel is devoted to Bloom. Molly comes across as equally significant to Bloom, which is a tribute to the way Joyce created this wonderful character, Molly Bloom. She's far more instinctive than Leopold Bloom. She's far more feisty. She stands up for herself. And she's a fascinating character, really. Bloom, maybe regarded as a bit dull and ordinary, whereas Molly is extra ordinary, although she's, again, just a normal person in many ways. Now, the thing about the three characters that I mentioned, Stephen, Daedalus, Leopold Bloom, and Molly Bloom, they're all kind of outsiders in the Dublin of that time, because Stephen is an outsider because he's an unusual name. Daedalus, where does it come from? Sounds very Greek. He's also a rather superior artist who kind of finds it difficult to relate to people in the normal kind of work-a-day world. Leopold Bloom is an outsider because he's Jewish, Hungarian background, and his personality is somewhat awkward and difficult, and therefore he doesn't really fit into the Dublin of that time. And then Molly, well, she's born in Gibraltar, her father's a British officer, and her mother a Spanish woman. So she's not, again, typical at all of Irish women at that time in the early 20th century. So it's the ordnance of these characters and the fact that they're semi outsiders that gives them the appeal and makes this an odyssey of character. And then finally, it's an odyssey in the ways of the world. And what I mean there is that Ulysses is set in Ireland in 1904, a time when the country was on the cusp of political change. So what we get is a forensic portrait of a society which 10 years later started to transform itself politically. And what would have been wildly popular in 1904, some form of self-government, was unacceptable to a majority of Irish people by the time we get around to 1918, 1920, when the Revolution in Ireland took place, which created the state that I happen to have represented for the last 44 years. So what you get is this portrait of Ireland as it was about to take off and move in a different direction. And to some extent, Joyce's novel is an energy for the dying world of the 19th century parliamentary tradition which sought to get improvements for Ireland by peaceful parliamentary agitation. And it has a nod a little bit towards the new generation because Arthur Griffith is mentioned. Griffith founded Sinn Féin in 1905. So very shortly after the book was set, he wrote a series of articles called The Resurrection of Hungary in 1904, which were the basis of the policy of the Sinn Féin party, which by the way is very different from the party that exists today. It's even very different from the party that existed in 1917, 18, when it picked up the mantle of the Easter Rising and pushed forward to win the general election of 1918 and therefore paved the way for the War of Independence and for Irish independence that's now celebrating 100 years this year because the Irish Free State was created the same year as Ulysses. And in fact, the first symbolic move towards giving Ireland independence occurred just two weeks before Joyce's novel was published in Paris on the 2nd of February 1922. Now, Joyce's novel was not just his satire about nationalism, was not just aimed at Ireland. And I want to try and demonstrate that by reading another excerpt from this great book, Joyce's great book. And the scene here is in Barney Cairne's pub. It's also from the Cyclops episode, but this is one of the bits that's not an exuberant aside, an exuberant, you know, flight of fancy. This is rather, I think, the key passage in the whole of Ulysses. And it comes at a time when Bloom is being goaded by the drinkers in the pub because he's not really Irish in their view. Are you really Irish? You know, what is your nation if I may ask Mr. Bloom? And he said, Ireland, I was born here, Ireland. So he asserts that if you're born in a country, that's where you belong. But of course, the drinkers in the pub had a very different view of things. So here's the only place in the book where Bloom hits out at his detractors. He says, and I belong, too, to a race, says Bloom, that is hated and persecuted. And also now, this very moment, this very instant, God, he near, he near burnt his fingers with the butt of his old cigar, robbed, says he, plundered, insulted, persecuted, taking what belongs to us by rights. At this very moment, says he, putting up his fists, sold it by auction off in Morocco, like slaves or cattle. Are you talking about the New Jerusalem, says the citizen? I'm talking about injustice, says Bloom. Right, says John Wise, stand up to it then with force, like men. That's an Almanac picture for you. Mark for a soft-nose bullet, or lardy face standing up to the business end of a gun. God, he'd adorn a sweeping brush, so he would if only had a nurse, if he only had a nurse's apron on him. Then he collapses all of a sudden, twisting around all the opposite as limp as a wet rag. But it's no use, says he, force, hatred, history, all that. That's not life for men and women, insult and hatred. And everybody knows it's the very opposite of that, that is really life. What, says Alf? Love, says Bloom. I mean the very opposite of hatred. I must go now, says he, to John Wise, just around to the court moment to see if Martin is there. If he comes, just say I'll be back in a second, just a moment. Who's hindering you? How he pops like breeze lightning. A new apostle to the Gentiles, says the citizen. Universal love. What, says John Wise? Isn't that what we're told? Love your neighbors. That chap says the citizen. Beggar, my neighbor is his model. Love, Maya. He's the right pattern of a Romeo and Juliet. So there you have, I think a key passage in Ulysses where Joyce through Bloom is standing up against force, hatred and history. By history he means the misuse of history. Because Stephen says earlier on in the novel, history is a nightmare which I'm trying to awaken. So here you have us. And that's why I think Joyce was not talking about Ireland exclusively. Because remember he was writing this book, people were killing themselves, killing each other in their millions on the battlefields of the First World War. And that I think also weighed on Joyce. And this is a criticism not just of Irish nationalism, but of the imperial nationalisms of the First World War. Because remember imperialism of the kind you had 100 and plus years ago was an extreme form of nationalism. Because the imperial entities believe that their country is so special. Not only does it deserve to have its own nation, but it also deserves to rule other countries and other countries need to be ruled by the imperial power. And then if you think about it today, this is my final point. Force hatred history. Vladimir Putin has unleashed force against Ukraine because he believes that force ultimately is the arbiter in human affairs. He's unleashed hatred. And we've seen how things that look like war crimes have been perpetuated against the people of Ukraine because they've been dehumanized by the hatred that Putin has generated towards them. And then finally, the whole invasion of Ukraine is based on Putin's own misuse of history, his belief that somehow Ukraine doesn't have a history. That Ukraine's history is part of the history of Russia. And that justifies the elimination of Ukraine from the political map of the world. And that's what the Ukrainians are standing up against and good on them for doing so. So we see that in 2022, 100 years after Ulysses was first published, Joyce's cry to stand up against hate, force hatred and the misuse of history remains as valid today as it ever was in 1922 or any of the years between 1922 and today when we celebrate 100 years after the publication of James Joyce's Ulysses. Thank you very much for your attention. Ambassador Mulhall, thank you so much for your presentation and for sharing your insights about Ulysses, this book that has accompanied you throughout your life and your work. We do have some questions in the chat and the first one I'll share was, did Joyce reveal why the book's timeline is one day only? I don't know if he did or not because I'm not an academic, I haven't read every word that Joyce ever wrote. But what I would say here is that I think he wanted to record humanity at close quarters. He wanted to look at it through a microscope, not a telescope. And I think therefore the events of a single day appealed to him and also it was a day symbolically when he met Nora Barnacle, the love of his life, who obviously influenced his writing as well because he was a much more down-to-earth character than he was and probably helped to save him from being Stephen Dedalus for the rest of his life. By the way, Joyce is not Leopold Bloom, Joyce is a different character from Leopold Bloom but he certainly, he moved beyond the character he is presented as in the case of Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses and in the Portrait of the Arts as a Young Man. And he said that he felt that in order to present the reality of life in a single day he had to use all these different techniques. Now that may or may not be true but that's what Joyce believed and therefore I think that that's why he chose a day because he figured that he could really delve into life if he restricted himself to a single day in the life of the characters in the Dublin of 1904. Well, thank you. So as we've heard today, your career has taken you all over the world and in speaking about Joyce and Yates throughout the world really globally, you sought to use the lure of Irish literature as a resource for creating vital affinities with Ireland, you've said. And I wonder how is the allure of Joyce's Ulysses different in say Malaysia or India, Vietnam than in say Germany or America? Well, clearly Ulysses is a difficult book so therefore I think it lends itself more to people from English speaking world or indeed from European countries because there are good translations of Ulysses into French and German, probably not necessarily to all the languages of the world. And also I think you Europeans and Americans would be familiar with the kind of life that is represented in Joyce's novel. So I've always found that you had to find a different hook to hang things on in different countries. So in India, as I said to you earlier on, the hook that I tried to use was the hook of the similarities between Ireland and India. Because remember India also broke away from the British Empire at a certain stage in its history as we did. So in a way they followed Ireland down the same path and that gave Ireland a significance for Indians and it also gave Irish literature a significance for Indians that Irish history wouldn't have had for other countries that didn't have that same experience. So I do think you have to pitch literary diplomacy differently in different countries. In Germany, I was definitely able to use this idea that if Germans had accepted blooms and Joyce's definition of nationality as I'm Irish, I was born here, Ireland is my nation. That would have saved a lot of problems for Germany during the 20th century when they went for a very different version of nationality because you have to remember that most of those who perished in the Holocaust were actually people who were born in Germany. In fact in many cases they were three or four generations born in Germany but that wasn't enough to qualify them as Germans in the eyes of the Nazis who had a different definition of identity from the one that Bloom proposes in USAIS. Well thank you so much and there's some very appreciative comments also in the chat. One of our participants thanks you for your insights and for your eloquence and another one of our participants said that they read the book 50 years ago for English Lit Class and the professor was a Joyce scholar but the ambassador explained the book better than the Joyce scholar so the historical context really helped. Well you see I don't consider myself to be a kind of an academic person responding to Joyce. I consider myself to be like the ordinary reader and therefore I think I have a maybe an ability to explain things in a way that maybe the extra learning that Joyce scholars have means that they have too much information to be able to put across the clear analysis. I felt I had enough I have a whole library of books here on USAIS which I some of which I read a lot of which I read when I was preparing this book but I didn't have to delve too I didn't go down too deep because the deeper you go the more it starts to become cloudy and I found a lot of the academic stuff I read about USAIS made it more difficult rather than easier and my aim with this book was to appeal to the good reader to the person who goes to the library and gets out a serious book to the person who goes to a good bookshop and buys a serious book but it's not an academic it's not a student it's not a scholar but it's an ordinary reader so I hope that my book and I believe my book will be will be useful for the normal reader. Yeah well most definitely I'm also not an academic but I've enjoyed reading USAIS multiple times and when I read your guide there were several places in which I thought to myself wait a minute I never noticed that next time I read it I'm going to go back and I'm going to pay special attention to to this aspect of it so that I'm just really grateful for that something that you bring to to my reading and I'm sure to others reading as well. I do have another question coming up here which is that you have well today's the day after Bloomsday and you've celebrated Bloomsday over the years everywhere from Kuala Lumpur to London to Washington and I imagine that each of the different settings in which you've celebrated Bloomsday has its own has its own flavor and I was curious if there are some highlights some of your favorite experiences that you can share with us. Sure yeah well I mean in Malaysia it was maybe a little more difficult because of course Malaysia's an Islamic country so a novel with a Jewish character as the hero of it is maybe not always what Malaysians would you know automatically respond to but you could always find people who had an interest in it and I remember once I actually brought a film version of Ulysses called Bloom which was done about maybe 15 years ago or thereabouts maybe more maybe almost 20 years ago now I brought back to Kuala Lumpur and I had to show it in my own residence because I couldn't get a censors approval for it show it in a regular cinema this censors would have gone crazy and would have you know would have cut the you know the thing to ribbons so there was a degree of caution you know were required in Malaysia because you know dealing with a book that you know would offend a lot I mean it doesn't offend many people now in the west unless you really want to be offended but in other countries that people could find offence in Ulysses quite easily so you gotta be careful about that so I what I did in Kuala Lumpur was I was I appealed to the interest that people had in in the English language tradition that you know that that because a lot of Malaysians were of the view that the future for Malaysia was in maintaining its high standards of English language competence and that you know therefore the literature was a part of part of that as I said in Germany very well very easily able to you know to connect with the you know with the the issues that were current in Germany at that time as well and you know language nationality religion are things that are also relevant and they're all I mean they're all present in Ulysses as well I that that phrase comes from a portrait but they're all those issues are all being discussed in Ulysses as well so I suppose the best place for doing it from my point of view was in London because in London for Bloomsday you had a kind of a rich um tribe of Irish actors who were living in Britain of course on the stage and screen and basically they would all come over and they would be happy to read and the fascinating thing about but Bloomsday is that you can get very prominent people to come and take part and you can't you know we I never paid them anything it was just but they they wanted to be involved and they were willing to give their time and an effort so I had all sorts of wonderful actors doing it for me in London and in Washington of course I mean in I mean in New York you or in Los Angeles you would get a good crowd of Irish actors as well that you could draw on but you can't in Washington DC it's not it's not possible there's not enough people like that around so I had to you know rely on I mean I mean last night I had John King from CNN who was an Irish American he read I had Maury Dowd from the New York Times I had Julia Mason from Sirius XM so I had a number of prominent people I had Governor O'Malley Governor Martin O'Malley who sang one of the songs that that features in the novel and also read Blooms political manifesto I thought it was important for a former governor to give voice to Blooms political philosophy which is kind of hilarious which when it comes across in the episode so it's a different story wherever you go but the fact is there's always an interest and last night people enjoyed that event immensely and that's the great thing about Joyce and about Ulysses is that he is actually enjoyable there are you know it is if you pick the right bits it's quite funny to read and to listen to and there's a lot of music in it and so on so it's a you know I mean I often ask myself well Yates is um is very important to Ireland as well but Yates doesn't have the same cash as Joyce why because he's there's not the same fun attached to to Yates we have him I mean the only other writer I can think of that this is this is happens with is Robert Burns in Scotland where they have burners and and they drink they eat neeps and tatties and you know that you know that terrible dish that they eat and they pour whiskey on it so it's so but but that's a kind of a celebration of a writer this is a celebration of a book which is even even more incredible that book a hundred-year-old book could still have enough relevance for people to want to celebrate it in 2022 how about that isn't that a good thing for civilization that that's still happening it's a fantastic thing another one of our viewers viewers is wondering how has your view of Ulysses changed over time and were sections more meaningful to you at different times in your life yeah well I mean I suppose in the beginning I probably gravitated towards the earlier episodes you know the episode when we first meet the blooms episode four calypso episode five when bloom first takes to the streets of Dublin and and so on and I was always interested in episode 12 but that was because I'm a historian so that's that episode is rich in history what I found in in recent times is I'm gravitating more towards the more difficult episodes trying to mining more and more inspiration from Cersei which is the surrealistic play and from the Umea episode set in the cavern and shelter on butt bridge and from Ithiga where you get all this information about bloom that we haven't had before so I'm I'm kind of I'm kind of gradually moving up the scale and focusing more now on the latter episodes because they're the ones where there's a lot more stuff that hasn't yet been uncovered by me at least it has been uncovered I'm sure but by by all the various academics who are laboring in the field of joy studies yeah fantastic so another one of our viewers was wondering if DFA and culture Ireland will be broadcasting a bloomsday event again next year I'm not sure if I mean I answer to that but you know but but but this year they they produced a a short film which you can find on my Twitter account I tweeted it there a couple of days ago fantastic it was a four-minute film where they had people all over the world reading little bits from you this is very well done I mean the best resource online is probably Irish radio in 1982 for the centenary of Joyce's birth they produced a full dramatization of Ulysses and it's about 30 hours long but it's available now on Spotify anywhere you get a podcast if you if you just look for um Ulysses Irish Irish radios Ulysses and the the website which you can get it on is www.rte for radio television RTE.ie so www.rte.ie and if you if you search for Ulysses there you will get this wonderful dramatization and there's also a wonderful set of commentaries by the Joyceian scholar from from Switzerland Fritsen and by other people so there's a there's a companion piece to each episode so there's a lot of there's a lot of listening there for anyone who uh who's not going out for the summer uh you can certainly listen to all of this wonderful material on um podcast on Spotify or wherever you get your podcast www.rte.ie great someone else mentioned that Catherine Flynn and you too too is very good for commentaries as well very good in fact uh one of the episodes I am involved in that uh and and I also Catherine has just um produced as edited um the centenary the uh it's called the Cambridge centenary um edition of Ulysses and I have it here in front of me I'll just get up a second and I'll put it into the view you can see how big it is it is a massive tomb right you know I mean I mean you wouldn't put it in your satchel uh you're going home in the evening um you know you you want to have a big satchel for this so I don't think that many people are borrowing it from the library but certainly uh and it's got it's got a facsimile of the first edition and it's also got 18 commentaries by different scholars and then some footnotes and so forth so it's it's it's a marvelous piece of work and Catherine Flynn is probably now up there among the very best uh joy scholars and she of course is based at the University of California in Berkeley well fantastic we're coming to the end of our time and I just want to thank you again for your insights and for your inspiration and I will pass it back over to Brian Weaver so he can close out our program yeah thanks ambassador that was a wonderful uh talk today very much appreciate it and uh thanks for um to everyone for joining us today um it was uh a wonderful program um and have a great afternoon thanks again ambassador Mulholl you're welcome you're welcome and thank you to all for tuning in thank you by now