An Odyssey to the Irish Embassy

I walked up to the Irish Embassy in Birkenstocks.

The shoes were a choice. I had to walk to Embassy Row from DuPont Circle Station with my obtrusively large backpack on a day predicted to be 90 degrees. I knew from the start I could not do this in heels or sleeves, so I arrived at the stone portico in falling apart sandals and a sleeveless, baby pink mock turtleneck.

Before I met Dan Mulhall, the Irish Ambassador, for the lecture and discussion on James Joyce’s Ulysses, I asked for the bathroom. It was filled with Irish flag paraphernalia and the wall held a large, canvas painting of a distinctly Irish and ultimately unrecognizable face done in shades of blue. There, I pulled my black, Tory Burch heels from my backpack and switched them out, at last “smart casual” as the email described.

When I emerged from my quick change, I was led out to the porch through ten-foot windows; the sills at the floor were grabbed and raised high above my head so that I could walk through them as doors. A dozen chairs waited in a semicircle, oriented toward a standalone counterpart intended for the ambassador, who it turned out was having printer troubles.

While the participants from different D.C. universities and literary organizations waited for the lecture to officially begin, we were offered miniature cakes and tea on gilded white tea sets. I am not much of a tea drinker—I would rather have plain water than leaf water—but I could not turn down the opportunity to hold this pristine set and drink authentic Irish tea. The Irish literature lover in me could not deny the aesthetic temptation, and I was rewarded. It was delicious.

Soon, Dan arrived to begin his lecture about Ulysses, one of the most influential pieces of literature from the 20th century.

It is a book I have never read.

Thankfully, a knowledge of the text was not required to attend the lecture, though knowledge of Joyce’s previous work and reading the “Cyclops” chapter of Ulysses was recommended. Joyce was a familiar figure to me, as I had read Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man the year before for school and was taking a class on Joyce and W.B. Yeats at the time. In regard to the “Cyclops,” I had spent the two days prior to the lecture sprinting through the middle of Ulysses’ stream of consciousness via an ebook on my phone. Not the best conditions to crack into the impossible novel, but I worked with what I had.

I just really wanted to go to this lecture. 

Dan began, sans notes, having lost the battle with the printer. But he knew much of it by heart anyway. Even if he hadn’t, I would have listened to him speak gibberish for an hour so long as it was in an Irish accent.

He told us that when it comes to a work like Ulysses, there are “a thousand doors” through which a reader can get into the text. Readings include the political, the classical, the biographical; Dan chose the historical.

I had spent the last year or so being inundated with Irish literature and history, but before then all I could have told you about Irish history was the existence of the Irish Potato Famine. Even as I had out a notebook and pencil to record Dan’s knowledge, I still felt murky, like I only knew slivers of the complex and fraught history of Ireland from the poems of Seamus Heaney and W.B. Yeats and the television shows Normal People and Derry Girls.

Dan had a gift. As he described to us, liltingly, the role Charles Parnell held in the hearts of the Irish in the 1800s and the lasting impact of his ideological dethronement on the movement for Irish independence, I was enraptured. He took the tangled strands of Ireland’s history and movements toward autonomy, which seem to repeat endlessly in failed rebellions, and wove them together more comprehensively than I had ever before experienced.

All this history culminated in the reading of the “Cyclops” episode of Ulysses, in which Joyce pokes fun at “narrow minded nationalism.” James Joyce was a writer who, from his university years, had forceful opinions about Ireland’s society, culture, and literature that he put out into the world, loudly.

Though I do not want to offer too much detail about what the ultimate argument of this scene is, being a novice reader of the novel and likely to get almost everything wrong, I did glean moments of insight from Dan’s analysis. Leopold Bloom, Ulysses’ protagonist, reflects the views of Joyce in this scene. Joyce was very vocal about not supporting the Irish cultural and literary revival; he wanted the island to become part of the European mainstream, and it appears that Bloom also takes up this view.

But the aspect that Dan highlighted that struck me most was this: Bloom was Joyce’s “apostle of tolerance.” The novel was written over many years, including during World War I, which was a keystone moment for all modernist writing. Bloom, and in turn Joyce, is responding to a monumental and harrowing worldwide experience and arguing for love instead of the conflict of hatred.

The lecture ended soon thereafter and we got the opportunity to ask questions. I, an arrogant undergraduate, raised my hand to ask what Dan thought about Ulysses being a response to the national desire for an Irish epic. It was a question I shamelessly stole straight from the mouth of Dr. Baker, my Joyce professor, who told me he found Ulysses to be an almost satirical response to that call. Dan, as a diplomat, had a kinder and more diplomatic view of the novel as epic. I think I may need to read the whole book before I decide whether or not that was Irish pride coloring his opinion.

We took a picture in the back garden of which I still have not received a copy, and then it was over. I had skipped class to come to the lecture and needed to get back to school for another that afternoon. Looking, I am sure, incredibly young and overly eager, I hauled on my large black backpack and headed back to the DuPont Circle Station, stopping outside the embassy to take a selfie.

I walked a few hundred feet down the street, stopped, took off my bag, and changed back into my Birkenstocks.

October 2021