◆The Barbaric Yawp Project

History Is a Nightmare I left Ireland at twenty-two and never really went back. People have spent a century asking why. The answer is in everything I wrote. The nets. That is what I called them in the Portrait — the nets flung at the soul to hold it back from flight. Nationality. Language. Religion. The demand that the artist become the mirror of his people — that he reflect their mythology back to them purified and heroic and stripped of everything that complicates the dream. I said: I will not serve. Not the church that educated me. Not the nation that claimed me. Not the dream of an Ireland that had never quite existed but was so much more comfortable than the Ireland that did. And from outside I saw it clearly — a culture in love with its own suffering, its own mythology of loss and betrayal so elaborate and so cherished that it had become more real than the actual present, which was merely disappointing compared to the glorious past that had been stolen. I called it paralysis. The specific condition of people who cannot move forward because forward requires releasing the story they have been telling about themselves. I am watching it now. Not in Dublin. The church has changed its name. The priests wear different clothes. The grievance has an American accent. But the structure is identical. The great past that was stolen. The enemies who explain every failure, whose presence contaminates the pure original thing that existed before they arrived. The leader who embodies the lost greatness and will restore it. The crowd that believes him not because the evidence supports it but because belief itself is the point — belief as identity, belief as the alternative to the unbearable difficulty of seeing clearly. I know this crowd. In Ulysses I put him in a pub in Dublin — the Citizen, roaring about Irish purity, about foreigners and their corruptions, about the great days before the invaders came. He throws a biscuit tin at Bloom as Bloom escapes. Bloom, who does not fit the national mythology, who keeps thinking when everyone else has stopped — Bloom simply continues. He notices the actual thing rather than the official story about the thing. The Citizen is always in the pub. He was there in Dublin in 1904. He is on the screen now. What changes is not him but whether the culture gives him the keys or keeps him in the pub where he belongs. I want to say something about language. Power speaks in certainties. In purities. In us and them. It makes itself invisible by becoming natural — by sounding like simply the way things are, the obvious truth that only enemies deny. My whole career was the project of making that language visible — of making it strange enough that you could see it as a construction, a choice, rather than the air itself. The stream of consciousness is not a technique. It is a political act. Here is what a mind actually does when it is not performing for authority. Here is thought before the censors arrive. The official story always wants to simplify you. The stream refuses. History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake. I gave that line to Stephen Dedalus in 1922. It is still the nightmare. It has simply found new dreamers. The nightmare is the dream itself — the dream of the pure past, the stolen greatness, the simple story in which everything makes sense because everything is someone else's fault. Waking requires seeing the dream for what it is — a story that certain people need you to believe because your belief is what gives them their power. I will not serve. I said it at twenty-two in Dublin and left. I am saying it now from wherever the dead speak — which is everywhere and cannot be shut up no matter how many biscuit tins are thrown. The stream does not stop. It simply continues — noticing, recording, refusing the official version, following the actual thought wherever it honestly goes. That is the only answer there is.