‘A Place in Hungary’: The Phantasmal Dublin of Ulysses

Abstract

At the centenary of its publication in 1922, James Joyce’s Ulysses prompts reflection on its relation to a political event which took place in the same year: the emergence of the Irish ‘Free State’. Joyce’s novel mentions only one of the political figures directly involved in that development but traces his influence from the year in which the narrative unfolds: 1904. At that date, Arthur Griffith, later a key negotiator of the emergence of the Free State, and a president of its parliament, published a pamphlet entitled The Resurrection of Hungary: A Parallel for Ireland. Griffith argued that Irish nationalists, rather than sending representatives to London, ought to follow the example of their Hungarian counterparts, who had boycotted the imperial parliament in Vienna to demand a legislature in Pest (eventually achieved in the Compromise or Ausgleich of 1867). The pamphlet formed the basis of the political party founded by Griffith, Sinn Féin, which played a pivotal role in the advent of the Free State. Joyce approved of Sinn Féin and admired Griffith (with some serious reservations). Through its central reference to Griffith and the chain of associations that follows from this reference, Ulysses can be read as an enactment of the problem of the Resurrection: the absence of a legislative capital.