Under The Spell
"The great advantage of having an ancestry like that of a mongrel dog is I have
so many ancestral homes to go home to."
We caught the ferry from Le Havre, France to Ireland, land of my ancestors.
Every since I was a wee lad, my mind has been used as a canvas by every Irishman
who has been displaced from the Emerald Isle. A picture of quaintness
bordering upon myth. Cute I thought it would be, but never as much as the
tourist hype I had read. I donned my suit of armor constructed of cynicism,
forged by age. Protected thus from the hype, I the ancestral child would see
Ireland as it really is. Mind you, no tourist hype for me.
The ship pulled in to Rosslare Harbor near Wexford and lowered its gangplank. I
made it most of the way down before I was sucked clean out of my armor into,
head over heels, and under the spell of the Emerald Isle.
We had arranged for a rental car, to be picked upon arrival at the harbor. I
thought perhaps we would be shown how to operate it. Instead the attendant said
in his sweet Irish brogue, "It's the wee red one over there," and handed me the
keys.
Still dazed by the sudden entrance in to "The Spell" we sped off in our wee red
Ford Fiesta. Every so many hundred yards along the road signs reminded us to
"Drive to the left." On the open road it was no problem, however moments later
in the congestion of Wexford I was near panic, yelling at Travis to help remind
me what side of the street I was on. It didn't help that he often mixes left and
right up in his mind, some sort of hereditary functional disorder. I almost
broke out in sweat when I had to make my first right turn feeling as though I
was going head on into the oncoming traffic.
By the time we got through Wexford I was in desperate need to stop for a wee pee.
I saw a small side road and took that hoping to find a secluded spot to relieve
myself.
I discovered that when you leave the main roads in Ireland you are almost
immediately secluded. We stopped in front of an old abandoned barn made of stone
with an unusual door shaped like a horseshoe. The earth smelled wet and fresh
and was a bit boggy, more so when I departed. It was only a few hundred yards
before we learned our first rule of driving in Ireland.
wrapped mah way on down to de landin'. The men was all in blue, and Ah heard
it. Luckly it was short, If It wasnt I doubt i would have made it throught the
After a few minutes of being thrown to Purgatory, we had made it. The scene just as I had remembered-- bloody.
it, but it carried on towards me, until it was close enough for me to
. He edges his way toward the outer fringes and then suddenly shot to the opposite side of the street.
This is the final epiphany that Joyce wished to impart to his readers. Especially those in Ireland as he hopes that it will inspire his Irish readers to recognize their own paralysis and take the necessary steps to rouse themselves. Vivian Heller said in her book, Joyce, Decadence and Emancipation that, “Joyce liked to say that life in his native city was a form of paralysis….As the following lines, written in the defence of Dubliners, suggest, he conceived of his first major work a kind of diagnosis: “It is not my fault that the odor of ashpits and old weeds and offal hangs around my stories. I seriously believe you will retard the course of civilization in Ireland by preventing the Irish people from having one good look at themselves in my nicely polished looking glass” (Heller 13). Joyce wrote Dubliners because he believed that Ireland could break itself free of its paralysis, they only needed to take one good look at themselves to do
down in the middle of the road, avoiding helping an old man to pick up his change that
there was not a car in sight. Due to the fact that the road was "all mine", I
school. From a far distance, I saw a trolley was coming towards me. Being busy texting with a friend, I
I had suddenly been left alone and I knew that my priority was to find
I was driving with my learners permit so my husband only allowed me to drive but so far. I could drive to work, my mom house, sisters house, mall, etc. Anywhere that I could get going the street way I drove. I knew in order to get my drivers license I would have to learn how to drive on busy intersections and the express way. I hadn’t driven on the express way yet because I was terrified. Just seeing the cars drive 80 miles an hour and quickly switching lanes made me jittery. I knew in order for me to conquer my fear of driving on the express way I would have to drive on the express way. I wasn’t quite ready for that
There were some desks and other odd things in the vicinity, I turned the corner to find a redneck’s paradise.
James Joyce chose Dublin not only as the setting of his short stories, more importantly, he wanted to “show the paralysis of the psyche, society and politics of Ireland”. (Daniels, 2) In the “Selected Letters of James Joyce”, Joyce clearly suggested that “[his] intention was to write a moral history of [his] country and [he] chose Dublin for the scene because that city seemed to [him] the centre of paralysis. (Thwaites, 14). Colonized by Britain for 800 years, Dublin and its people were constantly under political and religious oppression. Other than “[speaking] to the world about the paralyzed and dependent situation of the Irish people under English oppression”, Joyce intended to “[invent] a unified Irish society that could resist” the force through his short stories in “Dubliners”. (Thwaites, 11, 1) Various aspects of Dubliners will be explored to investigate how Dublin is described as city of paralysis, including the depiction of...
friends and I were as jittery as a novice driver as none of us had