How the Cruiser Was Grounded and Finn MacCool Returned

I had some business in Ireland with a man named Bloom, and by an implacability of scheduling arrived there toward the climax of the summer’s excitement. With the Republic papered with posters and wired for sound sea to sea, 375 assorted patriots, competing for 148 seats in the Dail Eireann, were abroad addressing rallies, ringing doorbells, asserting that the other lot was not fit to be washed, arranging for mass resurrections from Glasnevin Cemetery, and in other ways as well affirming the health of parliamentary democracy among a people whose talents in that line have been exported as far afield as Cook County, Ill.

An election anywhere is a communal madness, fittest to be described by the conventions of science fiction. An entire harassed people shouts and dances its way through a spacewarp into a domain where words and doings come unhitched from all normal significance and, after wild ritual gyrations there, emerges again into Newtonian space, having somehow agreed to submit for several years to a minimally altered pattern of harassments. No one afterward can quite agree on how it all happened, though The People are conceded to have Spoken, amid such intoxication it is true as attended the speech of oracles in Greece. What did they say? Wild stammering words, which only the new government is authorized to interpret.

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Hugh Kenner

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I had some business in Ireland with a man named Bloom, and by an implacability of scheduling arrived there toward the climax of the summer’s excitement. With the Republic papered with posters and wired for sound sea to sea, 375 assorted patriots, competing for 148 seats in the Dail Eireann, were abroad addressing rallies, ringing doorbells, asserting that the other lot was not fit to be washed, arranging for mass resurrections from Glasnevin Cemetery, and in other ways as well affirming the health of parliamentary democracy among a people whose talents in that line have been exported as far afield as Cook County, Ill.

An election anywhere is a communal madness, fittest to be described by the conventions of science fiction. An entire harassed people shouts and dances its way through a spacewarp into a domain where words and doings come unhitched from all normal significance and, after wild ritual gyrations there, emerges again into Newtonian space, having somehow agreed to submit for several years to a minimally altered pattern of harassments. No one afterward can quite agree on how it all happened, though The People are conceded to have Spoken, amid such intoxication it is true as attended the speech of oracles in Greece. What did they say? Wild stammering words, which only the new government is authorized to interpret.