‘The Ireland Joyce knew from his first twenty-two years was an underdeveloped and unindustrialised British colony and had been for centuries. [...] By the time Joyce was twenty-two years old he believed Ireland was a dead end and its history a nightmare from which, as Stephen Dedalus puts it, [21] so dramatically, he was "trying to awake". He refused to join any nationalist groups.’ [.&c.].

‘He repeatedly looks at Irish nationalism, supporting such political objectives as Home Rule, while at the same time keeping a cautious and sceptical eye on what he saw as the Irish proclivity for betraying its leaders.’ [p.22.]

Complained at misspelling of O’Leary [sans O’] in Prezioso’s Piccolo, 1907.

Bending the facts: John O’Leary returned to Dublin to great acclaim, 1885; Acc. Joyce, he was a man whose ‘plots had gone up in smoke, his friends had died and in his own native land very few knew who he was or what he had done.’ (CW, 192.)

1914: Joyce submitted his articles on Ireland for book publication to Genovese publisher Angelo Formiggini as " Ireland at the Bar", and was refused.

1912 Lectures on Defoe & Blake.

Defoe’s "Duncan Campbell" is ‘a spiritualistic study of an interesting case of clairvoyance in Scotland which relates] what happens when the realist comes into a mystical place where ‘telepathy is in the air’.

JJ: ‘Seated at the bedside of a boy visionary [i.e., "Duncan Campbell"] gazing at his raised eyelids listing to his breathing, examining the position of his head, noting his fresh complexion, Defoe is the realist in the presence of the unknown, it is the experience of the man who struggles and conquers in the presence of a dream which he fears may fool him; he is, finally, the Anglo-Saxon in the presence of the Celt. (Occas. Writings, ed. Barry, OUP 2001, p.171.)

Bulson writes: ‘Unfortunately for us Joyce fails to elaborate and we are left wondering how Defoe’s descriptioin of the boy visionary necessarily translates [at] the envounter between the Anglo-Saxon and the Celt. The realist Joyce seems to be [28] suggesting here, that we can never get beyond the material world, mush as the English coloniser cannot get into the mind of the colonised Irish race. Joyce was particularly pleased with this lecture and sent it to a prestigious literary journal in Florence call the Marzocco. Corinna de Greco Lobner sustpects that the editors refused to publish it because Joyce’s thinly veiled anti-British sentiments would offend British subscribers.’

Joyce argued that Blake was Irish (cf. Yeats). [29]

JJ: ‘In English literature Blake represents the most significant and the truest form of idealism. He was not however an Anglo-Saxon. Instead he possessed all the qualities contrary to this type and most of all his hatred of commerce. He was Irish and he manifested in his art those characteristics most particular to his people. [n.p. for Barry; here 29.]

Bulson comments: ‘James Joyce was not the first to make Blake a Celt . Yeats [on the] ‘shakiest evidence tried to prove Blake’s father James Blake was born James O’Neill.’

Amelia Popper: ‘The two contrasting elements of Joyce’s manner were noticeable from the beginning . the mystic and the realistic.’ (Popper, Araby, Trieste; Casa Editrice Triestina 1935) [5 stories in trans.]. (Cf. Amelia Popper, the putative love-object in Giacomo Joyce, 1911.)

Bulson sees gnomon in Dubliners as referring to missing [inferable] detail, i.e., a parallelgram from which a small parallelogram has been removed.

Stuart Gilbert, Reflections on James Joyce: Stuart Gilbert’s Paris Journal, ed. Thomas Staley & Randolph Lewis (Texas UP 1993) - calls the punning method of Finnegans Wake ‘easy to do and hard to understand’ (p.21.)

Ellsworth Mason on Ellmann: ‘The trouble with your performances is that they have a kind of self-contained beauty of their own, and even in deepest error you have an intelligence of expression that is rare in Joycean criticism. I hereby predict that your the errors about Joyce will be the last to depart from this earth. (See Joseph Kelly‘,Stanislaus Joyce, Ellsworth Mason, and Richard Ellmann’: The Making of James Joyce’, in James Joyce Studies Annual, 3, 1992, p.112; here p115.)

On Colin MacCabe: ‘Although Joyce refused to align himself politically with Irish nationalist movements, MacCabe argues that his politics becomes manifest in the ways he deconstructs nationalist indentifications and representations.’ [117]

For [Seamus] Deane, Joyce was not at home in Ireland, but he was precisely his geographical and psychic distance that enabled him to create a critique of it. [117]

‘The relationship between literature and politics, [117] Deane contents, “was not [...] mediated through a movement, a party, a combination or a sect. For him the act of writing became the act of rebellion, rebellion was the act of writing”.’