nation all who are descended from foreign families would be impossible, and to deny the name of patriot to all those who are not of lrish stock would be to deny it to almost all the heroes of the modem movement... Our civilisation is a vast fabric, in which the most diverse elements are mingled, in which nordic aggressiveness and Roman law, the new bourgeois conventions and the remnant of a Syriac religion are reconciled. In such a fabric, it is useless to look for a thread that may have remained pure and virgin without having undergone the influence of a neighbouring thread. What race, or what language (if we except the few whom a playful will seems to have preserved in ice, like the people of Iceland) can boast of being pure today? And no race has less right to utter such a boast than the race now living in Ireland. Nationality (if it really is nor a convenient fiction like so many others to which the scalpels of present-day scientists have given the coup de grace) must find its reason for being rootèd in something that surpasses and transcends and informs changing things like blood and the human word. The mystic theologian who assumed the pseudonym of Dionysius, the pseudo-Aeropagite, says somewhere, "God has disposed the limits of nations according to his angels", and this probably is not a purely mystical concept. Do we not see that in Ireland the Danes, the Firbolgs, the Milesians from Spain, the Norman invaders, and the Anglo-Saxon settlers have united to form a new entity, one might say under the influence of a local deity?47 In tutti i suoi scritti Joyce coerentemente oppone il concetto di una razza mista a quello di una nazione pura, e questa opposizione può essere di importanza vitale anche per la nostra comprensione di Shakespeare e dell'unità della Gran Bretagna nella lingua inglese. Per approfondire queste indagini, tanto affascinanti quanto necessarie, 180
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTExMDY2NQ==