Between the Covers
Who are UCD’s fictional alumni? From Stephen Dedalus to Ross O’Carroll-Kelly, they’re a colourful crew, for whom university represents variously an intellectual forum, a drinking club, a place to make friends, a first brush with sexual diversity and somewhere to air your new Ralph Lauren chinos. The nameless narrator in At-Swim-Two-Birds barely attends lectures before being consumed by his characters. Maeve Binchy’s Circle of Friends embodies the collegiate spirit of the 1950s, while Joseph O’Connor’s Cowboys and Indians are 1980s Generation X-ers. And if Stephen Dedalus inhabits an all-male milieu in the 1890s, Emma Donoghue’s Maria Murphy gets her revenge 100 years later by hanging out only with women. BRIDGET HOURICAN investigates.

UCD’s most famous fictional son, Stephen Dedalus, came up to Earlsfort Terrace about 1898, the same time as his creator. James Joyce (BA 1902) was UCD’s most brilliant ever student, and Stephen, the protagonist of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, is by far the smartest of all the fictional students, and part of a gifted set, with whom he discusses Marx, Rousseau, Aquinas, Aristotle and, of course, Newman. They quote Latin as easily as later students quote advertising slogans. We know, because we observe him alone, that Stephen is passionate and sensitive but, to his peers and lecturer, he comes across as cold, intellectual, and dismissive. He refuses to sign student petitions, laughs in his friends’ faces when they ask him questions, becomes irate, and coins bitter aphorisms of gnomic brilliance. As a result, his contemporaries are obsessed with him – “the only man I see in this institution with an individual mind,” cries one. On long walks with his best friend, Cranly, Stephen relaxes a little, discusses family, religion, women, love. He is unusual – among fictional and actual students – in his emphasis on intellectual development but, like generations of students, he finds that the best college has to offer is not lectures and the library, but conversations with equals (or near-equals).


YOU CAN READ THE REST OF THIS STORY IN THE 2009/2010 ISSUE OF UCD Connections Magazine, OUT NOW . Click here receive a copy