Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’: a new reading

In his 1930 book James Joyce’s Ulysses, Stuart Gilbert named all the chapters in Joyce’s novel (1922) after episodes in the Odyssey—Hades, Circe, Cyclops and so on—and these titles have been universally accepted since then.  But if readers ignore the heroic and exalted Homeric parallels and focus entirely on Leopold Bloom, they will see that he is not a wily Ulysses who outwits his enemies and escapes all the dangers, but the very opposite: he is trapped by and suffers from them.

The life of this quintessential victim is an unending series of emotional disasters: of mourning, rejections, frustrations, embarrassments, humiliations, insults, bigotry and violence.  His Irish acquaintances cruelly mention Molly Bloom’s forthcoming musical and sexual tour with her manager Blazes Boylan.  They take malicious pleasure in taunting and hurting Bloom, and delight in crushing his sensitive, humane and compassionate character.  But he’s a better man than any of them, not least by his stoical ability to endure constant punishment.  A major theme of the novel is “When in doubt persecute Bloom”. Even his name suggests spilling the sacrificial Blood of the Lamb.

Though Bloom’s knowledge of Hebrew is limited to the first four letters of the alphabet and familiar words such as Kosher and Bar Mitzvah, and he eats forbidden sausages from a ferret-eyed pork butcher, his Jewish background marks him as a perennial target in Catholic Ireland.  He sees himself as a permanent outsider—a stranger in his own land—as a Jew wandering “far away over all the earth, captivity to captivity”,  condemned to suffer the ancient Babylonian exile.  He mistakenly recalls that Moses “brought us out of the land of Egypt and into the house of bondage”, rather than out of bondage — a Freudian slip.  Bloom longs for the exotic allure of the distant and never-to-be-seen Palestine; for the Dead Sea, Tiberias and Jerusalem on the opposite end of the Mediterranean from Gibraltar where Molly was born.  He’s even vaguely interested in joining a Zionist planter’s colony, whose Berlin address is Bleibtreustrasse (“remain true street”).  It’s significant that the Zionist leader Theodor Herzl died in 1904, when the novel takes place, and the Second Aliyah, or wave of immigrants to Palestine, began that year.

Bloom is not only cut off from his ancestral homeland, but also from his past and future life.  His father Rudolph had committed suicide and the memory of that tragedy plagues him throughout the novel.  In the midst of life he’s obsessed by death.  Talking with Bloom in the carriage en route to Paddy Dignam’s funeral, Jack Power and Simon Dedalus follow the doctrine of the Catholic Church and condemn suicide as a cowardly and disgraceful act.  Martin Cunningham coughs to distract them, takes a more charitable view and calls it “temporary insanity, of course”.

When they’re walking in the cemetery without Bloom, Cunningham tells them: “I was in mortal agony with you talking of suicide before Bloom. . . . His father poisoned himself.”  Joyce gradually reveals the facts of the suicide as Bloom remembers his father’s death.  At the cemetery he recalls the words of the inquest and the suicide letter.  There were “yellow streaks on his face.  He had slipped down to the foot of the bed.  Verdict: overdose.  Death by misadventure.  The letter.  For my son Leopold.”  Later, in the Nighttown chapter, Rudolph reappears in Jewish garb as a sad spook who haunts his son and shows telltale signs of his suicide: “A stooped bearded figure appears garbed in the long caftan of an elder in Zion and a smokingcap with magenta tassels.  Horned spectacles hang down at the wings of his nose.  Yellow poison streaks are on the drawn face.”

In the pub chapter, the hostile Citizen declares that Bloom’s swindling father “poisoned himself with the prussic acid”. Later on, a clinical account states that the tragedy took place eighteen years ago in a town 150 miles west of Dublin: “The Queen’s Hotel, Ennis, county Clare, where Rudolph Bloom died on the evening of the 27 June 1886, at some hour unstated, in consequence of an overdose of monkshood (aconite) selfadministered.”  Finally, Bloom remembers that Rudolph had become increasingly melancholy after his wife’s death and reconstructs his sad fragmentary letter: “To My Dear Son Leopold . . . it is no use Leopold to be . . . with your dear mother . . . that is not more to stand . . . to her . . . all for me is out . . . be kind to Athos, Leopold . . . my dear son . . . always . . .of me . . . das Herz . . . Gott . . . dein . . . [Vater].”  His last message written in poor English, perhaps after he’d taken the poison and knew he would die, expresses his wish to join his dead wife and asks Leopold to take care of his dog.  Named after one of the Three Musketeers, the aged Athos is very different from the fierce Garryowen that belongs to the fanatical Citizen in the pub.

Bloom’s son Rudy, named for his father Rudolph, has died eleven years before the novel begins, when he was only eleven days old.  One acquaintance confusingly and comically recalls Bloom’s excited response when Molly was pregnant and he didn’t know the sex of their child: “every male that’s born they think it may be their Messiah.  And every jew is in a tall state of excitement, I believe, till he knows if he’s a father or a mother”—rather than if he will have a son or a daughter.

Bloom imagines Rudy three times: as if he were still alive aged eleven, at his funeral and in a vision.  At first Rudy is a living reflection of himself: “If little Rudy had lived.  See him grow up.  Hear his voice in the house.  Walking beside Molly in an Eton suit.  My son.  Me in his eyes.”  As the child looks at his father Bloom sees a reflection of himself in Rudy’s eyes.  Second, when he sees a child’s tiny coffin on the way to the cemetery he recalls his guilt about Rudy’s death: “A dwarf’s face, mauve and wrinkled like little Rudy’s was.  Dwarf’s body, weak as putty, in a whitelined deal box. . .  Our.  Little.  Beggar.  Baby.  Meant nothing.  Mistake of nature.  If it’s healthy it’s from the mother.  If not from the man.  Better luck next time.”  In fact, it meant everything, and there was no next time.

Finally, and by contrast, Rudy’s magically bejeweled appearance, with the telltale mauve countenance, concludes the Nighttown chapter: “He has a delicate mauve face.  On his suit he has diamond and ruby buttons.  In his free left hand he holds a slim ivory cane with a violet bowknot.  A white lambkin peeps out of his waistcoat pocket.”  This idealised vision was probably influenced by a poignant passage in William Drummond’s Conversations with Ben Jonson (1619): “Came there a letter from his wife of the death of that boy in the plague.  He appeared to him, he said, of a manly shape and of that growth that he thinks he shall be at the resurrection.”

A casual misunderstanding leads to another unprovoked round of hostility and hatred.  Bloom had picked up an advertising flyer, given it to Bantam Lyons, who’d been talking about that day’s Gold Cup horse race at Ascot near London, and twice told him he was going “to throw it away”.  In the pub Bloom refuses to accept a drink and explains that he has to leave for the courthouse to deal with Paddy Dignam’s insurance.  Bloom has never in his life backed a horse and didn’t know that Throwaway had unexpectedly won the race and paid 20 to 1.  When Bloom leaves the pub Lenehan says, “The courthouse is a blind.  He had a few bob on Throwaway and he’s gone to gather in the shekels” — the Jewish currency in the Bible.  Lyons told Lenehan that Bloom gave him the tip, bet five shillings and won five pounds.  Furious that Bloom didn’t stand a round of drinks with the winnings, the Citizen exclaims, “There’s a jew for you!  All for number one.  Cute as a shithouse rat.  Hundred to five.”

Bloom is the last of his name.  Fearful of creating another infant who might die soon after his birth, Bloom—though still lustful—sleeps head-to-feet in bed with Molly and has stopped having sexual relations with her: “Could never like it again after Rudy.”  He’s therefore forced to tolerate Molly’s infidelity with Blazes Boylan and many other lovers, and to be publicly mocked as a cuckold.  After renouncing sex with Molly, Bloom must find other ways to satisfy his lust.  Using the pseudonym of Henry Flower—“a flower that bloometh”—he carries on a flirtatious correspondence with Martha Clifford.  He stares at and fantasises about the bosom and bottom of a naked statue in the National Library.  He watches his floating penis and masturbates in the bathtub.

Fascinated by silk stockings and ladies’ underwear, he ecstatically stares at Gerty MacDowell (a few years older than his teenaged daughter Milly) who attracts a potential husband by shamelessly revealing her knickers:

she let him and she saw that he saw and then it went so high it went out of sight a moment and she was trembling in every limb from being bent so far back that he had a full view high up above her knee where no-one ever not even on the swing or wading and she wasn’t ashamed and he wasn’t either to look in that immodest way like that because he couldn’t resist the sight of the wondrous revealment half offered like those [cancan] skirtdancers behaving so immodest before gentlemen looking and he kept on looking, looking.

Bloom is so excited by Gerty’s wanton display that he masturbates, has a fireworks-orgasm and ejaculates in his trousers: “then the Roman candle burst and it was like a sigh of O! . . and gushed out of it a stream of rain gold hair threads . . . all greeny dewy stars fallen with golden.”  This both parodies sex with Molly and alludes to Zeus impregnating Danae in a shower of gold.  When Gerty stands up and limps away Bloom realizes she’s crippled.  Even though she’s behaved indecently and provoked him, he feels guilty about taking advantage of a lame and vulnerable young woman.

In Barney Kiernan’s pub the drunken Citizen, a truculent troglodyte, launches the most violent attack on Bloom.  The Citizen insists that Jewish traders swindle the poor Irish peasants and says, “We want no more strangers in our house.”  Bloom, who (like Joyce) is afraid of dogs, pretends to ignore his remarks as Garryowen, as aggressive as his master, stands near Bloom “looking up to know who to bite and when”.  As the Citizen advocates lynching on land and flogging at sea, Bloom contradicts him by opposing the use of “force against force”.  The persecuted Bloom tries to deflect the assault by arguing, “Persecution, says he, all the history of the world is full of it.  Perpetuating national hatred among nations.”  Bravely but hopelessly confronting the surge of animosity, he laments: “I belong to a race too, says Bloom, that is hated and persecuted.  Also now.  This very moment.  This very instant. . . . Robbed, says he.  Plundered.  Insulted.  Persecuted.  Taking what belongs to us by right. . . .—Are you talking about the new Jerusalem? says the citizen.  –I’m talking about injustice, says Bloom.”  Cornered by the Citizen, Bloom resorts to his last desperate, biblically correct but blasphemous argument, which enrages his enemy: “the Saviour was a jew and his father was a jew. . . . Your God was a jew.  Christ was a jew like me.”  Suddenly a defensor fidei, the blasphemous Citizen responds with, “By Jesus, says he, I’ll brain that bloody jewman for using the holy name.  By Jesus, I’ll crucify him,” and drives him out of the pub.

But the Citizen does not have the last word.  Bloom has given five shillings to Dignam’s widow and five children, his largest expense of the day.  Martin Cunningham, who’d tried to deflect the condemnation of suicide, looks at Bloom and concludes: “Sympathetic human man he is.  Intelligent.  Like Shakespeare’s face.”  Unlike his malicious compatriots, he thinks Bloom has “Always a good word to say.”  Later on another man, thinking of Bloom’s generous contribution, quotes The Merchant of Venice and says, “there is much kindness in the jew.”

Bloom kindly serves Molly breakfast in bed, buys pornographic books by Paul de Kock (“Nice name he has”) to arouse her, and is himself sexually excited by the thought of her liaison that afternoon with the overheated Blazes Boylan.  As Molly defensively says, “it’s all his own fault if I am an adulteress.”  Boylan had bet on Sceptre, the horse with the phallic name, and is the opposite of her repressed and frustrated husband.  Bloom spies his rival in a carriage on the way to his rendezvous with Molly: “By Bachelor’s walk jogjaunty jingled Blazes Boylan, bachelor, in sun in heat, mare’s glossy rump atrot, with flick of whip, on bounding tyres: sprawled, warmseated, Boylan, impatience, ardentbold.”

In a sad but amusing scene in Nighttown, Boylan takes the eager Molly as if he owns her while Bloom plays the humble servant.  He gets more excitement and pleasure from masturbating while imagining Boylan screwing Molly than from actually having sex with her himself:

Boylan

(tosses him sixpence)  Here, to buy yourself a gin and splash.  (he hangs his hat smartly on a peg of Bloom’s antlered head)  Show me in.  I have a little private business with your wife, you understand?

Bloom

Thank you, sir.  Yes, sir.  Madam Tweedy is in her bath, sir.

Marion [Molly]

He ought to feel himself highly honoured.  (she plops splashing out of the water)  Raoul darling, come and dry me.  I’m in my pelt.  Only my new hat and a carriage sponge.

Boylan

(a merry twinkle in his eye)  Topping!

Bloom has no real friends.  During his futile search for his lost son, he rescues Stephen Dedalus from a fight in a whorehouse and establishes a strange communion as they piss together, wittily echoing Tom Moore’s poem “The Meeting of the Waters.” (This scene inspired Seamus Heaney’s “Pit Stop at Castletown” about pissing with Robert Lowell in Ireland.)  Bloom invites Stephen into his home and faces yet another conflict.  Molly, who’d admired a “lovely young cock” on a little naked statue, fancies Stephen as a potential lover.

In his Inferno, Dante observed: Nessun maggior dolore / Che ricordarsi del tempo felice / Nella miseria. (“There’s no greater pain than remembering past happiness in misery.”)  Bloom, now miserable, was happiest when he proposed to Molly on Howth Hill and when Rudy was born.  A major theme of Ulysses, expressed in four simple but powerful words, is “Me.  And me now.”  He feels “Envy, jealousy, abnegation” but never achieves “equanimity”.  Bloom could plead, like Molly with her creator, “O Jamesy let me out of this pooh.”

Jeffrey Meyers published James Salter: Pilot, Screenwriter, Novelist in February 2024.  His Parallel Lives: From Freud and Mann to Arbus and Plath will appear on July 3, 2024.  His book, 45 Ways to Look at Hemingway, will be out in July 2025, all with Louisiana State University Press.

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