I ♥ the Hibernian Metropolis

Three chapters of Stephen. Three chapters of Bloom. In chapter seven, "Aeolus," the two finally intersect (albeit briefly) in a newspaper office located at the epicenter of Dublin proper. However, this much-anticipated meeting is anything but climactic, with each protagonist barely acknowledging the presence of the other. The chapter is titled for the God the Winds who had bagged up and given to Odysseus all of the winds save the one that would return Odysseus home to Ithaca. However, as their captain slept, Odysseus's curious men opened the bag of winds, thus preventing a safe and timely return home. Throughout this episode, note the "wind" being blown around the newspaper office, both in terms of the bloviating (thank you Bill O'Reilly) on the part of the newsmen as well as in the 63 newspaper headlines that punctuate the chapter. It might be worth noting at this point that in addition to parallels to Homer, each chapter also contains a correspondence to a particular body part: "Calypso" is the kidney, "Lotus-Eaters" is genitals, "Hades" is the heart, and "Aeolus," of course, is the lungs. (Significantly, as he is so out of touch with his body, Stephen's three chapters have no bodily correspondences.) Finally, recall that Joyce once famously said that a writer "should never write about the extraordinary. That is for the journalist." Thus, the novel as a whole becomes a campaign against writing that distorts the ability to accurately perceive the world. Hence, "factual" newspaper reporting proves less than ideal in portraying the truths about life, since (1) fact-based newspaper accounts fail to accurately capture human experience (which we'll witness first-hand when we read the woefully inaccurate and incomplete newspaper account of Dignam's funeral near the end of the book) and (2) the news deals with the extraordinary, not the ordinary.

Bring Out Your Dead!

Every great epic - The Odyssey, The Aeneid, The Divine Comedy, Paradise Lost - must contain a journey to the Underworld, the world of the Dead, and Ulysses is no exception. In "Hades," Joyce uses the graveyard setting of Paddy Dignam's funeral to meditate on death. Note that at the same time, in "Proteus," Stephen Dedalus is also meditating on death as he walks along the beach. However, whereas the gloomy Stephen would likely subscribe the aphorism, "In the midst of life we are in death" (96), Bloom sees things differently, reemerging from the graveyard world of the dead with a newfound lust for life in all its glory: "Plenty to see and hear and feel yet. Feel live warm beings near you. Let them sleep in their maggoty beds. They are not going to get me this innings. Warm beds: warm fullblooded life" (115). For Bloom (and, perhaps, Joyce himself) in the midst of death we are in life.

Meet Leopold Bloom!

The protagonist of Joyce's novel -- and the counterpart for the hero Odysseus -- is none other than Leopold Bloom, a middle-aged Jewish advertising man whose wife is about to have an affair. How can this somewhat neurotic nobody be the embodiment - or, more precisely, the reincarnation - of perhaps the greatest literary hero of them all? Be patient, boys. You shall see.

The first chapter is titled "Calypso" after the goddess on whose island Odysseus is imprisoned for seven years. The first thing to make clear is that this chapter and the next two take place simultaneously with the three earlier Stephen chapters: 8:00, 10:00, and 11:00 a.m. Note also that while Stephen is a young, heady intellectual, Bloom is very much attuned to his bodily needs and to sensual/fleshly pleasures. Bloom's family situation is less than stellar: his sexy wife Molly is about to have an affair with Blazes Boylan; his daughter Milly has just turned 15 and is beginning to emerge sexually; and 11 years ago his son Rudy died at 11 days old. Finally, note Joyce's excessive realism: while Shakespeare, Dickens, and many other writers went pretty far in terms of accuratelycapturing human experience and behavior, only Joyce goes so far as to portray his lead character not only taking a crap, but thoroughly enjoying it.

The second chapter of Part II is titled "Lotus-Eaters" after the brief encounter Odysseus and his men have with an island of people addicted to the stupifying, narcotic effects of eating Lotus leaves. Odysseus's men are tempted to remain there (who wouldn't be?), but Odysseus succeeds in forcing them back to his ship. Similarly, in this chapter Bloom is tempted toward a narcotic state of forgetfulness (especially with respect to his wife's impending infidelity), only to be constantly jolted back into the painfulness of reality. Thus, the flower imagery of the chapter is counteracted by images of pain and suffering, culminating in Bloom's assessment, "No roses without thorns" (78).

Finally, a word on Joyce's famous stream-of-consciousness style of narration. While Bloom does not narrate the novel in first person, we do get his thoughts throughout the novel. The thing to keep in mind is that Joyce gives us Bloom's thoughts as they occur, with no expository information whatsoever. Another way of saying this is that we don't get any information that Bloom himself is not thinking at the time. One classic example of this: "Potato I have" (57). A few hundred pages later, we will finally understand what the hell this sentence means ... but Bloom doesn't let us in on its full meaning because he's not thinking of it at the time.