Eros, Thanatos, and Bloom

To experience James Joyce’s Ulysses is in the first place to experience a Very Hard Book. The reasons are obvious. Joyce’s erudition is so vast that even when a reader escapes the devouring maw of stream of consciousness and the wandering rocks of diction, he may still be drawn down into the whirlpools of allusion scattered throughout the text. Whereas most works of fiction occupy a discrete place within a literary tradition, Ulysses grapples, as it were, with all of tradition at once. Almost every word becomes the end of a strand we might follow back to Shakespeare or Homer, to Dante or Mozart, to Aristotle or Ovid, with countless dimmer luminaries along the way. A Very Hard Book indeed; and our first impressions of the book, gleaned in the high school classroom or the public library, revolve around its impenetrability.

Rarely are we reminded of the human drama that drives Joyce to his inventive heights, the drama which indeed calls for this difficulty. What Joyce attempts in Ulysses is to set before us both the depths of human anguish and the heights of the imagination as his characters seek to square the longings of the heart with the harshness of reality. We know Stephen Dedalus, the Hamlet-obsessed, ambitious, prickly genius. But in the thickets of his thought we may miss his agony at his mother’s death; his father’s hardness; his being a boy who has found as yet no way forward in the world. We know Leopold Bloom, wandering the streets of Dublin, cuckolded by his voluptuous wife. Yet perhaps we little remember Rudy, the dead son who haunts the couple’s love, who hovers between Bloom and his marriage bed like the ghost of Banquo.

Anton Chekhov tells us that it is the dramatic interplay between male and female that drives all story telling. Odysseus’s tale weaves through the magnetic fields of Circe, Kalypso, and Nausikaa toward the lodestar of Penelope. Telemachus seeks himself, and his father, between his mother and Athene. Stephen Dedalus grapples with the ghost of his mother, begging for the prayers that he would not give. He would not commit the crime for which Saul consented to the first Stephen’s death. Leopold Bloom can no longer bring the “limp father of thousands” to bear, no longer rouse the “floating flower” from its languor. Haunted by birth and death, he can only give himself sad pleasure on Sandymount Strand as the fireworks go off and Gerty MacDowell leans back for his gratification, and Blazes Boylan ignites Molly’s sensuality. Let him, says Bloom, deflated, resigned, with the fireworks above like Dante’s stars, Molly like Beatrice in the upper window of Eccles Street, and the devil’s laughter echoing through the streets of Dublin.

One of the questions that Joyce’s intractable storytelling poses is this: what has the dynamism between man and woman come to? Bloom commits his sad, far-off adultery with Gerty as Molly romps with Blazes Boylan. Bloom’s deed is a sad affair all around, one whose faults are ineluctably damning. Nonetheless, we feel that there is in this encounter an honesty, at least a personality and presence, altogether lacking in the pornographic paradigm of modern sexuality. Meanwhile, the affair of Molly and Blazes exists along the slick pane of the voyeur. The pornographer’s lens digests the woman, transmutes her into goddess or at least idol, object of an all-consuming worship to be repeated ad nauseam.

The same conquering, modernist sexuality churns beneath the surface throughout Ulysses. It is there in Stephen’s ruminations on Anne Hathaway, the older woman who on some readings overmastered the young Shakespeare, like Venus drawing Adonis down beside her. It is there in Molly Bloom’s ecstatic first gift to Leopold, the seed cake she presses from her mouth into his on Howth Hill. She, voluptuary, playful, commanding; literally inseminates him. And all the men of Dublin are drawn to Bloom’s wife, from Blazes Boylan to Red Lenaghan and Simon Dedalus to of course Mr. Bloom himself—stick-in-the-mud Poldy, watching the bat squeak by in the dark.

So Molly feeds Bloom the seed cake, and two children issue from their love. But Rudy Bloom, dying, sets Leopold on his ten years’ wandering course through pork kidneys and funerals, through epistolary infidelities and onanistic chances on the strand, through comment after comment on his wife’s great voice and beauty and the appearance, frequent and ineluctable in the small rounds of Dublin, of his wife’s impresario and lover. He remains servant to the marriage bed, and a devoted one, but he has so far failed to mount it once more as Ulysses did.

For Bloom, the conjugal act is frightful. There is the fear that the wife will have cause to say, as Beatrice to Benedick: “You always end with a jade’s trick,” that is, you always stop just short. But there is also the fear that this act, ending in the “little death” of ecstasy, should in giving life give death with it. There is in fact a certain knowledge that giving birth means also giving death, that the child who is born is the child who must someday die. In general we comfort ourselves with the natural order of things: the father and the mother precede the son into the grave. Yet it is not always so, and when the parents bury the child, death, in itself the most natural of things, becomes the most unnatural, the sign that sings in its dread clarion that something is horribly wrong with the world. Leopold and Molly Bloom must bury their boy; their own conjugal love is buried with him, and it will take a long road through the dark to resurrect it. For Bloom the vegetarian, even the death of a beast is too much: what must the death of his son have been. The kernel of his agony germinates, we might say, in the book which brings it to our notice, a book which in its very intractability echoes the agony of the fallen world.

Even in a Christian paradigm, one in which the Blooms move, though faintly, as if at the end of a tether which holds together by a single trembling fiber, it is difficult to face our role in bringing children to birth, knowing they must one day face death. When the tether breaks, we enter a harsh and frightening world in which, completely autonomous, we would spare as many as we can the horror of that autonomy, the dreadful possibilities of a life spun out to the certainty of the grave.

This interplay of death and eros in the rich havoc of Joyce’s language produces a flight of words in Ulysses which signals our fundamental need to give birth to beauty—not simply in the body of another, but in eternity. Leopold Bloom, in his failures, points us toward fruition, the flowering of the self which obtains in deathless, interpersonal love. 

Daniel Fitzpatrick is the author of the novel Only the Lover Sings. His translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy, illustrated by sculptor Timothy Schmalz, was published in 2021 in honor of the 700th anniversary of Dante’s death. He is the editor of Joie de Vivre, a journal of art, culture, and letters for South Louisiana.