Ulysses

“He put the huge key in his inner pocket.”

From the opening episodes of the novel, Stephen and Bloom are portrayed as both opposite and alike. Stephen is sure to take the key to the tower, while Bloom forgets his own key. Stephen’s key weighs heavily on him, the concept of “home” burdening his consciousness, while Bloom may feel annoyed by his oversight of the key but seems to willingly stay away from home long enough for his wife’s visitor to conclude his business. Both men are bound together by access to their home, but the inherent irony is that the man who takes the key (Stephen) is the man who never plans to return to this home, while the man who forgets his key (Bloom) is framed as the titular Ulysses, returning home and even bringing Stephen with him. Through small gestures and actions, the men are bound together in a narrative that presents them as two sides of the same coin.

“History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”

Stephen’s cryptic comment is framed as a challenge to those who use history to justify what Stephen perceives to be immoral actions. Haines’s comments about English colonialism in Ireland and Deasy’s comments about Jewish people rankle Stephen; both men use history as a justification for historical immoralities that they believe are consigned to the past but which Stephen believes have not been addressed. Stephen feels trapped by the lingering violence of imperialism and prejudice, especially as those who support the dominant, violent forces feel that the matters are settled. The men absolve contemporary problems by blaming history, which turns history into a self-perpetuating trap that undermines the efforts by people such as Stephen to improve the world. Stephen’s view is quintessentially Modernist.

“Something he buried there, his grandmother.”

Earlier in the story, Stephen posed a riddle to his students about a fox burying its grandmother. As he tries to understand the movements of a dog on a beach, his thoughts coalesce around the imagery of the riddle. The dog stands in for the fox, with Stephen wondering whether it is searching for the grandmother it buried before. The artistically inclined Stephen tries to perceive the world through metaphor, allusion, and allegory. To him, the world is a text waiting to be read and interpreted, a riddle waiting to be solved. In viewing the dog, he is attempting to insert into a literary pattern of behavior as a means of understanding the incomprehensibly random and unfathomable world around him.

“Asquat on the cuckstool.”

Bloom visits the outside toilet. When he sits on it, the toilet is described as the “cuckstool” (66). Traditionally, a cuckstool was a form of medieval punishment for dishonest tradesmen or gossipy women. For Bloom, this form of punishment has a sexual subtext. He is still obsessing over his wife’s potential affair with Blazes Boylan, an affair that would make him a “cuckold.” The toilet is his cuckstool because his obsession and his humiliation regarding his wife’s affair has followed him everywhere, even into this private place.

“Then all settled down on their knees and he sat back quietly on his bench.”

Bloom’s Jewish identity separates him from many of his compatriots. Though he attends the church service, the descriptions of his physical actions reveal his separation from the Catholic world. As they settle onto their knees in an act of devotion, he sits back and stares at women. As they repeat prayers, he is silent. Bloom is among the people, part of the congregation, yet ethnically, religiously, and physically alienated from them.

“Parnell will never come again.”

Charles Parnell is a hero for the Irish nationalist cause, but he is dead. As they walk through the graveyard, the men reflect on his death and the newspaper man Hynes says that Parnell will not return, implying that the cause must find a new figurehead rather than become trapped in nostalgia. The novel is replete with historical cycles repeating, with characters becoming trapped in narrative loops that echo across time, space, and fiction. With Bloom as the titular Ulysses, another person must be found to fill the Parnell archetype now that Parnell is gone.

“That door too sllt creaking, asking to be shut. Everything speaks in its own way. Sllt.”

As Bloom explores the printing shop, the machines begin to intrude on the prose. The regular, rhythmic stamping of the machines is represented by the onomatopoeic phrase “slit” (117) that cannot be stopped or hindered by human thought, just as Bloom imagined the modern machines smashing humans to atoms at an earlier point in the episode. The machines are speaking in their own way, proving to be an unstoppable force of modernity that is represented in the prose itself by this mechanical new word that intrudes on the narrative.

“Queer idea of Dublin he must have, tapping his way round by the stones.”

The blind man’s version of Dublin is different from Bloom’s version of the city. Bloom assembles a subjective understanding of Dublin, infused with his personal experiences of infidelity, antisemitism, and alienation. These sensations create a particular understanding of the city, just as the blind man’s understanding is affected by his own personal travails. There is no objective version of the city, only subjective understandings of the world, all of which have their own merit.

“O, yes, he must speak the grand old tongue.”

Stephen listens to the conversation of the academics as they discuss the upcoming poets that may form a new literary movement in Ireland. His name is not among them. The consensus of the men is that any poet representative of Ireland must speak “the grand old tongue” (185). In this context, the tongue in question can be understood to be the Irish language. Stephen does not speak much Gaelic, which alienates him from the idea of Irish identity. As much as he loves his country, as much as he aspires to be a poet, his inability to communicate in the authentic, original Irish language separates him from a nostalgic, traditional idea of Ireland.

“Fabulous artificer, the hawklike man. You flew. Whereto?”

Stephen Dedalus searches for more meaning in his life through literature and history. During his discussion about Shakespeare, he is asked “what’s in a name” (200). This question sets Stephen’s mind racing, as he compares himself to his own namesake from Greek mythology, Daedalus. As an inventor imprisoned in a tower, Daedalus built wax wings for himself and his son, Icarus, which allowed him to escape but led to his son’s tragic death as, through hubris, Icarus uses his father’s invention to fly too close to the sun. Daedalus’s genius allowed him to escape but, because his son could not use it correctly, brought great tragedy into his life. When asking where his namesake flew, Stephen is concerned about where his own intellectual pursuits will lead him and, as the son of another more revered Dedalus, again reveals folly in failing to learn from one’s predecessors.

“They drove his wits astray, he said, by visions of hell.”

Buck Mulligan believes that Stephen can “never be a poet” (239) because he is too obsessed with the idea of hell. Stephen is not a believer in traditional religion, but the thought of hell dominates his thinking. This atheistic obsession creates a sense of inevitable tragedy in Stephen’s life, in that his ambition to become a writer is undermined by his obsession with a religious concept in which he does not believe.

“Tap.”

As Bloom sits and drinks in the bar, the prose begins to break down into a series of sensory intrusions. The piano tuner’s cane is heard from outside, punctuating the narration with the occasional “tap” (269) as the man draws nearer. The taps become louder, more frequent, and more intrusion, creating a rising tension in the prose as the song and the cane work in tandem to build toward a crescendo, just as Ben Dollard finishes his song and Bloom exits the bar. In this way, Joyce illustrates the staccato intrusion of exterior reality shaping the workings of one’s inner reality.

“A nation is the same people living in the same place.”

Bloom’s definition of a nation seems deliberately and defensively loose. The citizen is implying that Bloom’s Jewish Hungarian heritage means that he cannot be part of the same nation as the Irish Catholics in the bar. However, Bloom’s definition is true to his character. His humanistic interpretation of nationhood is self-selecting, in which each person is empowered to join and become part of a nation, rather than having nationhood thrust upon them. Given that the comment comes during a discussion of British colonial control of Ireland, Bloom’s definition seems more in line with Irish nationalism than the citizen’s antisemitic implications.

“Homerule sun setting in the southeast.”

Home rule was an important political issue in British colonial Ireland. Home rule refers to the capacity of a colony to govern itself in some capacity, though remaining part of the empire. Charles Parnell and his Irish nationalists made the call for home rule an important part of their campaign. Bloom’s pessimistic view of the question of Irish independence views home rule as a setting sun, an issue that is disappearing over the horizon in the direction of England as seen from Dublin Bay.

“Why me? Because you were so foreign from the others.”

The same foreign, outsider status that makes Bloom feel so alienated from his fellow men is also what first attracted Molly to him. Molly, one of the most important and most fundamental bedrocks on which Bloom’s character and identity are built, came to him because he was unlike other men. While Bloom often wishes he could relate to people, that he could be more like them, the difference and the alienation that he experiences have a positive dimension that differentiates him from others and brought Molly into his life.

“There is none now to be for Leopold, what Leopold was for Rudolph.”

Rudolph Bloom was Leopold Bloom’s father, who died by suicide in 1886. Bloom named his son Rudy after his father, though the son died shortly after being born. Bloom is caught between the deaths of two Rudolphs, whose absences weigh heavily on his mind. He has no one to look to for paternal advice and no son to pass down his knowledge to. Bloom is caught in a void of masculinity, deprived of the men who shaped him and whom he might shape.

“We are all born in the same way but we all die in different ways.”

The men’s discussion about pregnancy and death arrives at a point central to the themes of the novel. Each person’s life is unified by the nature of birth, as all people are born in a similar fashion. Given the sheer number of ways in which a life can end, however, death is not nearly as unifying. From the moment of a person’s birth, fate and circumstances conspire to fracture their life into an unknowable and alienated pattern. The older a person gets, the more removed they are from the moment of unified human understanding. Birth unites and death alienates, but the nature of the life lived between these moments creates the unknowable complexity of existence.

“Sleep reveals the worst side of everyone.”

During the extended theatrical hallucination, Bloom announces that sleep is the moment when the “worst side” (511) of a person is revealed. Bloom has not slept during the course of the narrative, but the hallucination is an extension of his subconscious. He is suffering from a waking nightmare in which he interrogates his own worst tendencies. To Bloom, the theatrical episode is a dream from which he cannot wake.

“Whereas the simple fact of the case was it was simply a case of the husband not being up to the scratch with nothing in common between them beyond the name and then a real man arriving on the scene, strong to the verge of weakness, falling a victim to her siren charms and forgetting home ties.”

Bloom empathizes with the husband of Parnell’s mistress, feeling naturally drawn to the man whose situation most closely resembles his. Bloom hears the men mocking this man and he is frustrated on the man’s behalf, feeling that the jokes apply to him. He insists to himself that such affairs are simple and natural, desperate to convince himself of this even though he has spent the entire day fretting over Boylan’s visit to Molly. The excuses Bloom makes for the cuckolded husband are excuses he cannot bring himself to make for his wife’s suspected infidelity.

“But it was no animal’s fault in particular if he was built that way.”

In a roundabout way, Bloom again tries to excuse his own flaws. Animals cannot be blamed for their constitution or their flaws, so neither can he be blamed for his own flaws. He is desperate to project his own self-loathing on the world in the hope that everyone feels as badly about themselves as he does about himself. If this were the case, if animals were naturally “built” (616) to be flawed, he hopes, then his anxious self-hatred would bring him closer to people rather than alienate him.

“Its universality: its democratic equality and constancy to its nature in seeking its own level.”

Bloom has an innate reverence for water. He admires water’s ability to find “its own level,” respecting this democratic flattening of the self that is brought about by something as objective and as fair as gravity. Bloom envies water’s ability to become evenly distributed according to an objective measure and wishes that humanity could do the same. Bloom wishes that society possessed a similar “democratic equality,” one that would make him the equal of every man rather than making him feel perpetually like an outsider.

“Where? ■.”

The final punctuation mark of Episode 17 is a large black dot. The black dot brings Bloom’s narrative to a close, providing a visual representation of his unconscious. From this moment on, his wife will take over the narrative just like her actions have dominated his thoughts all day. The use of a single black mark to end Bloom’s story reflects him sinking into the deep black void of unconscious. Like the mark itself, Bloom’s unconscious is vast and subjective, open to interpretation but freed from the anxious thoughts that have defined his waking life. The mark itself is the distant, unknowable pinprick in the sky that Bloom gazed at while urinating in the garden, becoming for the reader what the stars were for Bloom: a blank canvas, ready for projections of the understanding of the self.

“I always knew wed go away in the end I can tell him the Spanish and he tell me the Italian then hell see Im not so ignorant.”

Molly speaks Spanish due to her upbringing in Gibraltar. She imagines a vacation with Bloom, in which she will prove her intelligence to him by speaking in her second language. The differentiation between Italian and Spanish creates another duality between the man and woman, the husband and wife. Both are speaking in second languages, both of which are Romance languages, but they are not mutually intelligible. Spanish and Italian are similar and different, just as Bloom and his wife are similar and different. Molly’s fantasy vacation is a way to reaffirm her intelligence to herself and subtly reassert the duality of her marriage in one fell swoop.