REPORT ON JAMES JOYCE'S ULYSSES

EPISODE 17--ITHACA (666-737)

The "Ithaca" episode of Ulysses finds Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus adjourning to 7 Eccles St. at approximately 1:00 a.m., June 17, 1904 (Kenner 25) to decompress from the day's events with cocoa and conversation. The episode is presented as a series of interrogatories and their answers by an apparently objective authorial voice. These answered queries produce a windfall of information. The reader of "Ithaca" learns the physics of a falling Bloom (668), the engineering of the Dublin waterworks (671), and a complete inventory of Bloom's kitchen (675), his bookshelf (708), and his private drawers (720). In addition to this catalog of minutiae, which serves to orient the characters within a grander macrocosm, the formal, catechetical style yields tightly structured representations of the memories, fantasies, and abstract ideas of both Stephen and Leopold that are much more accessible than if they were embedded in the stream-of-consciousness that is the norm throughout the rest of the text.

"Ithaca" begins with Stephen and Leopold traveling to the Bloom house from the cab-shelter of "Eumaeus." Along the way the pair find commonality in their enthusiasm for music, in their "inherited tenacity of heterodox resistance" (666), and their views of the maddening nature of heterosexual attraction. Stephen shows little interest in Bloom's political beliefs, and Bloom show's little interest in Stephen's aesthetic theories. The subject of Stephen's collapse also causes dissent. Bloom common-sensically attributes it to "gastric inanition" (667) and acute alcoholism. Stephen points, pessimistically, to the "matutinal cloud" (667) seen by both that morning.

The couple arrive at the Bloom house and the keyless Leopold, "doubly irritated" (668) at having forgotten after reminding himself twice not to forget his key, devises a "stratagem" (668) to gain entry to the house without waking Molly. He sneaks in through the basement and then opens the hall door to his guest. Bloom next prepares cocoa for the two of them. Bloom, as an act of hospitality, does not use his favorite cup, instead serving both cocoa drinks in identical cups and giving his guest the more generous serving of Molly's precious breakfast cream. By frequently using the word "host," along with "massproduced" and "creature cocoa," Joyce turns the drinking into a "jocoserious" communion (Blamires 228).

Bloom goes on to consider the mathematical relationship of their ages (679), and discusses their common acquaintance, Mrs. Riordan of A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man. Their parentages, baptismal records and formal educations are compared (682). Neither mentions the racial differences between them (681). Stephen retells the "Parable of the Plums," first told by him in "Aeolus" (147). This evokes in Bloom the "financial . . . possibilities" of "model pedagogic themes" (685), but also a comparison with the three Moses', especially Maimonides who synthesized Jewish revelation and Aristotle, or Bloom and Stephen (Blamires 233). The two go on to comparisons of ancient Hebrew and ancient Irish languages and the possible historical connections of their respective peoples. This mingling into the composite "Stoom" and "Blephen" (682), "an apparent instance of circumincession, in that father and son exist reciprocally in one another" (Blamires 234), displays Odysseus and Telemachus, but not in their traditional parent-child roles, rather in more mystical incarnations echoing Bloom's day-long fascination with metempsychosis.

Unmaliciously and at his host's urging, Stephen recites an anti-Semitic rhyme to which Bloom reacts typically by observing his "law of the conservation of energy" (692) that has served him so well whenever violence, physical or emotional, is near. Bloom, who had earlier lamented Molly's "deficient mental development" (686), offers Stephen a room for the night hoping for Italian lessons for her, intellectual stimulation for himself, and possibly a suitor for his daughter (695). "The way to a daughter led through her mother" (695), Bloom avers. He is apparently unaware of his wife's sexual attraction to "clean" Stephen, as she expresses later in "Penelope" (776). She presumably is unaware of Stephen's aversion to bathing. The offer of shelter for the night is declined, but Italian lessons are tentatively bartered for vocal instruction (696). Bloom returns the money that he had tended to for Stephen during "Circe," later itemizing it in his June 16, 1904, budget as a "loan" and a "loan refunded" (71 1), a testament to his scrupulous decency and integrity. Stephen leaves the house with Bloom, and they meditate on the stars and the relationship between moon and woman when Molly luminously makes her presence felt in the window. The masculine pair who had been contemplating silently begin to simultaneously urinate, almost reflexively, as they gaze upon the source of the light.

Alone Leopold Bloom relaxes in his fantasy of landed gentry. He ruminates, motivated by the contents of his locked drawer, upon his father and his father's suicide, which leads to his own imagined destitution and the alternatives available. Finally, exhausted, he retires to his bedroom where he notes the imprint of Blazes Boylan upon his sheets. Rejecting violence he reserves the right of future legal recourse (733). Respecting his "approximate erection" he kisses each of Molly's rear cheeks which leads to a "proximate erection" which is met with "catechetical interrogation" (735). He delivers a prudently edited account of his day, highlighting his encounter with "Stephen Dedalus, professor and author" (735). Molly is conscious of the ten year drought of intercourse with Leopold as he drifts to sleep, at rest except for the motion of the earth, in a fetal position, thinking of Sinbad the Sailor.

Attempting to alleviate the exertion of forcing the text of Ulysses to conform too narrowly to the structure of The Odyssey, Hugh Kenner states that "in the eighteen episodes . . . the Homeric titles point less to analogy of incident or character than to analogy of situation" (24). However, he counsels that lesser, trivial correspondences' "dubious immanence adds fun to our endless exploration of (Joyce's) book" (30). "Ithaca" does abound with Homeric correspondence and contrast of incidents and characters.

Bloom devises a "stratagem" to regain entry to his home (Joyce 668) as Odysseus laid a plan to re-enter his home (Homer 264), both like a "menial, by the service door" (Gilbert 371). Bloom kisses the upended rump of Molly (Joyce 734) as Odysseus kisses the ground of Ithaca (Homer 258). And the most overt reference to The Odyssey is in Bloom's recitation of the day's events, eliding what transpired in "Nausicaa" as had Odysseus in telling his adventures to Penelope.

Joyce deviates from Homer with a Telemachus/Stephen who is not terribly interested in Bloom/Odysseus as a father figure whatever other bonds they may have forged. Bloom also, notably, fails to dispense with the suitor Boylan, who is not only not killed, but is not even confronted, and is left unmolested to cuckold him another day. And finally, the reunion of Bloom/Odysseus and Molly/Penelope is ambiguous and unconsummated.

Leopold Bloom--defined as a Jew by himself, by his acquaintances (suffering their ignorant and callous remarks in "Hades"), and by vile anti-Semites like the Citizen in "Cyclops" (342)--is confirmed to be of dubious ethnicity in "Ithaca." It is revealed in "Circe" that his mother's maiden name was Irish--"Higgins" (Kenner 141). This is reconfirmed in "Ithaca," and it is further revealed that his maternal grandmother also had an Irish surname--"Hegarty" (682). Talmudic interpretation dictates that Jewish blood is transferred through the distaff line. Bloom's immediate distaff line is shown to be thoroughly Gentile. "Ithaca" also reveals his three baptisms: two Protestant, one Catholic (682), and his father's conversion to Christianity during Bloom's infancy (716). These anomalies--along with the previous revelations such as his intact foreskin in "Nausicaa" (373); his statement in "Eumaeus" that "Christ was a jew . . . like me, though in reality I'm not" (643), refuting his statement in "Cyclops" (Kenner 141); his ravenous appetite for pork; and his apparent atheism--reveal Leopold Bloom as a Jew only by virtue of his father's name. He is defined by the Irish around him as Jewish and therefore defines himself as such, despite his cognizance of the error. The definition has been actualized to the extent that he is reluctant to ask Hynes for repayment of a loan (375) for fear he would be thought of as Reuben J. Dodd, the money-lender. Bloom battles the insurmountable bigotry with the quiet generosity of his giving more of his time and money to Paddy Dignam's widow than anyone else and without drawing attention to himself, visiting Mina Purefoy in the hospital, and caring for Stephen Dedalus. Joyce juxtaposes the oppressed Irish with the oppressed children of Israel, ironically displaying the former as tormentors, ignorant of the object of their scorn, and one of the latter as able, somehow, to live as a decent man despite the intolerable inhospitability of his environment. Stripped of his Judaic credentials, Bloom is transformed from a persecuted minority, victimized by powers beyond his control, to a beleaguered Everyman, victimized by powers beyond his control. By questioning the efficacy of humanity's compulsion to categorize each other, Joyce demonstrates the utter absurdity of racial and religious hatred. This absurdity becomes glaringly obvious in the case of Bloom: a minority of one. This demonstration also begs the question: What is an Irishman? If accurately defining Jewishness is problematic, defining Irishness, given the Celtic propensity for the ethnic assimilation of their centuries of conquerors (Vikings, Normans, English), becomes impossible. It is possible, however, to define Leopold Bloom as a transcendently decent human being.

Molly in "Penelope" describes Bloom describing himself as the "first socialist" (743). Bloom himself declares his love of "rectitude" as evidenced by his progressive views in the "economic, scientific, and political spheres" (Blamires 240). His quaint, utopian fantasy of himself as dispenser of "unbiased homogenous indisputable justice" (716) yet "mentioned in court and fashionable intelligence" (715) demonstrates his inclinations for social justice dwelling uncomfortably with his craving for material comfort and social acceptance. The two competing ideals can only harmoniously exist in his mind at play. In reality these conflicting goals cause him trouble as in "Oxen in the Sun" where it is shown Bloom "made pro-Boer noises while hanging on to his Empire investments" (Kenner 141). The absurdity of his fantasy is shown in preposterous schemes by which he proposes to finance his dream world, such as a grant from a Rockefeller or the discovery of a gold seam (719). His fantasies, along with his compulsion to calculate costs and profits of virtually every material commodity he encounters, are also a demonstration of how thoroughly the hegemony of capitalism can overwhelm even a remarkably decent and astutely sensitive man like Bloom and define his world for him.

Stephen and Bloom act as a pair of magnetically attracted opposites. Stephen is intellectually brilliant, yet dissipated; Bloom is grounded, yet intellectually pedestrian. Their differences are magnified by their parallax approaches: the youth's vigorous Aristotelian scrutiny which yields knowledge, yet never satiation, and the elder's experiential savvy which yields survival yet never comfort. Stephen Dedalus "affirms his significance as a conscious rational animal proceeding syllogistically from the known to the unknown and a conscious rational reagent between a micro- and a macrocosm ineluctably constructed upon the incertitude of the void" (697). Leopold Bloom "not verbally" but "substantially" affirms "that as a competent keyless citizen he had proceeded energetically from the unknown to the known through the incertitude of the void" (697).

It is this "competent keyless citizen"(697) who returns home in "Ithaca" triumphant over the day. He is even triumphant over Boylan as he notes that Boylan is "a bounder," "a billsticker," and "a boaster" (732); none of these epithets could be used to describe Bloom. His moral triumph over Boylan is demonstrated by his feelings of "more abnegation than jealousy, less envy than equanimity" (733). By demanding breakfast in bed and kissing his wife "on each plump melonous hemisphere" (734), Bloom proclaims his victory. The "beset indestructible man" (Kenner 4) returns undefeated by his journey.

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Metheun, 1996.

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Gilbert, Stuart. James Joyce's Ulysses. New York: Vintage, 1958.

Kenner, Hugh. Ulysses. London: Unwin, 1980.

Joyce, James. Ulysses. New York: Vintage, 1990.