The nuance of Leopold Bloom is a huge artistic accomplishment, and Joyce has a seemingly limitless number of tools at his disposal to refine Bloom's character.
In Chapter Five, when Bloom leaves his house in the morning, there is the sense that he has begun his quest. A tracking shot has Bloom walking past storefronts, Joyce effortlessly breaks into Bloom's conscious ("Could have give that address too") with an aside that won't make sense until Bloom reaches the post office, jarring and alerting the reader, then we're back into the scene. The precision of detail of what is observed, and how it is observed, evokes a bifurcated, but simultaneous, experience which I can only compare to Cubism, if the paintings also took place in time. Maybe the best examples are from Martha's letter, when Bloom reimagines it replacing flowers for nouns (letters glanced over are a running gag), and when he is in the chemist's.
But, what do I mean by Bloom's quest? In Chapter 4, Bloom seemed to be imprisoned. Now as he leaves the house in the morning, he is leaving a certain safety, and encountering the myriad puzzles of turn of the century Dublin. There is a momentous feel to the chapter. Paradoxically, so acute and unflinching are the details, there is nearly a documentary quality to what is observed. Events are both inflated and deflated.
One technique Joyce uses to very good effect in this chapter to create that tone, is the Homeric motif of Lotophagi. Chapter Five corresponds to Book Nine of the Odyssey, and Joyce's Lotus Eaters are well adapted: the British soldiers in the post office ad, the churchgoers, and the horses at their feedbags are all actually frightening images, especially to Bloom (although humorously, because they frighten Bloom, they also seem amusing to the reader). At church, Bloom's naive and nearly humanistic idea of Catholic service is contrasted with the fire and brimstone actuality of it, and the specter of kneeling, slavishly crossing themselves. The horses eat: "No use thinking of it anymore. Nosebag time." And the soldiers are "half baked, hypnotized like".
Against the dangers of advertising and the church, Bloom has some powers (He is, after all, the story's hero). One is sight. "Clearly I can see today," Bloom thinks while staring at a lady. The perception is clearly multifaceted; Bloom can see a lot of things that others can not. Often his perception is in service to another power, his "flower". The lotus-eaters are castrated: the horses are geldings, the church's best singers are castratos, and the soldiers seem to have subsumed their sexuality into national identity. The frisson of a sexual thought keeps Bloom from forgetting.
Consider, the Lotus-eaters had forgotten their homeland completely. Bloom would like to forget that Blaze Boylan has an assignation with his wife; a few time we see the cognitive dissonance at work, when he gets a letter from his Martha, for instance, or when he thinks about confession and what the women confess to ("chachachachachacha"ing). He may disguise his thoughts, but he cannot forget them, he knows what Molly's up to. To "forget his homeland", would be to give up the love, sexual and otherwise, in his marriage.
1 comment:
Your posts have been excellent, particularly the Lotus Eaters one, in which you make several telling points. You're right about the consistency between Joyce's literary approach and cubism, although there are some differences too. Both problematize "seeing," breaking it up into the collage of words through which we see things. It's interesting that a mainstay of cubist pictures was the newspaper ("Le Journal"), where Joyce, in the 7th chapter, writes in newspaper format, but also shows the falseness of discourse in the paper. You also comment interestingly on Catholicism. Either of these could be a paper topic, but Catholicism would need some narrowing down to work appropriately. Ritual? Joyce here is concerned with the incarnation of spirit in flesh.. or the failure of that incarnation in the modern waste land.
While the occasioal post has been a little slight, your posts are generally thoughtful. Stephen's "non sequiturs" - I think you mean his pithy, aphoristic sayings - are as close as he comes to being a mouthpiece for Joyce. They do stand out, because they are moments of rebellion in the generally withdrawn Stephen, and moments in which he is separate. He insults people without their knowing it at some of his most interesting moments.
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