Eumaneus
Reading the Odyssey greatly improved my understanding of the Eumaneus episode in Ulysses. In Homer, Odysseus finally returns to his native land, but he feels that it might be prudent to conceal his identity at first and take in the situation incognito. In disguise he goes to the hut of his faithful swineherd Eumaneus; there he meets his son, but does not initially reveal his identity.
The ideas of return and hidden identity are recurring themes throughout Eumaneus. Bloom and Stephen stop to collect themselves at a cabman's shelter, which is sort of like an all-night greasy spoon for cab drivers. Therein they meet a sailor who could be Odysseus himself; he has been on the seas for many years and is finally returning to his wife and son. He is also a teller of tall tales, just as Odysseus is, and it is possible that he has given a false name to his assembled listeners. Another possible incognito is the owner of the shelter, who is rumored to once have been an infamous Irish revolutionary of the 1880s. Politics comes to the fore again when the sailor suggests that the hero Parnell is not dead at all, but rather that a weighted coffin was buried and the man has assumed another identity and is waiting for the right moment to reappear in triumph. Bloom has his doubts. As an aside we learn that Bloom happened to be present at a pivotal moment in Parnell's life.
Strangely, though, neither Bloom nor Stephen is strongly partisan. Stephen objects to the British rule, but he is more concerned with his own artistic freedom; in fact, the young man is so vehemently solipsistic that he declares that he is not there to help Ireland, but rather "Ireland must be important because it belongs to me." Bloom, meanwhile, deplores conflict, and to the shelter owner's insistence that Ireland will one day rise up and destroy England, he instead imagines a future in which both countries are equals.
Meanwhile Bloom finds himself drawn to the younger man, a parallel to Odysseus's one-sided reunion with his son Telemachus.
The style of the episode is supposedly a parody of men's literature, a kind of counterpart to the style seen in the first half of Nausicaa, and it is filled with cliches, dry humor, manly understatement and matter-of-fact meanderings. As usual, Joyce takes the joke a bit too far; sentences wind on and on with no end in sight, digression digressing from digression.
One other thing I found interesting is Bloom's discovery of the evening edition of the paper, which includes the obituary of Patrick Dignam. The dead man is mentioned quite often in the book, something I never really noticed before; he is practically a full-fledged character, though we do not know much about him besides the fact that he is dead. The effect is that we see death as a part of the life within the book, though not a negative type of death, existence replaced by nothingness, but rather a change to a different state. This is even the case in the Hades episode, as Bloom does not brood on ceasing to be but instead thinks about the dead man as if he is still part of the world, in a way.
The ideas of return and hidden identity are recurring themes throughout Eumaneus. Bloom and Stephen stop to collect themselves at a cabman's shelter, which is sort of like an all-night greasy spoon for cab drivers. Therein they meet a sailor who could be Odysseus himself; he has been on the seas for many years and is finally returning to his wife and son. He is also a teller of tall tales, just as Odysseus is, and it is possible that he has given a false name to his assembled listeners. Another possible incognito is the owner of the shelter, who is rumored to once have been an infamous Irish revolutionary of the 1880s. Politics comes to the fore again when the sailor suggests that the hero Parnell is not dead at all, but rather that a weighted coffin was buried and the man has assumed another identity and is waiting for the right moment to reappear in triumph. Bloom has his doubts. As an aside we learn that Bloom happened to be present at a pivotal moment in Parnell's life.
Strangely, though, neither Bloom nor Stephen is strongly partisan. Stephen objects to the British rule, but he is more concerned with his own artistic freedom; in fact, the young man is so vehemently solipsistic that he declares that he is not there to help Ireland, but rather "Ireland must be important because it belongs to me." Bloom, meanwhile, deplores conflict, and to the shelter owner's insistence that Ireland will one day rise up and destroy England, he instead imagines a future in which both countries are equals.
Meanwhile Bloom finds himself drawn to the younger man, a parallel to Odysseus's one-sided reunion with his son Telemachus.
The style of the episode is supposedly a parody of men's literature, a kind of counterpart to the style seen in the first half of Nausicaa, and it is filled with cliches, dry humor, manly understatement and matter-of-fact meanderings. As usual, Joyce takes the joke a bit too far; sentences wind on and on with no end in sight, digression digressing from digression.
One other thing I found interesting is Bloom's discovery of the evening edition of the paper, which includes the obituary of Patrick Dignam. The dead man is mentioned quite often in the book, something I never really noticed before; he is practically a full-fledged character, though we do not know much about him besides the fact that he is dead. The effect is that we see death as a part of the life within the book, though not a negative type of death, existence replaced by nothingness, but rather a change to a different state. This is even the case in the Hades episode, as Bloom does not brood on ceasing to be but instead thinks about the dead man as if he is still part of the world, in a way.
posted by Joe Gola at 10:14 PM
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