Happy Bloomsday! If you are among the uninitiated, that means that today, June 16, is the day on which James Joyce’s Ulysses is set in 1904, the day in which the book’s protagonists — Leopold Bloom, Stephen Dedalus, and Molly Bloom — make their way in Dublin. 

The novel is connected to Homer’s Odyssey, with Bloom as Odysseus, Stephen as his son Telemachus, Molly as his wife Penelope, and episodes linked thematically and in many symbolic ways to episodes in the Odyssey. All refracted through the lens of modernity, through the turmoils of one hundred years ago that are still not so different from our own. The book is a riot of language, of wordplay, of sensation, of human understanding and misunderstanding, of folly and wisdom. If you haven’t read it, I hope you will. 

What does this have to do with this blog? Well, potentially a lot, but there is a particular episode, often referred to as the “Cyclops” episode, that I’d like to reflect on. In this episode, Leopold Bloom wanders into a pub and becomes involved in a discussion about Irish politics, nationalism, religion, and identity. The episode is narrated by an anonymous witness in the pub. The dominant figure in the pub is a character known simply as “the Citizen,” a belligerent Irish nationalist. The Citizen is suspicious of foreigners, Jews, and anyone he regards as insufficiently Irish. Bloom, who is of Jewish ancestry, becomes the target of the Citizen’s insults and prejudices. Bloom pushes back, somewhat meekly but nonetheless courageously arguing for a more inclusive vision, culminating in this exchange with a lackey of the Citizen, Alf, when Bloom avers:

—But it’s no use, says he.  Force, hatred, history, all that.  That’s not life for men and women, insult and hatred.  And everybody knows that it’s the very opposite of that that is really life.

—What? says Alf.

—Love, says Bloom.  I mean the opposite of hatred. [12.1481-85]

The upshot is that the Citizen becomes so enraged by what Bloom is saying that he actually chases Bloom out of the pub, trying to inflict bodily harm (just as the Cyclops chases Odysseus and his crew away from his island). Nationalism trumps love.

I can’t help but think of this episode when I see the reporting on Trump’s UFC disgrace at the White House on Flag Day: the jingoism, all meant to prop up his fragile ego; the pretense of having US troops “salute” macho-forward fighters, as if that’s where patriotism could find meaning; and the immense graft and corruption behind the scenes. The Citizen sits idly in his pub, holding forth before a crowd of drunkards, risking nothing as he spouts vicious nationalistic hatreds of the other. Trump sits idly at the White House, staging a spectacle before a crowd of sycophants, risking nothing as he spouts his own vile hatreds.

Bloom wants a way out of what he calls “history” — but that is certainly not available to us now. We are in a fight for our lives and for the life of our democracy; we are immersed in history. Let’s have the courage of Bloom to resist, and the sense that what we are striving for is the opposite of force, hatred, insult, and yes, even history.