Jewish in Dublin: Bloom’s Encounters on the Way to “Cyclops”

Abstract

Few characters in fiction exist in the solitude of a one-person world, narrative theorist Lubomír Doležel tells us (96). In the multiperson worlds that most novels represent, readers confront literary figures not in solitude but in the company of others, engaged in negotiations that Doležel describes as “Interaction and Power” in the fourth chapter of Heterocosmica (96–112). Leopold Bloom is a figure who moves from a largely one-person world in “Calypso” and “Lotus Eaters” into an increasingly multiperson world in the course of his day in Ulysses. The reader is therefore obliged to accompany him on a journey from the interior of his mind into increasingly complex social spaces in which he interacts with a variety of friends, acquaintances, and strangers. Initially, this movement involves merely a slight cognitive shift in Bloom’s consciousness—from his meditations on a variety of issues to opinions, feelings, and judgments about persons he encounters once he ventures abroad into his community. But eventually this cognitive relationship changes as we begin to see not only what Bloom thinks about other Dubliners, but also what other Dubliners think about him. And it is then that the hypothetical virgin reader—accompanying Bloom on a foray into the outside world for the first time—will receive a series of surprises that by the time of “Cyclops” turn into painful shock.