A Psychological Reading of Ulysses

Stephen's wound is a gesture he will not take back. His mother asked him to kneel and pray at the bedside. He refused. Her eyes still come back unasked. Mulligan, who has already called her beastly dead, does not think the feeling is worth managing. The hurt Stephen names is precise. It is the insult, and it is also the discovery that his grief can be spent by someone else as a joke. A mind in that spot cannot turn the refusal into peace. It also will not turn the refusal into a phrase the joker can use.

The tower makes the no practical. Stephen pays the rent. Haines, the Englishman who shouted in the night about a black panther, is the guest. Mulligan asks for the key as if the ask were manners. Stephen hands over the key and twopence. He will not sleep there tonight, and no other door is waiting. A person can refuse a kneeling and still have nowhere to put the night. The defence is not a clean pride. It is a loyalty to a feeling that no longer has a house.

Bloom's first defence is attention to what a body can finish. The cat stalks a table leg until he pours the milk and watches the rough tongue finish it. Thursday is no day for mutton, so the kidney will be pork. Hunger, at least, is an appetite he can meet himself. This is not a sermon about living in the present. It is a mind using the next small task so the larger fact does not have to be faced all at once. The saucer, the tray, and the street are squares of attention that can be completed.

The method is the psychology. Joyce stays with the morning because Bloom stays with it. A man who can watch a cat finish a saucer is a man who has not yet let the afternoon abolish the hour he is in. Presence here is a holding action. It does not deny what the hall floor will show when he comes back with the meat. It refuses to skip a morning that is still his. The defence works only until the letters. That is why it matters. A defence you can finish is still a way of being in the room.

The known fact arrives as an address. Two letters and a card are on the hall floor. One is from Milly in Mullingar. One, in a bold hand, is for Mrs Marion Bloom. He carries the tray up with his thumb on that letter. She says it is from Boylan. He is bringing the programme. She will sing Là ci darem and Love's Old Sweet Song. The funeral is at eleven. He lets the blind up and sees her glance. The concert is the cover, and the kitchen has already been told.

This is the psychology of staying with a fact you will not contest. He does not open a trial in the bedroom. He does not ask the question that would turn breakfast into a verdict. Later, in the Ormond, with Sweets of Sin in his breast, he remembers that four o'clock had been named. He still has a letter to write. The day has a clock inside it. Bloom's steadiness is not ignorance and not a plan of revenge. It is the decision to remain a man with a funeral, an errand, and a body that gets hungry, while the clock runs toward a house he has left.

Grief in this book does not resolve. It takes a seat. In the funeral carriage Bloom sits on the cake of soap and leaves it there. Dignam is dead. Talk of suicide runs in front of him, and Cunningham knows why that talk is agony. Bloom's father poisoned himself at the Queen's Hotel in Ennis. The journey into Clare is the anniversary. Behind the whisper, Bloom asks whether Dignam was insured. The policy is heavily mortgaged. The practical question does not cancel the dead father. It sits in the same carriage as the shame.

Rudy is the other passenger, and he is not there. If the child had lived, Bloom thinks, there would have been a boy walking beside Molly, a voice in the house, something to hand on. Milly at least is growing up in Mullingar. Later writers on mourning call this a continuing bond: the dead are kept among the errands rather than worked through and set down. Joyce does not use the term. He uses the soap in the pocket and the boy who is missing from the footpath. Bloom can hold a funeral thought and a household thought in one ride. Neither one finishes the other.

The formal wager is that consciousness is not a report. It is a medium that changes shape. In the newspaper office the city arrives as headlines, trams, and a square of advertisement carried through the printing works. On Sandymount strand Stephen tries to make a phrase, the ineluctable modality of the visible, into ground he can stand on. He shuts his eyes. He opens them because the thought of falling in the dark is enough. At lunch the body interrupts the talk in his head. Gulls wheel. A throwaway asks if he is saved. The birds will not eat the paper. He buys cakes and breaks them up instead.

The late styles push the same bet. Wandering Rocks refuses a single centre, so one afternoon belongs to many minds and none of them is appointed narrator. In the hospital, style itself keeps changing while a woman labours, as if a parade of voices could stand between the drinkers and the plain risk of birth. At Eccles Street the night becomes a catechism. Questions can list the water in a cup of cocoa and still not say what Stephen is to him. Molly's chapter will not pause for the punctuation a reader uses to keep a self in order. The psychology is not hidden under these forms. The forms are how these minds keep going. A translated feeling would be a verdict. Joyce withholds the verdict and makes you run the thought yourself.

The public break is not private at all. In Barney Kiernan's the citizen makes Bloom's Jewishness a sport. Bloom answers with a fact the room hates. His uncle was a Jew. Christ was a Jew like him. The citizen goes back for the biscuit tin. He would brain that man for the holy name. He lets it fly as the jarvey gets the horse's head round. Shame here is a crowd, a dog, a tin, and a street. Bloom's defence is a sentence of belonging. The room answers with a weapon. A reading that turns this only into hurt feelings misses the scene. The mind is being told, in public, what it is allowed to be.

Nighttown is the other break, and it is staged. Voices charge him. He answers as a dentist, a soldier, a journalist, a married man of Eccles Street, and none of the answers hold. The accusations keep changing their shape. The brothel puts his humiliation in costume, down to a kneeling that echoes the kneeling Stephen refused beside a deathbed. Then the costume drops. Against the wall a boy of eleven stands in an Eton suit, a book open in his hand. Bloom calls a name the lane does not hear. Rudy. The errands, the wit, and the roles fail for a moment into the child who is not walking beside Molly. He is going to lead Stephen out. The shift is not a cure. It is a substitution you are allowed to see: a living young man standing where the dead boy appears.

The ending refuses adoption. They walk to 7 Eccles Street. Bloom finds a few likenesses and does not pretend the rest match. He makes Epps's cocoa as the label says, two spoons in each cup, sets Milly's moustache cup aside, and gives Stephen the cream kept for Marion's breakfast. He offers the room above the kitchen, next to the room where he and Molly sleep. A bed, quiet, a place to study. He thinks a stay might wake his own mind, and might give Molly correct Italian. Stephen says no at once, gratefully. The young man in this book will not be taken into the house. Cocoa is not a pact.

Bloom gets into the bed anyway. The linen is not fresh. He finds her smell, the imprint of a man's body that is not his, crumbs, and flakes of potted meat, which he picks away. The chapter says that every man who climbs into this bed thinks he is the first, and is only the latest. He stays. Molly, awake, begins with the breakfast he has asked for and moves through Boylan, the thunder on Gibraltar, and the day on Howth when she put the seedcake from her mouth into his and he asked her to say yes. The yes does not purify the imprint. It consents to a life that includes it. The tension is not solved by a slaughter, a confrontation, or a son who remains. It is suppressed only if a reader needs the yes to mean happiness. The book lets the yes and the crumbs occupy one bed.

The anxiety in the novel is not that it is difficult. It is the fear of a day whose worst appointment is already on the clock, and of an inner life no one else will manage for you. People still carry a known fact upstairs and talk about the programme. They still sit through a public hour in which someone else decides what their name is allowed to mean. They still hope a younger person, or a child who did not live, will turn a kitchen into a purpose. Joyce offers no method for getting through Thursday. He offers the record of a consciousness that does not become a legend and does not become a collapse: soap in the pocket, a tin in the street, cocoa measured by the label, and a yes that does not pretend the sheets are clean.

This reading treats the book as a study of staying: with a refusal, with a known hour, with the dead, and with an imprint. That can flatten a comic novel into a grief essay. Bloom is also hungry, funny, prurient, and practical. Stephen's talk in the library is already a performance about fathers, ghosts, and how deep a life a work springs from. A Freudian key will open that scene and lock the kidney, the soap, and the advertisement. This page leaves that key on the table.

The Homeric names are a scaffold, not a diagnosis. Reading Bloom only as a gentle Odysseus misses 16 June 1904, the newspaper office, the cattle traders, and the citizen's papers. Jewishness in Barney Kiernan's is a public danger, not a picture of a sensitive outsider. Circe is a hallucination the book stages. To call it a clinical break, or to call Molly's unpunctuated night a case study in desire, borrows a clinic the text does not run. Continuing bonds, a mind that stays with a known fact, and the demand that the reader simulate other minds are later ways of saying what the scenes already do. They do not replace Dublin, or the fact that Joyce wrote the city from cities that were not Dublin.

The Odyssey makes coming home a test of recognition, and it proves the test with a bed that cannot be moved and a hall that can be cleared. Ulysses keeps the house and cancels the proof. Penelope holds a place by undoing her work. Molly's yes remembers the seedcake and does not hold the afternoon against Boylan. Odysseus survives by becoming unrecognisable, then needs a scar and a wife before he can be himself again. Bloom is recognised all day, often as the wrong thing, and climbs into a bed that shows he is only the latest. Telemachus begins to take a public self in his father's gap. Stephen takes the cocoa, hears the offer of a room, and will not stay. Beside Homer, Joyce's psychology is the refusal of both the slaughter and the adoption. What remains is a Thursday that still contained a life.