The Modality of Bloom’s Correspondence with Other Persons
Jong-Il Yi
In James Joyce’s Ulysses, there appear a confusingly enormous number of characters. The confusion is moderated, however, by diverse kinds of links interconnecting separate persons. This consubstantial mode of sameness being shared by different beings is marked by such an incompleteness as is characteristic of human world. This is represented by the relationship between the two major male figures of the novel: Bloom and Stephen.Bloom and Stephen, it is true, share many common features in some ways and show sharp contrasts in others. But they are neither entirely the same nor entirely opposite. A complete fusion of them, as is cynically illustrated in the mirror image of Shakespeare’s paralyzed face described in a fantastic scene of the Circe chapter, is pertinent to fantasy rather than reality, and to stasis rather than life. Similarities always contain some shades of difference, and vice versa. Being partial, momentary, conditional, and shaky, the union of the two characters is not a sober hit but a near miss.The incomplete union between persons, however, does not indicate negative aspects of human relationship. Rather, it entails a living being’s, like Bloom’s, recuperative ability to return to oneself after a tentative, if significant, meeting with others. And it is the tension between difference, or specificity, and similarity, or universality, that makes possible this resilient process of repetition with a change in human relationship.
The Modality of Bloom’s Correspondence with Other Persons
Jong-Il Yi
In James Joyce’s Ulysses, there appear a confusingly enormous number of characters. The confusion is moderated, however, by diverse kinds of links interconnecting separate persons. This consubstantial mode of sameness being shared by different beings is marked by such an incompleteness as is characteristic of human world. This is represented by the relationship between the two major male figures of the novel: Bloom and Stephen.Bloom and Stephen, it is true, share many common features in some ways and show sharp contrasts in others. But they are neither entirely the same nor entirely opposite. A complete fusion of them, as is cynically illustrated in the mirror image of Shakespeare’s paralyzed face described in a fantastic scene of the Circe chapter, is pertinent to fantasy rather than reality, and to stasis rather than life. Similarities always contain some shades of difference, and vice versa. Being partial, momentary, conditional, and shaky, the union of the two characters is not a sober hit but a near miss.The incomplete union between persons, however, does not indicate negative aspects of human relationship. Rather, it entails a living being’s, like Bloom’s, recuperative ability to return to oneself after a tentative, if significant, meeting with others. And it is the tension between difference, or specificity, and similarity, or universality, that makes possible this resilient process of repetition with a change in human relationship.