Why Is the Funeral in Ulysses So Funny? Comedy and Death in Joyce's Hades

Ulysses has a reputation for difficulty that can obscure a simple fact: it is also very funny, and its comedy is inseparable from its seriousness. In his Rebind Classics reading, Philip Kitcher is alert to James Joyce's tonal range, the way the novel makes the ordinary both mortal and hilarious, often in the same breath. Nowhere is this clearer than in the funeral episode, Hades, where Kitcher shows comedy and death sharing a single carriage.

The episode begins, Kitcher notes, with the carriage itself becoming a joke. The mourners discover that their funeral coach smells of the "picnic party" enjoyed by its previous occupants, and one of them remarks that the smell comes from "the most natural thing in the world." The carriage, Kitcher observes drily, "has been the seat of lovemaking." Joyce sets the comedy of sex directly beside the solemnity of death, and refuses to let either cancel the other. The reader rides to a funeral in a coach that still smells of life.

Bloom's Comic Materialism and the Grief Beneath It

Bloom's mind, in this episode, is where comedy and mortality fuse most completely. When the other mourners imagine a coffin tumbling out of the hearse, Bloom's interior monologue runs to the practical and the grotesque, "recognizing the wisdom of standard ways of dealing with dead bodies." Kitcher describes the attitude as that of "a mortician, noting post mortem phenomena," remarkable for "its detachment." Bloom thinks about death the way he thinks about everything: with curiosity, unsentimentality, and a faintly comic literalism. He offers, Kitcher notes, "a jocular redescription of the raising of Lazarus."

That literalism rests on a settled worldview, which Kitcher names plainly. Bloom's monologue "avows a resolute materialism." We should, in Bloom's view, "think of hearts as pumps," and once they stop and the body decays, "the idea of a bodily resurrection becomes ludicrous." Bloom is, Kitcher writes, "a humanist," skeptical of religious consolation. He will not give offense, but he sees the ceremony as "an exercise in providing false — but perhaps needed — comfort," and his refusal to pretend otherwise is part of what sets him apart from his fellow mourners.

Yet Kitcher is careful to show that Bloom's detachment is not coldness. Two attitudes toward death run through the episode. While the others reach for "whatever consolations religion or custom offers," Bloom refuses those, but his thoughts also reveal "a capacity to be deeply moved." His unsentimentality about the stranger Dignam coexists with real grief over the two deaths that haunt him: his father's suicide and his infant son Rudy's death. The materialist and the mourner are the same man, and the comedy never mocks the grief underneath.

Why the Comedy Keeps the Seriousness Honest

The deepest reason for the comedy, Kitcher suggests, is that it is bound up with the everyday. Joyce's subject is ordinary life, and ordinary life is both funny and mortal at once. The funeral is full of small social comedy, the awkwardness of the Boys' Club, the gossip, the misremembered names, even as it descends, in Kitcher's reading, into the literal underworld. "Hades is the underworld," he writes. "Readers have to join in the descent." The comedy is not relief from the seriousness; it is how Joyce keeps the seriousness honest, refusing the false dignity that would make death less strange or life less absurd.

Out of Hades, Toward Warm Fullblooded Life

Kitcher shows that even the episode's darkest material turns, at the end, back toward life. Bloom leaves the cemetery carrying his two losses, but Joyce gives him not grief but a word: "warm." Kitcher tracks how "warm" and "full" recur around Molly throughout the book, the language of "warm fullblooded life." As Bloom re-enters the living world, "the embodiment of 'warm fullblooded life' appears to be Molly Bloom." The descent into Hades ends with the pull back toward home, toward the warm bed and the living wife, toward the ordinary pleasures that the comedy has been affirming all along.

This is why Joyce wanted his readers to laugh. The comedy is not decoration on a serious book; it is the book's way of holding life and death in the same frame without flinching from either. Kitcher's reading restores the humor that the novel's reputation tends to bury, and shows that the laughter and the mortality are doing the same work: insisting, against every false consolation, on the strange, funny, finite texture of an ordinary day.