with commentary by Philip Kitcher
James Joyce's Ulysses has a hero, and he is one of the least heroic-looking figures in literature: a middle-aged advertising canvasser who spends June 16th, 1904, walking around Dublin being talked about behind his back. In his Rebind Classics reading, Philip Kitcher makes the case that Leopold Bloom's apparent ordinariness is exactly what makes him extraordinary, and that the book's deepest subject is the texture of exclusion around a man who fits none of Dublin's categories.
The exclusion starts with something as basic as a name. Kitcher points out a detail easy to miss: "During the entire novel, no living character ever calls Leopold Bloom by his first name." To his daughter he is "Papli," to his wife "Poldy," but to the men of Dublin he is held at a distance the first name would close. When one of them collects names for a newspaper report, he does not even know Bloom's, or, as he tactlessly puts it, his "christian" name. The word marks the line Bloom cannot cross.
Set Apart by Temperament, Not Only by Prejudice
Bloom's outsider status, Kitcher is careful to show, is not only a matter of being marked as a Jew, though the novel is unflinching about the antisemitism around him. "It is not simply his being marked as a Jew," Kitcher explains. "He is differentiated by temperament." In his leisure time, "Bloom prefers mixed company to the Boys' Club meetings in the pub." And he is set apart by something rarer still: "an intellectual curiosity none of his contemporaries seems to share." Lacking formal education, he has read widely on his own and is full of "imaginative plans for improving all sorts of things, from Dublin traffic to burial practices." He is, in Kitcher's phrase, "strikingly inventive," and strikingly alone.
The Least Cyclopean Man in Dublin
What raises Bloom above the men who exclude him is a quality Kitcher draws from the novel's central idea: the capacity to hold more than one perspective. In the Cyclops episode, set in a hostile pub, Kitcher reads Bloom as the opposite of the one-eyed men around him. "In the land of the Cyclops, he is the least Cyclopean," Kitcher writes. His defining trait is "his proclivity for trying to place himself in the situations of others, and his habit of rethinking," visible from the first chapter in his musings about how he appears to his own cat, and in his sympathy for the people Dublin overlooks.
That capacity reaches its peak in the pub, when Bloom does something no one expects. Cornered and mocked, he declares his credo: "Love, says Bloom. I mean the opposite of hatred." The room treats it as effeminate softness, and the narrator presents his departure as running away. Kitcher reads it as courage. "A less jaundiced observer, or reader," he writes, "might commend Bloom's courage in confessing unpopular beliefs before an already hostile audience." Bloom rejects force and hatred and insists that what matters in life is love, and he does it knowing the room will sneer.
A Humanist Carrying a Hidden Grief
Kitcher locates the root of Bloom's decency in a coherent, quietly held worldview. At the funeral in Hades, while the other mourners reach for religious consolation, Bloom refuses it. He is, Kitcher says, "a humanist, plainly concerned to understand others' feelings and to help them when he can," but skeptical of what he regards as "false — but perhaps needed — comfort." His sympathy is not sentimental. It is practical: at the funeral he is already thinking about how to help the widow Mrs. Dignam, a willingness given its own poignancy by the fact that Bloom has lost his own only son, Rudy.
That loss is the wound underneath Bloom's whole day. Kitcher traces how Rudy's death "changed Mr Bloom's sexual identity" and damaged the marriage at the book's center, leaving Bloom carrying a grief he never speaks aloud. What the day finally discloses, in Kitcher's reading, is a previously hidden strength. Bloom's stumbling through the hostile pub, his refusal to back down, reveals "his own, previously unappreciated, capacity for resilience." When he raises a fist and declares for love, he is doing something "very unBloomian," and Kitcher reads it not as a loss of composure but as the emergence of a man who will not abandon his convictions even when the whole room turns on him.
What Stephen Dedalus Finally Sees
That resilience is part of why the kitchen scene late in the novel matters so much. When Stephen Dedalus finally sees Bloom clearly over shared cocoa past midnight, he recognizes "a depth in Bloom, a capacity for absorbing and reflecting on the details of his experience." Stephen even sees in Bloom's face a resemblance to Jesus, a man, like Bloom, who is "labeled and misunderstood, and he suffers in consequence." What began as an awkward encounter flowers into genuine connection, and Stephen comes to recognize, in Kitcher's words, that "an advertising canvasser may be an Odysseus." The hero of Ulysses is the man the city refuses to fully see, and the novel's quiet triumph is making the reader see him.