Bloom Again? Questions of Aggression and Psychoanalytic Reconstruction

It is often asked: “How can you study characters in fiction? They don't exist.” Well, I have studied many “real” people in hospitals. And their stories are all fiction. If you want to know about real people, go to literature.

Character analysis, however, has a bad reputation.

We can begin with questions of consistency. Joyce's celebrated “jocoserious” (U553) sinister/dexterity in judiciously balancing his “allroundman” (U193) with negative affirmations hardly needs reiterating. Briefly, it's known that Bloom is both Jew/non-Jew, Greek/non-Greek, Irish/non-Irish, lover/ cuckold, father/son, host/exile, hero/antihero, messiah/victim, Everyman/Noman, and ostensibly, a “finished example of the new womanly man” (U403), who mixes Stephen's cocoa “in his firm full masculine feminine passive active hand” (U551). In Circe he is accused of being “an episcopalian, an agnostic, an anythingarian” (U400.1712). His most peculiar Story of O, both as cipher and as Odysseus, is more a story of All. Nor does it need reiterating that anything less than this all-inclusive balancing act would answer Stephen's need as artist to encounter the fluctuating realities of this world through Bloom as ghost and host: father and future.2

Sexually, Bloom seems pretty well-rounded as well. In psychoanalytic terms, his polymorphous perverse trends balance well over the course of time with his vacillating affirmations of genital primacy. His voyeurism in Nausicca (spying on Gerty MacDowell) is set off by his exhibitionism in Circe. And