Valérie Sourisseau
Séminaire de M
.
Topia
COMPARAISON DE TEXTES :
ULYSSES, de James Joyce
« Proteus » et « Hades »
07/05/2004

According to Joyce’s first major book,
Dubliners , death is an important part of Dublin life ; it can even be said to be the very essence of the Dublin (and maybe even Irish) way of being. From the « paralysis » that frightens and fascinates the young narrator in the very first lines of the collection to the title of the last story, « The Dead », and its derisory characters, whose persistence in living is duller than the determination in dying of the long-gone Michael
Furey, the whole book seems to be contaminated by the final all-encompassing, deathly snow.
Death is also what most distinguishes A Portrait of the artist as a young man from its sequel
Ulysses : more than the - shortened - exile to Paris announced at the end of A Portrait , which hasn’t really changed things for Stephen, it is his mother’s death (all the more terrible that it is never narrated except in the form of nightmarish visions) that most separates the two books, and the two views of the world and art they offer.
Whereas A Portrait still believes (despite hints of irony) in a life justified by art and in an art justified by its exceptional nature, its character of « epiphany », Ulysses has done with this belief and, instead of on intense epiphanies, dwells on insignificant moments, on ordinariness and trivialities.Two whole different conceptions of life - and therefore of death - appear indeed in the two books, and in Ulysses this evolution is notably represented by the contrast between how
Stephen Dedalus, « artist » of the
Portrait , and Leopold Bloom, anti-hero of Ulysses , each in their way, deal with death. For both of them, this subject appears very early in their thoughts or discussions : Stephen and Buck Mulligan start on it in the opening conversation of the first chapter, concerning the death of Stephen’s mother. The practical and medical point of view of
Buck Mulligan conflicts with Stephen’s more irrational apprehension of this tragic event, his vision of his mother’s ghost and his obsession with the « agenbite of inwit » - the mysterious, magical formula which expresses the depth of his uneasiness, his « remorse of conscience » about his mother’s death and his uncontrollable sense of guilt. Death is also a subject of conversation between Bloom and his wife Molly in the first Bloom chapter, « Calypso », when

Molly asks her husband the meaning of the word « metempsycosis ». Death is here something that has to be explained and can be, in an optimistic perspective : « that we go on living in another body after death. » (62) However the explanation is interrupted by the smell of a burning pork kidney : no place for tragedy or even gravity there, death is treated from the beginning as just another common fact of life.
This same casual treatment is displayed again all along the main chapter of Ulysses officially dedicated (as one might say) to death, « Hades ». In it, Bloom follows the funeral of
Dubliner Paddy Dignam, and meditates over death. At the same time - 11 o’clock - that morning of June 16, 1904, in another part of Dublin along Sandymount Strand (and in another part of
Ulysses , the third chapter « Proteus ») Stephen is walking alone and also brooding, in a much darker way, over death and the dead. At the point in which, after coming accross a « bloated carcass », that of a stray dog, he watches another « live dog » going thoughtlessly about his business, a striking parallel can be made between his situation and that of Bloom arriving at
Prospect Cemetery a few miles away, mourning a dead friend and at the same time observing the living people about him. The parallel is all the more justified than in the « Hades » chapter, after a long section of narration and dialogue (as the Linati Schema states), the arrival at the cemetery signals the beginning of Bloom’s interior monologue, which seems to echo Stephen’s own interior monologue on the beach. An interesting way of exploring this parallel between the experiences of Stephen and Bloom can be to follow Joyce’s own taste for symbols and correspondences : there are many of them between the two passages, from the most trivial to the most significant. We will take a first general glance at these correspondences, considering in a way two versions of a same text. Following that viewpoint, and throwing on each passage light from the other one, we will then study more in detail these two versions as two types of an encounter with Death and, conversely, as two types of an encounter with the « matter » - Proteus

- and its transformations. In the end, we will examine how these two parallel and opposite texts can also be seen as two different ways of dealing with creation, whether in nature or in literature.
Let us specify this notion of Bloom’s interior monologue not only echoing, but also rewriting, in a trivialized and sometimes almost parodic way, Stephen’s. The two characters share a similar situation. Geographically, both characters are at the periphery of Dublin, in places where important changes take place - where land becomes sea, or life becomes death. Socially, both are in the position of the observer, seeing but unseen : « Peekaboo. I see you. No, the dog », says Stephen spying at a distance « the two maries » and their dog. But he later notices about the dog : « Doesn’t see me ». Jeri Johnson, in the same sense, notes that Stephen “is much happier as spectator than as spectacle” (783). Even in his mental recreation of the past, when he « moved among them [his people] on the frozen Liffey », he seems isolated, as if inaudible and invisible :
« I spoke to no-one : none to me ». Bloom, similarly, although he pays a lot of attention to what is going on around him at the cemetery and especially to the caretaker (he « admired the caretaker’s prosperous bulk » and notices his « grey sprouting beard »), goes unheeded by his fellow Dubliners : the caretaker takes notice of everyone but him and at the end of the chapter,
John Henry Menton ignores him deliberately.
Inside this similarity of situation, discrete but significant echoes, either of words, thoughts or facts, reinforce the impression that Bloom is giving the corrected version of Stephen’s too dark, too mystical - and too poetical - monologue. The mention of the « cockles », a word used in two very different contexts and with very different meanings, is a first hint : in Stephen’s mental speech, the cockles are those picked up by « the two maries » identified as « a woman and a man » and « cocklepickers ». The word also shows up in a reference to Shakespeare at the end of the episode : « My cockle hat and staff and hismy sandal shoon » (Ophelia in Hamlet ). In
Bloom’s version, they become related to the jolly caretaker - himself compared to the

« gravediggers in
Hamlet » - as the « cockles of his heart » warmed up by his own jokes. The variations around this word could be thought of as fortuitous were there not other examples of the same kind scattered here and there. The letter, for instance, is an object that appears in both monologues : in Stephen’s, under the form of « Old Deasy’s letter » torn off to provide « paper » to the young poet and receive his « scribbled words » (47-48) - and maybe to be later abandoned or lost on the beach, for Bloom to find (and be unable to read) in the « Nausicaa » episode. As
Stephen himself acknowledges, his written words are « dark » (48), tinged both with death
(« pale vampire /.../ bloodying the sea ») and eroticism (« mouth to her mouth’s kiss », 47). In
Bloom’s thoughts, another kind of letter is mentioned : the love one he wrote to his mistress
Martha and which, he hopes, is « not chucked in the dead letter office » (104). The anxious darkness, delicate eroticism and intellectual pretensions associated to the first letter undergo here a complete reversal : « dead » refers only to lost mail, the love story is a derisory attempt at adultery, and the only anxiousness Bloom feels about what he wrote is whether the address was readable. An equivalent transformation affects an image recurrent in Stephen’s monologue, that of two women walking on the beach - image loaded with tragical, if also ironical, associations : first he sees the two « midwives » figures coming down Leahy’s terrace, one of them carrying in her bag « a misbirth with a trailing navelcord » (38) ; then the « two maries » of the New
Testament progressing along the shore, after they « have tucked it safe mong the bulrushes » (and the enigma remains about what that « it » refers to : would it be the corpse of the crucified Christ they are supposed to have watched over?). A parodic echo of this vision may be seen in Bloom’s altered quotation of the song which constitutes an important recurring motif in the book : « Those pretty seaside gurls », he says to himself in a mockery of Blazes Boylan’s singing accent (105) - and possibly in an (unconscious) mockery of Stephen’s gloomy visions.
In this light, Stephen’s third episode can very well be read as a (contemporary) rehearsal, acted by the unaware young poet, of Bloom’s encounter with Hades. Indeed, even though the

chapter titles first given by Joyce do associate the third Bloom episode to Odysseus’s descent into Hades, it might seem to a reader unaware of these explicit correspondences that such a reference would better suit the third Dedalus episode. Better than Bloom’s journey, Stephen’s walk on the beach is indeed an actual, physical descent, as the mention of « the steps from
Leahy’s terrace » (38) signals. It is also, as the opening references to Aristotle point out, an experience about time and space and their absence - which recalls the Linati Schema mention of a « descent into nothingness » concerning the « Hades » episode ; and an experience about loneliness (« I am lonely here. /.../ I am quiet here alone. Sad too. », 48). Going down to meet
« our mighty mother », the sea (38), and evoking indeed his own mother in the guise of « Heva, naked Eve », « Womb of sin », or as « a ghostwoman with ashes on her breath » (38), Stephen can certainly remind one of Homer’s Odysseus, meeting the ghost of his mother in Hades. Her spectral presence seems actually to be constantly hovering about his guilt-ridden mind, as the grammatically puzzling passage from « him » (the drowning man) to « her » shows : « I… With him together down… I could not save her. » (45) In general, the people he sees, either really or in his imagination, recall the ghosts coming and going in the Odyssey episode about Hades. Stephen conjures up from the nothingness and then sends back to it again (« creation from nothing », 38) creatures half real half invented : sinister carriers of a deathly load - the first two women with « a misbirth with a trailing navelcord, hushed in ruddy wool » (38); riders of ominous ships - the
« Lochlanns » with « blood-beaked prows » ; frightening images of ancient warriors (the « Dane vikings, torcs of tomahawks aglitter on their breasts », 45) or surreal slaughterers (the « horde of jerkined dwarfs /.../ with flayers’ knives » killing stranded whales, 45) ; messengers from another world strangely silent (Stephen’s fourteenth century people crossing the « frozen Liffey », like another Acheron, without saying a word to him), or on the contrary speaking a strange language - the cocklepickers, now biblical figures (« the two maries »), now mysterious gypsies (« the red
Egyptians », 47), expressing themselves by way of insults (« you mongrel ») or of a meaningless

cant vocabulary (« bing awast, to Romeville », 47) ; the dog « vulturing the dead », his « dog’s bark » (45), and « the bark of their applause » (45), an illusory language that the « pretenders » who « live their lives » (not their own) pine about, but that is worth nothing. The whole of
Ireland appears as a land of death inhabited by people worth no more than shadows : if a paradise, a « paradise of pretenders » (45) and of falsehood ; more generally, a « House of... »
Death - and the unfinished phrase gives a special weight to the implied reference, through
Bocaccio, to death. Death is present everywhere in this Dedalus chapter, « ineluctable », from the walk « into eternity » (37) in the beginning to the « corpse rising saltwhite from the undertow »
(49). The final ghost, the « silent ship » going « upstream », « homing » (50) back to her origins, like Stephen, gives a final image of death but also a new direction for the text to follow : she embarks the reader back from the middle of the day to the early morning, from the limits of the city to inland Dublin, from Stephen the son to Bloom the father, from the too complex and disembodied intellect to the relishing body - from life leading ineluctably to death, to death as a possible « new lease of life ».
The correspondences between the two episodes bring indeed to the fore the radical differences of attitude of the two characters towards death, or towards matter as the privileged place of its manifestation. The opposition is visible already in the passage from the first three chapters known as « Telemachia » to the twelve next known as « Odyssey ». In his final ghastly vision of death, that of the decomposing drowned man, Stephen sees himself as a living being disgustingly dependent on the dead, unable to escape their horror : « dead breaths I living breathe, tread dead dust, devour a urinous offal from all dead » (49). The whole evocation is quite shocking in its deliberate crudity and cruelty. Two pages later, « Mr Leopold Bloom » makes his entrance also with a vision of death, but from a very different perspective - a positive one, that of dead animals providing meat : he « ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and

fowls », and particularly « liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine. » (54) The crudity is of a milder kind here, but it is hard not to make the connection with Stephen’s precedent vision. In his candid way, Bloom manages from the start to turn Stephen’s horror and disgust into innocent pleasure, by the trivial way he looks at things and experiments with them. By the same token, the sheer « horror of /.../ death » aroused in Stephen by the vision of the « man that was drowned » (« Proteus », 45), and whose decomposition he later evokes in gruesome details (« Bag of corpsegas sopping in foul brine », 49), is turned into a farcical black comedy by Bloom’s joking spirit in « Hades » : « Well preserved fat corpse gentleman, epicure, invaluable for fruit garden. A bargain » (104).
These opposite ways the two characters walk their way through life, and towards death, is best epitomized by two symbolic figures in the two parallel passages of « Proteus » and
« Hades », two possible guides for Death - minor, comical versions of a Virgil initiating Dante into the Inferno . The dog Stephen watches with some anxiety - a dual dog, both a « carcass » and
« live » - is a first one. Running towards the young man and barking at him as at an intruder, threatening him (« Lord, is he going to attack me ? »), belonging to an unnamed ennemy that could very well be death (« Dog of my ennemy. I just simply stood pale, silent, bayed about » says Stephen as he identifies with Acteon about to be eaten by his own dogs, 45), he reminds one of Cerberus, the warden dog of the Underworld. Stephen is irrationally afraid of him, in spite of himself : « you shake at a cur’s yelping. » (45) Even when, through many Protean metamorphosis, the dog seems to acquire more familiar, less frightening shapes and movements, even if, being a « live dog » as opposed to the dead one, he constitutes an image of life, with all his insignificant but necessary little actions (« he lolloped, dawdled, smelt a rock and /.../ pissed against it », 46) and his search for « the simple pleasures of the poor », he in fact remains fundamentally a creature of the other world : a « brother » of the carcass, moving to become one himself (the « one great goal »), and in the meanwhile « vulturing the dead » (46). In fact, this

changing dog is seen by Stephen as alternately a victim and a killer - and in that sense can be said to fully belong to death, in all its forms. The implicit reference to Acteon turned into a stag, for instance, puts the dog in the position of the death giver ; but he then becomes himself a stag, that is to say a possible victim, in the heraldic interpretation Stephen gives of him : « On a field tenney a buck, trippant, proper, unattired. » (46) Frank Budgen, in James Joyce and the making of Ulysses, reports the comment Joyce himself made about the figure of the dog in « Proteus » :
« He is the mummer among beasts - the Protean animal. » (53) Other than into a stag, he is metamorphosed by Stephen’s imagination into a hare, a wolf, a calf, a fox (through the mention of the « buried /../ grandmother », alluding to a riddle earlier explained), even into a dog (« like a dog », 46), and finally into « a pard, a panther, got in spousebreach, vulturing the dead. » (46)
This bestiary is completed by other animals like the dying whales, a gull, the « herds of seamorse » (waves) who « serpented » ; but in reality all the animals are present within the last of the metamorphosis if we refer to Joyce’s explanation : « Panther : all animals » (quoted by F.
Budgen, 54). The whole passage constitutes a very realistic picture of animal life as well as a symbolical representation of the Protean elusiveness of all beings ; but the last transformation also suggests a darker representation of death as an animal thing, a « beastly » thing (Buck
Mulligan in the first talk about death has upset Stephen by using the expression « beastly dead »,
8). And that includes Christian death, since the « pard » himself, « allegorical of Christ » in the medieval imagery (Jeri Johnson, 862), « vultures » the dead (even more so if we consider « dog » as the reverse of « God ») : no sign of redemption here, only disgust and despair.
The caretaker that Bloom admires, as the second symbolic figure that incarnates death, makes quite a different impression. Joyce himself explicited the connection in the Gilbert
Schema, giving to the caretaker the part of Hades, god of Death and lord of Hell. On the other hand, his name being John O’Connell, he « must be a descendant » of Daniel O’Connell, the great Irish leader (and « great catholic »), and thus epitomizes the essential Irishman (if Ireland is

a House of Death, as Stephen suggests, shouldn’t indeed the typical Irishman be a cemetery caretaker ?). Far from arousing fear in the people he meets, he appears friendly and a « decent fellow, /.../ real good sort », « prosperous », « cheerful enough », a reassuring father of eight.
There is even a hint of envy in Bloom’s reflections about the man : his sex life must be unusual
(« Love among the tombstones. Romeo. Spice of pleasure. », 104), as well as his experience of men (« He has seen a fair share go under in his time », 104) and his philosophy of life (« Wonder how he looks at life », 105). More than the dog, the caretaker is indeed « vulturing the dead », since he lives out of them, and even gets « a sense of power seeing all the others go under first »
(105). But there is nothing shocking or fearsome about that, not the least bit of tragedy, only a natural process : as Bloom wisely thinks to himself, « You must laugh sometimes so better do it that way » (105) - take it lightly. The « Hades » episode is in fact, overall, a pretty light chapter, in spite of Bloom’s tentative mental recreation of a midnight atmosphere like in a Shakespeare tragedy (« The shadows of the tombs when churchyards yawn », 104) - or like in the bad horror stories he has probably read (« It was a pitchdark night.The clock was on the stroke of twelve »,
104). « Ghosts haunt
Hades », as Jeri Johnson writes (803), but they are sad memories rather than actual apparitions : nothing like the horror visions Stephen has of his mother as soon as the first chapter - « her wasted body within its loose graveclothes » (10) - in the way Bloom remembers his dead son Rudy, his suicide father and his « poor old greatgrandfather ». And when an actual face-to-face with the dead is contemplated, it is presented as an event belonging more to slapstick comedy than to the epic or tragic mode : « Bom ! Upset. A coffin bumped out on to the road.
Burst open. Paddy Dignam shot out and rolling over stiff in the dust in a brown habit too large for him. » (95) « Hades » is haunted by ghosts from the past but also filled by the living men’s gossips, common sense remarks and even laughs, so that life eventually seems to predominate.
The figure of the caretaker, in particular, is repeatedly associated with the idea of a
« joke » : « Cracking his jokes /.../. The dead themselves /.../ would like to hear an odd joke /.../.

You must laugh sometimes /.../. Daren’t joke about the dead for two years at least /.../ Hard to imagine his funeral.
Seems a sort of joke. » (105) His jokes are indeed what mark out the caretaker as full of « pure good-heartedness » - a good heart, that is to say both a compassionate soul and a healthy pump, « pumping thousands of gallons of blood every day » (102). « In the midst of death we are in life », as Bloom proclaims, and the secret of it is not to take the whole thing too seriously : « both ends meet », anyway (104).
Besides the dog and the caretaker, and closely related to them, another symbolic pair goes into the essential differences of Stephen’s and Bloom’s universes : water and earth, the two dominating elements of, respectively, « Proteus » and « Hades », represent two ways of confronting matter and its transformations (notably in death), two kinds of a « Protean » experience.
An allegory of instability, the dog of « Proteus » finds his natural complement in water. In the passage that interest us, the character is confronted with a world of confusion, where the transition between land and sea is uncertain and unsafe. Even though Stephen is facing the ocean, his gaze rarely goes too far and remains mostly set on the beach : he watches what happens on the sand or « at the lacefringe of the tide » where the sea begins. The fringe is what captivates him. It frightens him too : we know from the first chapter that he doesn’t like water, to the point that he doesn’t even wash very often ; on the beach indeed, he gets scared when the fringe gets closer to him and he sees « the tide flowing quickly in on all sides, sheeting the lows of sand quickly, shellcocoacoloured » (45). The set of « Proteus » is a moving landscape invaded by water, a place where the elements mingled to form a hybrid and menacing matter in constant transformation : the sea flows in, the sand is « dwindling », the water is in turn a « molten pewter surf » or a « frozen » river on which « resin fires » splutter. This disquieting matter might easily become a deathly trap for the living : Stephen remembers the whales « stranded /.../ in the

shallows », waiting for death, whereas he himself has to get « out quickly, quickly ! » for fear the water will surround him unexpectedly. Drowning is an obsession with the young man : water reveals in him tragic impotence (« I would try [to save a drowning man]. I am not a strong swimmer »), helpless blindness (« When I put my face into it in the basin at Clongowes. Can’t see ! »), and leads to an ineluctable death (« A drowning man. /.../ I... With him together down...
/.../ Waters : bitter death : lost »). The only people out of danger seem to be either the violent barbarous ones, mere bodies following a primitive impulse (the ferocious « Dane vikings » or the
« jerkined dwarfs » made fearless and pitiless by hunger) or the « pretenders » like Buck
Mulligan, a good swimmer who « saved men from drowning » but also an « usurper » (23), undisturbed by moral subtleties (or « medieval abstrusiosities »). But for Stephen, the
« changeling » uncertain even of his own identity, the land is the only place where life is safe and some stability to be found : « If I had land under my feet I want his life still to be his, mine to be mine » (45). The sea is the domain of ambiguities and contradictions that the rational mind cannot grasp : « cold soft », it feels both unpleasant and nice ; as « our mighty mother » (38) and our « Old Father Ocean » (50), it is both feminine and masculine ; the death it gives is alternately
« bitter » (45) and the « mildest of all deaths » (49). The only sure thing about it is precisely death : it confronts our body with the bigger body it comes from - whether mother or father - and will return to, it recalls to the reluctant intellect the predominance of the « primal matter »
(Gilbert Schema) that eventually absorbs all beings in its ever-transforming shape - and even the highest aspirations cannot prevent from falling back into the original matter, as the « seadeath » of Icarus, son of Dedalus, shows.
In the « Hades » episode, it is the earth that is seen as death’s privileged element : « First thing strikes anybody. Bury the dead. » (105) The graveyard gets the bodies inside its ground
(« all the dead stretched about »), and on the outside should get the souls, if only metaphorically, in the guise of poppies reminding one that « to die » is « to sleep » : « Ought to be flowers of

sleep. Chinese cemeteries with giant poppies growing produce the best opium /.../ » (104). Death is not here a fact that escapes the mind’s understanding, a reality impossible to grasp as it is in
« Proteus » when related to the water element. On the contrary, good order and organisation dominate in the graveyard, inside and outside : « All honeycombed the ground must be : oblong cells. And very neat he keeps it too, trim grass and edgings » (104). An organisation that Bloom even tries to mentally improve, using his logic : « More room if they buried them standing.
Sitting or kneeling you couldn’t. » (104) Even the « dreadful » process of decomposition hidden within the soil, with all its gruesome « green and pink », « black », « tallowy », « cheesy » phases, its « treacle oozing », its « deathmoths » and its « gas », happens in an orderly way : « then /.../ then /.../ then /.../ ». The materiality of death, made obvious by the profusion of bodies and their physical transformations, is not here, as it is for Stephen, a source of puzzlement or disgust but a guarantee that everything can be under control (or almost : it is true a dead man’s « head might come up some day above ground with his hand pointing », a thing better to be avoided). The caretaker’s own body constitutes a reassuring first sign of good death-management : his
« prosperous bulk » anticipates all the other prosperous bulks that tombs make in the cemetery ground. His underground world of bodies is a world of equity, as is suggested by Bloom’s reference to the historical bill of individual liberty, which is also, literaly, a reclaiming of one’s body : « Habeat corpus ». (The passage from « habeas » to « habeat », with John O’Connell-
Hades as the subject of the verb, implies that only death can confer this liberty). And it is also a world « swirling with » life : with « maggots » notably, but also with all the « cells or whatever they are » who « go on living » after the person is dead. Sexual desire and decomposition are not fundamentally different : both lead to create « new life » in the end. The series of erotic fantasies linked to the graveyard (« Whores in Turkish graveyards », « a young widow », « Love among the tombstones », « Tantalising for the poor dead /.../ Desire to grig people ») end up with the mention of the caretaker’s « eight children » . The different visions of death, equally, all end up

with the same idea of a life going on under new forms : « It’s the blood sinking in the earth gives new life » ; « fat corpse /.../ invaluable for fruit garden » ; « I daresay the soil would be quite fat with corpse manure » ; « Of course the cells /.../ go on living. Changing about. Live for ever practically » ; « Read your own obituary notice they say you live longer. Gives you second wind ». Thus the transformations of the matter in « Hades », mostly of the body matter, are just different phases of the death and life cycle. The changes and metamorphosis are not a disquieting fact like in « Proteus », but the conditions of life : « changing about » is logically followed by
« live for ever practically ».
Stephen obsessively refuses to get into the water - to take a look into the « primal matter »
- remaining on the surface, abstracted in his high reflections and lofty judgements. But one might get trapped, « stranded » like the school of whales, by taking the « shallows » for deep water.
Bloom, unlike Stephen (but also, in his simple ways, unlike Buck Mulligan who dives in to become a hero), doesn’t hesitate to « go under », inside the earth, inside the tombs, inside the caretaker’s heart in particular and the « human heart » in general : « dreadful » as it might be, that is where the real life is.
This life is of course, before anything, life from a book, or in other words a literary life, dealing with a matter which is really a literary matter. Stephen’s refusal to deal with this matter, consequently, can only lead to an acknoledgement of failure.
Too immersed in his own world, in his fantasies, visions, obsessions, and in his erudition, the aspiring poet doesn’t understant that the everyday life is what he has to look at to feed his creativity. The dog, mesmerizing with reality and utterly convincing as a possible evocation of death as life’s ultimate goal, attracts his attention but does not inspire him to write. The poem about death (« He came, pale vampire », 47) is to come soon after but loaded with anachronic symbolism and rather detached from reality, a product of his imagination - and of the Irish

Literary Revival, since it is a free adaptation of a translated Gaelic poem. To « the material existence of the world and its cycles of birth and death », Jeri Johnson notes that « Stephen prefers the regeneration more easily accomplished in the artist’s imagination » (783) ; but the imagination itself needs regeneration. Stephen’s problem is that although he cannot accept the materialistic vision of life and particularly of death, he doesn’t provide any other satisfactory vision to fertilize his « artist’s imagination ». Religion is an illusion he couldn’t resort to even at the time of his mother’s death (« I couldn’t save her », 45). Philosophy and history become useless « medieval abstrusiosities » when it comes to saving a drowning man - to real death. And art is prevented from developping by Stephen’s overwhelming sense of guilt and « fear » - whether it be fear of action, fear of betraying, or fear of life in general because of its correlation with death. Confronted with his « enemy », he is only able to stand still and « silent », « terribilia meditans » but never actans . Confronted with the reality of « human eyes » filled with the
« horror » of dying, he almost looses his power of speech (even interior) and his capacity for logical reasoning : « I... With him together down... I could not save her. Waters : bitter death : lost. » (45) The fear of betraying his ideas prevented him from giving his prayers to his dying mother ; the fear of becoming a « pretender », maybe, prevents him from giving his art to Mother
Ireland. For action and betrayal, as his obsession with Hamlet reveals, seem to him to work together : Buck Mulligan, hero and « usurper », perfectly illustrates this conception, along with all the pseudo « kings’sons », each of them a « knight » or a « wonder » of falsehood. At any rate,
Stephen, as a true Dubliner, appears struck by a kind of « paralysis », unable to push his creativity forward. Refusing to follow the material inspiration, but denying the world any soul, he remains prisoner of an artistic meaning he is terrified to betray. In the end, he is only a « rere regardant », as « silent » as the ship his eyes follow and going - at best - in the same direction, back.

Bloom on the other hand, Bloom the outsider, Bloom who is not an artist and doesn’t believe in meaning something but just in living, is an incarnation of productivity. While Stephen is a character of the past, a manifestation of the incapacity to look forward, Bloom ends his meeting with death (his « Hades chapter ») with a thanks and a praise to the morning : « Thank you. How grand we are this morning ! » (111) The only idea he believes in is the caretaker’s
« pure good-heartedness ». His learning is not always accurate but for all that, if he can admire
Shakespeare’s « profound knowledge of human heart », is it not because he shares it ? On the whole the creative principle he underscores is the one that functions in the book : that of an everchanging, ever-living, self-engendering matter, whether carnal or literary. « Nothing to feed on feed on themselves » (104) : that could be the motto of the Ulysses chapters, which constantly reuse, re-write, re-weave themselves like an (almost) never-ending Penelope tapestry. The poetical expressivity acording to him comes precisely from such a re-cycling (getting the material into a cycle again, the cycle of life and death) : the graveyard « wreaths » and « garlands of bronzefoil » are not as « poetical » as natural flowers because they get « rather tiresome, never withering.
Expresses nothing. Immortelles. » (109) Words too have to wither, evolve, metamorphose, get distorted, dead and resurrected to gain their full expressivity. From that angle, there is no such thing as betrayal or guilt, because there is no such thing as a meaning, a transcendence (art or philosophy), a father-author to look for - only elements of a general matter that follow the
« common sense » of life and death. No more than he is bitter about his father committing suicide, Bloom is not angry at Molly for her affair with Blazes Boylan. More generally,
« vulturing the dead » is only unearthing withered or buried in elements of reality ; a
« spousebreach » is just an unexpected association of existences : it is what
Ulysses constantly does with its own realities and existences, words. Indeed, it is interesting to notice that according to Frank Budgen, Bloom’s peculiar « character of thought » is « the nose on the ground, like a

dog on the scent » (92-93) : could the Protean dog that Stephen watches on the beach be - in spite of the chronological impossibility - one of the « metempsycosis » of the Protean Bloom himself ?
Like the dog in « Proteus », Bloom in « Hades » « rooted in the sand » to « vultur[e] » the dead - to bring out the bodies and ghosts, and feed his speech and character on them (and also to allow the chapter to develop its « incubism » technic, if one follows the Gilbert Schema). But the dog/Bloom also « rooted in the sand » in the sense that he takes roots in it, that not only does he feed on the matter but he is himself matter in every meanings and shapes. Bloom as a character is an illustration of the principle of creation he himself brings out, for instance by explaining in the first pages of his appearance the « metempsycosis » process that will then come back regularly all along his and Molly’s reflections - including as the curious mollyesque avatars « met him pike hoses » (147) and « met something with hoses in it » (705)... The character Bloom is a word that goes from body to body, from shape to shape, from speech to speech, to experiment as much as possible and without constraints with the literary material. Habeat corpus : or rather, habeat copora , for there is virtually no limit to freedom and play when the body is made of language, the most malleable of matters. Thus, while Stephen feels revolted by the « Pretenders » who betray their own lives, it is in fact Bloom’s way of being to « live their lives » (like the programmatic
« tuckoo »/cuckoo of the opening of
A Portrait ) : other characters’ lives, other languages’ lives.
But he does it in a playful way that is beyond betrayal, beyond any message except that of the
« good » sense, beyond any morals other than that given by a « profound knowledge of the human heart ». The length of the book Ulysses bears witness to that liberty and joyous creativity - and the biographical fact, too, that Joyce would probably never have stopped writing Ulysses had there not been publishing necessities to restrain him.
Bloom’s success as a character - as opposed to Stephen’s failure, just as he fails as an artist - is visible in that material proliferation. After three chapters and the lost beginning of a

poem, Stephen gives way to his antithesis : the unique artist gets metamorphosed into the life traveller, Ulysses, also named « Nobody » (and many more names, to start with Bloom), a more inspiring creation. Joyce didn’t hyde the fact that he had gotten tired of Stephen who, according to him, couldn’t evolve anymore as a character : already shaped by A Portrait , and even by
Dubliners (although he is not officially a character of that book), he wasn’t flexible enough to assume the freedom and space the new body needed to develop. A new life-sized (everyday lifesized) figure was necessary to turn the dead bodies of the precedent texts into fat manure and create a work that would « live for ever practically ». Stephen had first to get sacrificed to Bloom, the all-in-one character, to then be able to rise again as Bloom’s son in the final chapters, or as one of Bloom’s last avatars (Stoom or Blephen, 635). Thus the process of creative recycling goes on till the end - and much further than the end if we take into account the enormous posterity of the book. For in Ulysses , in the end, life is the winner, yes - as the last word of the last body (not
Stephen the son, not Bloom the father, but Molly the lover and mother) very simply says.