The Original Bobo

Writing on Joyce’s Ulysses just before the 100th anniversary of Bloomsday, Declan Kiberd notes the oddity of the ending: “the climax of Ulysses is a meeting between two men, the young poet Stephen Dedalus and the older ad-canvasser Leopold Bloom . . . . The meeting of Dedalus and Bloom is one of the oddest climaxes in the history of Modernism, since it violates the convention that there must be war between bohemian and bourgeois. Instead, the poet and businessman sit down for late-night food and a friendly chat.”

Kiberd explains this ending partly by reference to the belated modernization of Ireland: “In modernist Paris most self-respecting intellectuals despised the bourgeois as a soulless, money-grubbing automaton. It had not been so back in 1789, when writers had celebrated the meritocrats of a new middle class who were finally replacing a parasitic aristocracy. Only much later did the intellectuals begin to detach themselves from that class, becoming its first and foremost critics. In Ireland, however, although the old Gaelic aristocracy had fallen, it had been replaced by English arrivestes who posed as a new gentry. A native middle class was only just emerging as a full social formation in the lifetime of James Joyce.”

Personally, despite his innovative, experimental, and controversial writing, cut a conventional figure in Paris: “In the later days of his fame, his Parisian neighbours found it hard to reconcile his reputation as a daredevil artist with the uxorious family man in dapper suits who came and went from his apartment. The famous meeting with Marcel Proust set up by admirers keen for bons mots on the ‘ache of the modern’ resulted in little more than a stiff, uneasy exchange on the merits of dark chocolate truffles.” Joyce was also not adverse to entrepreneurial endeavors, including promotion of his own books: “He won a franchise from the Dublin Woolen Mills to sell Aran sweaters on the Continent,” and prior to his move from Ireland helped to set up the first cinema in Dublin. Nor was Joyce alone among Irish writers in his bourgeois interest in income, though Shaw said it most bluntly, in response to a film producers who wanted to buy the rights to a play: “you keep talking about art and all I’m interested in is the money.”

Thematically, what is Joyce up to in bringing Stephen and Bloom together at the end, in communion at a table? Kiberd suggests that the bourgeois submersion in the everyday actually represents a crucial element of Joyce’s (and Stephen’s) aesthetic vision: “Bloom’s prophetic role with Stephen is not to communicate in words any particular philosophy, but to sacralize the everyday, to help make him feel at home in the world.” Stephen needs a “street person” like Bloom the bourgeoisie, whose home is as much on the avenues and pubs of Dublin as in the house of Eccles Street, in order to fulfill his bohemian artistic vision.