Leopold Bloom’s Urban Odyssey in James Joyce’s Ulysses

Abstract

The purpose of the present paper is to present Dublin as seen through the eyes of Leopold Bloom, the protagonist of James Joyce's Ulysses, and the urban imagery he creates while wandering the streets of the city. Walter Benjamin's concept of the Flâneur, which Leopold Bloom embodies, depicts an asocial, aimlessly strolling type who observes the city from a certain distance, offering a miscellaneous portrait of the political situation in Ireland at that time. Perceived as a marginal "outsider" in Irish society due to his Jewish Hungarian origin, Bloom interprets the urban space of Dublin through his senses, depicting its backwardness.

As a wandering hero, Bloom reads the semiotics of the city — the signs and symbols of the urban space — taking into account its modern historical, socio-economic, and cultural contexts. His sharp eye detects symbols of colonialism, ostensible industrialization, or pop culture in Dublin's urban landscape.

The Dublin flâneur describes the provincial town's messes, streets, and often declined and unlivable houses of the Georgian era with overly naturalistic strokes. Even the obvious industrialization of Dublin does not go unrecognised by the modern Odysseus. According to colonial and post-colonial studies, the development of Irish beer production, although provoking profits for the breweries, mostly benefited England.

Decoding socio-cultural and political realities of Dublin, Joyce's wandering flâneur demonstrates an ambivalent urban space in Ulysses. On the one hand, Dublin at the beginning of the 20th century appears to us as a less industrialized, provincial city. On the other hand, its urban space is the epitome of modern mass culture and the advertising industry. Joyce's Leopold Bloom chooses the profession of an advertising agent, which allows us to see the changes forced by the development of mass communication means and cultural shifts.

Leopold Bloom's modern culture is full of advertising billboards and agencies, his consciousness is continually drawn by newspapers, popular books, song excerpts, or other elements of the entertainment industry. In this context, Ulysses may be interpreted as a form of protest against the totalization and hegemony of twentieth-century European mass culture. which directs to a transformation of neglect from more important political or aesthetic issues to secondary or insignificant ones.

Not a single advertisement, poster, newspaper article, or telephone line, which has become important, representing signs of the urban semiotic space, escapes Bloom's practical and sharp eye. All the allusions to newspaper headlines-clichés and journalistic presence (Episode 7 "Aeolus") scattered in the novel's narrative are an echo of the overall state of mass communications and mass culture in the daily life of Irish people.

Among the elements of city semiotics, special importance is given to public institutions. The National Museum and Library are among the most noteworthy sites in Dublin's urban landscape. Further enhancing the sensualism of Leopold Bloom are the statues of Greek goddesses located in the National Library of Ireland, constructed in the neoclassical Palladian style characteristic of the Victorian era.

The impressions received while wandering in the commercial urban space of Bloom and the sad memories revived by this topos (the status of an orphaned father and the son of a suicidal father, the unconscious feeling of landlessness, fatherlessness, alienation, suspicion of adultery, etc.) reach a climax in the phantasmagoric episode of the novel "Circe", which the character is clueless of. It offers a symbolic dramatization of the character’s unconscious. A 18-hour Dublin odyssey - Bloom's urban observations - finally acquires universal/mythical dimension, and early 20th-century Dublin is transformed into a mythopoeic chronotope.