[In the following essay, Alter perceives the character of Leopold Bloom in Ulysses as a version of the Greek epic hero.]

The reasons that drew Joyce to cast his modern Everyman in the mold of the classical Ulysses have been broadly evident to readers since the first publication of the novel. Of all the epic heroes of antiquity, Ulysses is the one who most fully engages the alluring multiplicity of human experience (“many sided” is one of his Homeric epithets), moving from seductress to sorceress to monster to welcoming princess, flung from proud commander to naked shipwreck survivor, then springing from disguised beggar to triumphant king. The exigencies of the quotidian, piquantly entrammeled with the fabulous, are more palpable in his story than in any of the other classical epics, and domesticity is the inner sanctum of the political realm itself—that conjugal bed built round a living olive tree that the returning hero will reclaim at the end.

And for all the traditional martial prowess of the epic warrior that Odysseus exhibits in savaging Penelope's suitors, he makes his arduous way across the Mediterranean to Ithaca chiefly through wiliness, ingenuity, resilience, and toughness of spirit. In all this, one readily sees the delightful correspondences—only some of them ironic—between the Homeric hero and Joyce's middling modern man, frustrated in marriage, work, and parenthood; cuckolded, yet longing to reclaim his Penelope (who, even while reveling in the afternoon's infidelity, proves to be faithful to Bloom in her fashion); an Eccles-Street homebody but also a voyager of sorts in the fabulous streets of Dublin, and, still more, a habitual mental voyager to exotic bournes where dulcimers play and melon-ripe maidens beckon.

What complicates Joyce's version of Ulysses and, I think, produces a shift in the thematic implications and tonalities of the figure as he represents him, is that he grafts onto the Homeric hero a cluster of allusions to that other set of Mediterranean texts that has been foundational for the Western tradition—the Hebrew Bible. This crossbreeding of intertextuality in part reflects Joyce's delight in playing inventively with received ideas, and I think it is never easy to distinguish in his writing between sheer literary play, self-pleasuring ingenuity, and the kind of invocation of archetypes that gives real resonance to his characters, though in my reading of Bloom the resonance is what mainly comes across. Hebraism and Hellenism are, of course, in different formulations a familiar schematic division of Western culture (Matthew Arnold duly makes a cameo appearance in the face of a deaf gardener near the beginning of the first chapter), and it is Joyce's clear aim both to exploit this opposition—in “Ithaca” Stephen is elaborately aligned with Hellenism and Bloom with Hebraism—and to collapse it.

Thus Joyce makes his version of the Greek epic hero a Jew, or, strictly speaking, a vestigial and ambivalent Jew, who, we learn at one point, is not even circumcised. “Jewgreek and Greekjew meet” not only in the encounter between Bloom and Stephen but within the character of Bloom himself. Joyce's most obvious move in collapsing a distinction as old as the Pauline Epistles is to wed the heroic wanderer of Homer's epic with the wandering Jew of post-biblical Christian lore: the brilliant epic survivor in this way is fused with the outcast, the marginal man, the perennial object of persecution and reproach. Less transparent, perhaps because at first it seems it could be only ironic, is the association of Bloom with the biblical idea of redemption.

Allusions to the Bible abound in Ulysses, being nearly as frequent as allusions to the Odyssey. There are, of course, certain recurrent references to the New Testament, since Bloom as Messiah is at a number of points linked with Christ, but the invocation of Hebrew Scripture is considerably more prominent, with a special concentration on the Exodus story (a tale of national redemption, Bloom lined up with Moses), on the figure of Elijah (who, according to Malachi, is to be harbinger of the Messiah), and on Isaiah and some of the other prophets who articulated visions of redemption. Tracing such networks of allusion is a standard operation of the Joyce industry—no other major modern writer has created so many irresistible temptations for the scholar's impulse of pedantry—but more noteworthy is Joyce's extraordinary sense of realistic rightness in introducing the biblical materials mimetically into Bloom's world as elements of consciousness, confused shards and fragments, notions misperceived yet perennially relevant, the flotsam and jetsam of an ancient past that plausibly, and often comically, surfaces in the present. In this respect, the biblical allusions often work differently than do the Homeric ones, which by and large do not reflect the consciousness of the characters but rather are ingeniously superimposed on the narrative by the novelist.

Here, for example, is Bloom walking through the office of the Freeman's Journal, in the subsection headlined AND IT WAS THE FEAST OF PASSOVER. Ever curious, he watches the compositor setting the type for Paddy Dignam's obituary, reading the letters backward (“mangiD. kcirtaP.”). This odd feat of reading from right to left, against the grain, as it were, of prevailing cultural practice, makes Bloom think of his father, reading the Hebrew text of the Hagadah, the narrative of the Exodus recited at the seder on Passover night (this fascination with the idea of reading from right to left will recur at the end of “Nightown”): Poor Papa with his hagadah book, reading backwards with his finger to me. Pessach. Next year in Jerusalem. Dear, O dear! All that long business about that brought us out of the land of Egypt and into the house of bondage alleluia. Shema Israel Adonai Elohenu. No, that's the other. Then the twelve brothers, Jacob's sons. And then the lamb and the cat and the dog and the stick and the water and the butcher and then the angel of death kills the butcher and he kills the ox and the dog kills the cat. Sounds a bit silly till you come to look into it well. Justice it means but it's everybody eating everyone else. That's what life is after all.

Bloom's confusion and bemusement over these half-remembered pieces of Hebrew tradition are realistically precise for the kind of Jew he is, and they are both funny and touching. Since the Passover, or Pessach, service is a recitation of the first national redemption of Israel, it appropriately concludes with the declaration of messianic hope, “Next year in Jerusalem,” which Bloom properly recalls. Then his earnest but imperfect memory begins a characteristic skid. The biblical phrase, used in the Hagadah, “that brought us out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage” is scrambled to read “into the house of bondage,” so the announced redemption is short-circuited, Israel turning back from Egypt into bondage. The alleluia is then sheer free association with biblical phrases—or, perhaps, a subliminal recollection of Psalm 113, which appears in a sequence of hallelujah psalms, and is later quoted from in the Vulgate version in “Ithaca.” Through alleluia Bloom stumbles on to Shema Israel, “Hear O Israel the Lord our God, the Lord is one,” but breaks off, realizing, “that's the other”—that is, the declaration of faith which would be the one other scrap of Hebrew beside some phrases from the Hagadah that a Jew of his ilk might still retain.

The irrelevant recollection of Jacob's twelve sons is another effort of Bloom's to find the thread he has lost among these bits of tradition he barely remembers. (Perhaps the theme of fraternal hostility prepares for what immediately follows.) Then he gets on to Had Gadia, “An Only Kid” (Joyce substitutes a lamb), a children's song written in a melange of Hebrew and Aramaic sung at the end of the seder, a few minutes after the chanting of “Next year in Jerusalem.” The song is structured like “This is the House that Jack Built” the kid being eaten by the cat, who is eaten by the dog, who is beaten by the stick, and so on up to God, who kills the angel of death (an eschatological last stanza suppressed in Bloom's summary). But in remembering, more or less, “An Only Kid,” Bloom has in fact found the thread he needs, the thread to the wry, realistically diminished, comic messianism with which he will be associated as the novel unfolds. “Justice it means,” he says to himself, perhaps vaguely thinking of that last eschatological stanza he has not managed to remember, “but it's everybody eating everyone else. That's what life is after all.”

Stephen Daedalus states matters more dramatically, or more apocalyptically, in his famous invocation of history as a nightmare from which we are trying to awake, but Bloom is more of a chagrined realist, duly noting that dog eats dog, or rather dog eats cat, is the rule of the world—“what life is,” and yet stubbornly clinging to the idea that there has to be some possibility of justice emerging from the whole murderous mess. He presents in effect a soberly reduced version of Isaiah 11, where the promised ideal king is imagined judging all the downtrodden of the earth in justice, and where the lamb, instead of being eaten by the cat in a cosmic chain of depredation, dwells in peace with the wolf. But Bloom's very longing for justice, however confused, is a reflection of his reiterated association in the novel with the messianic heritage, and it marks a significant shift from the figure of Ulysses, who is chiefly concerned with getting back what is personally his: “a limited notion of justice” within household and kingdom rather than justice as the hallmark of a transfigured global order.

Motivic and allusive reminders of the messianic dimension of this Ulysses continue to appear until the last chapter of the novel, when Molly takes over, with her own female and pervasively pagan vision of redemption. Before that point, the two principal arenas for the display of Bloom's messianism are barroom and whorehouse, with Bloom as comic messiah seen first in the sharp light of satiric realism (“Cyclops”) and then in the psychedelic illumination of farcical fantasy (“Circe”).

In Barney Kiernan's pub, Bloom, the well-meaning inveterately fumbling spokesman for the idea of universal justice, is caught in a crossfire of critical perspectives: first, that of the nameless vernacular Irish narrator who is inclined to see him as a figure of fun (“with his dunducketymudcoloured mug on him and his old plumeyes rolling about”), and then, that of the habitues of the bar, whose attitudes toward Bloom range from tolerant condescension to the seething hostility of the xenophobic Citizen. It is the latter who sarcastically puts the name of Messiah squarely on Bloom: “That's the new Messiah for Ireland!” To which one of his interlocutors rejoins, both whimsically and sardonically, but in words that in some degree reverse the Citizen's sarcastic negation: Yes … and every male that's born they think it may be their Messiah. And every jew is in a tall state of excitement, I believe, till he knows if he's a father or a mother.”

Bloom as Ulysses is a peripatetic and mental adventurer, dreaming of a return to the satisfactions of conjugality, that happy realm of “Warm beds: warm full-blooded life.” Bloom as Messiah is a talker rather than a doer, a preacher of truth to the gentiles (hardly a Homeric role) who touchingly trips through confusions as he argues for the necessity to escape the terrible cycle of slaughterer and ox, stick and dog:

—Persecution, says he, all the history of the world is full of it. Perpetuating national hatred among nations.

—But do you know what a nation means? says John Wyse.

—Yes, says Bloom.

—What is it? says John Wyse.

—A nation? says Bloom. A nation is the same people living in the same place.

—By God, then, says Ned, laughing, if that's so I'm a nation for I'm living in the same place for the past five years.

The genius in the double irony with which Joyce represents his character as the voice of messianic hope is that Bloom's manifest intellectual incapacity is intertwined with his moral capacity. Having invoked the idea of the hatred among nations, he makes it apparent that he has only a dim notion of what a nation might be (and the facts of persecution to which he refers are more pertinent to the relation between national majorities and minorities or individuals than among nations). This confusion is linked to another confusion, about what the Jews are—a nation, a religion, an ethnic group, or, in the modern era, a disparate collection of individuals in transition from being Jews to being something else. When Bloom is pressed to defend himself as a Jew, he offers a little catalogue of famous Jews that comprises three baptized Christians of Jewish extraction and one excommunicated Jew, to which he adds, inflaming the Citizen to the point of violence, Jesus and his Father.

The general conceptual muddle, however, about what a nation might be carries a certain paradoxical moral authority. This whole scene, we should recall, was written in the midst of the First World War, at a moment when the technologically advanced European states were, for the supposed cause of the nation, maiming and slaughtering each other's young men on a scale unprecedented in history. Bloom's indignation about persecution seems more important than his fumbling the concept of nation, or, indeed the very fumbling may be Joyce's way of suggesting that it is an empty concept, nothing worth killing for.

To put this paradox of moral capacity in intellectual incapacity somewhat differently, Joyce suggests through his incorrigibly middlebrow hero that there may be moral truth in banality itself because in his view the fundamental truths about the human condition are simple and self-evident and have not changed through the ages. Joyce's belief in this sort of unchanging truth is what ultimately underwrites his use of two sets of ancient Mediterranean archetypes to shape his modern epic. A few minutes later in the barroom debate, when the Citizen sarcastically asks Bloom whether he is talking about the New Jerusalem and Bloom answers, “I'm talking about injustice,” he goes on to explain, in a characteristic mixture of sincerity and simplicity, what he means:

Force, hatred, history, all that. That's not life for men and women, insult and hatred. And everybody knows that it's the opposite of that that is really life.

—What? says Alf.

—Love, says Bloom. I mean the opposite of hatred.

The moral authority of the commonplace is explicitly identified by Bloom when he says, “everybody knows.” Behind Bloom, Joyce knows that love as a universal principle of life affirmation is a soppy cliche as well as a truth, and so he wards off sentimentality by introducing, after a few satiric remarks by Bloom's interlocutors, a whole burlesque paragraph on love: “Love loves to love love. Nurse loves the new chemist. Constable 14A loves Mary Kelly. Gerty MacDowell loves the boy that has the bicycle. M. B. loves a fair gentleman. Le Chi Han lovey up kissy Chi Pu Chow. …” And so forth.

Both the force and the limitation of Bloom's inveighing against hatred, persecution, and injustice have to be understood in connection with who he is and where he is located in the world. An Irishman of Jewish-Hungarian extraction, no more than half-accepted by his fellow Dubliners, intermittently exposed to outbursts of hostility like the one unleashed by the Citizen, remembering, at least in principle, a long history of persecution, he has personal knowledge of the corrosive workings of prejudice and hatred, and a kind of self-interest in imagining a society where there would be neither outsider nor insider, neither oppressor nor oppressed. At the same time, he lacks the intellectual equipment to hold in clear view the historical phenomena and social institutions that are the concrete medium of injustice—and, an ineffectual figure hovering on the margins of his own society, he is scarcely in a position to do anything to implement his vision of a world founded on justice. In the end, Bloom as Messiah must slide back into Bloom as Ulysses, a man intent chiefly on getting back into his own conjugal bed, a latter-day hero who will “defeat” Molly's real and imagined suitors not by slaughtering them—“I mean the opposite of hatred”—but by accepting them, in returning to his Penelope, as painful yet finally inconsequential necessities of the irremediably absurd human condition.

Toward the end of the great, moving catechism in “Ithaca,” Bloom thinks of “the preordained frangibility of the hymen, the presupposed intangibility of the thing itself … the continual production of semen by distillation: the futility of triumph or protest or vindication: the inanity of extolled virtue: the lethargy of nescient matter: the apathy of the stars.” Given this destiny of resignation and this situation of social impotence (there are ambiguous intimations in the novel that it may be sexual impotence as well), it makes perfect sense that Bloom's vague messianic hopes, articulated realistically in the representation of his consciousness and his conversation, should then be recycled as farce: in a stubbornly unredeemed world, the figure of the would-be redeemer becomes a point of high hilarity for Joyce's verbal vaudeville. This begins in the vivid mock-biblical paragraph that concludes the “Cyclops” episode: Bloom, one recalls, is fleeing the wrath and missiles and snarling dog of the Citizen in a hackney carriage, which Joyce proceeds to convert into Elijah's heavenbound fiery chariot:

When, lo, there came about them all a great brightness and they beheld the chariot wherein He stood ascend to heaven. And they beheld Him in the chariot, clothed upon in the glory of the brightness, having raiment as of the sun, fair as the moon and terrible that for awe they durst not look upon Him. And there came a voice out of heaven, calling: Elijah! Elijah! And he answered with a main cry: Abba! Adonai! And they beheld Him even Him, ben Bloom Elijah, amid clouds of angels ascend to the glory of the brightness at an angle of forty-five degrees over Donohoe's in Little Green Street like a shot off a shovel.

For all the high jinks of parody, the novel at this point is still flooded with the level daylight of realism, and so the soaring fantasy of Bloom as Elijah or Bloom as ascended Messiah is bounced against a solid counterpoint in the material world, that wonderful last glimpse of Bloom zipping off “at an angle of forty-five degrees over Donohoe's … like a shot off a shovel.” The narrative then proceeds through “Nausicaa,” where pulp-fiction romance is the chief literary point of reference and “Oxen of the Sun,” where the long history of English style controls the chapter, to the climactic phantasmagoria of “Circe,” where the constraints of realism no longer affect the playing out of Bloom's sundry messianic images.

It is necessary, I think, to speak not of a messianic image but of sundry images, because in the long Nightown episode—aptly characterized by Nabokov as the hallucination of the novel itself rather than of Bloom—Joyce's bumbling spokesman for the idea of universal justice is made to veer wildly from one role to another. At one end of the spectrum, he is identified by two other Dublin Jews who appeared earlier in his stream of consciousness as an out-and-out fake in his messianic pretensions. First Hornblower, the porter of Trinity College, announces Bloom as scapegoat in ringing biblical language:

And he shall carry the sins of the people to Azazel, the spirit which is in the wilderness, and to Lilith, the nighthag, and they shall stone him and defile him, yea, all from Agendath Netaim and from Mizraim, the land of Ham.

The ritual of the scapegoat, Azazel, from Leviticus 16 is joined aptly with Lilith, the primordial demon woman or seductress of rabbinic legend, whose Hebrew name is accurately translated here as “nighthag,” for Bloom is, after all, in a brothel, and, throughout, his consciousness confuses messianic aspirations with erotic daydreams. The stoning is probably intended to recall the end of the “Cyclops” episode, except that here those who cast the stones are not only gentiles (the denizens of Mizraim, Hebrew for “Egypt”) but also Jews, who are associated with Agendath Netaim, the Zionist “planters' association” that first came to Bloom's attention in the newspaper advertisement he spotted in the pork butcher's.

The recurring Zionist motif is one of Joyce's most ingenious ploys for conflating the figures of Ulysses and the Messiah. Ulysses is a hero headed homeward, where he will reclaim his wife and re-establish his sovereignty over his kingdom. The Messiah in Jewish tradition is to lead his people back to its long-lost homeland and re-establish national sovereignty there. Molly, born in Gibraltar at the other end of the Mediterranean from the Promised Land, is associated with it in Bloom's mind both metaphorically—her “Oriental” sensuality, her connection with lush gardens and melons and other ripe fruit—and also by a kind of stretched metonymy—the Mediterranean itself. But the atoning ritual of Hornblower's prophecy immediately degenerates into humiliating farce:

(All the people cast soft pantomime stones at Bloom. Many bonafide travellers and ownerless dogs come near him and defile him. Mastiansky and Citron approach in gabardines, wearing long earlocks. They wag their beards at Bloom.)

MASTIANSKY AND CITRON

Belia! Laemlein of Istria, the false Messiah! Abulafia!

The prophesied stoning turns into a dreamlike charade and the biblical “defilement” into Bloom's being peed on by dogs and passersby. Mastiansky and Citron, two Jews of Bloom's acquaintance, appear here as old-style Orthodox pietists, dressed in gabardines (that is, caftans) and sporting earlocks and beards in order to stress that they speak on behalf of an “authentic” Jewry in their denunciation of Bloom. What kind of Messiah, they suggest, could this down-at-the-heels advertising canvasser be, uncircumcised, married to a Christian, coming upon his vision of the Return to Zion in a pork butcher's wrapping papers? And so they place him on the roll-call of infamy of false messiahs who led the Jews astray, rejecting his claim, a few minutes earlier in the Nightown psycho-farce: “Yea on the word of a Bloom, ye shall ere long enter into the golden city which is to be, the new Bloomusalem in the Nova Hibernia of the future.” Perhaps for them the bogusness of his messianic self-annunciation is betrayed by the very fact that the “colossal edifice” that commands the landscape of the new Bloomusalem is “built in the shape of a huge pork kidney.” Yet precisely what is endearing about Bloom's elevation to revealed Messiah in Nightown is the exuberance with which it is carried off, an exuberance that represents a heightening to wild hyperbole of his stubborn ethical optimism in the face of repeated defeat that is visible in the realistic sections of the novel. His notion of the messianic age is derived from the modern progressivist commonplaces that are his mental stock-in-trade, here huddled together with reckless elan: “New worlds for old. Union of all, jew, moslem and gentile. … Electric dishscrubbers. Tuberculosis, lunacy, war and mendicancy must now cease. … No more patriotism of barspongers and dropsical imposters. Free money, free love and a free lay church in a free lay state.”

Through all this, the comic possibilities of Bloom the vestigial Jew as Messiah are brilliantly exploited. At one memorable juncture, rams' horns, which according to the prophet Malachi are to announce the coming of the redeemer, blare, and the standard of Zion is raised. Then Bloom himself speaks, according to his lights, in the language of the prophets: “Aleph Beth Ghimel Daleth Hagadah Tephilim Kosher Yom Kippur Hanukah Roschaschana Beni Brith Bar Mitzvah Mazzoth Askenazim Meshuggah Talith.” These solemnly intoned words are a wonderful potpourri of gibberish, just the sort of scraps of Hebrew lexicon that a marginal Jew such as Bloom would retain from childhood memory: the first four letters of the Hebrew alphabet; the Hagadah or Passover homeservice referred to earlier by Bloom; tephilim, the leather boxes containing biblical verses and attached to thongs worn by Jewish males during the daily morning service; the names of three holidays; Beni (actually, B'nai) Brith, the Jewish fraternal organization; Bar Mitzvah, the confirmation ceremony; Mazzoth, the unleavened bread eaten on Passover; Askenazim, the general term for Central and East-European Jews; Meshuggah, crazy (the Hebrew term that becomes pungently standard in colloquial Yiddish); and Talith, prayer shawl. In the midst of all these sits Kosher, a term Bloom knows, but a practice which, as a purchaser of pork kidneys, he definitely eschews.

There is hardly a messianic message in this Hebrew word-salad, though it is certainly quite funny and a faithful reflection of Bloom's cultural world as a vestigial Jew. The only character in Nightown who speaks a proper Hebrew sentence is not Bloom but Zoe the whore. After appearing in the phantasmagoria as the beloved woman of the Song of Songs, “Murmuring singsong with the music, her odalisk lips lusciously smeared with salve of swinefat and rosewater,” she pronounces the untranslated words, “Schorach ani wenowach, benoith Hierushaloim,” that is, “Dark am I but comely, O daughters of Jerusalem.” Bloom, taking note of the pronunciation, which does not necessarily prove that he understands the meaning, is “fascinated” and remarks, “I thought you were of good stock by your accent.”

The general aim of the “Circe” episode is to extrude as surreal comic theatrics whatever is merely implicit elsewhere in the characters of the novel and their relationships. If Bloom does not share the blustering, boastful male assertiveness of the more typical Dubliners, if he is more wifely than husband to Molly, in “Circe” he can be presented as “the new womanly man” who, at the point of condemnation by an angry mob, is pardoned because he is about to have a child and then gives birth to eight sons, all of whom have names suggesting money and at once become captains of industry and public administration. This amounts to a benign comic version of the paranoid fantasy of a worldwide Jewish monetary conspiracy, as in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and Joyce is quick to link it with Bloom's messianic profile, for immediately after the birth of the eight sons a Voice asks, “Bloom, are you the Messiah ben Joseph or ben David?” and Bloom, echoing Jesus's words to Pilate, replies, “(Darkly.) ‘You have said it.’”

The Jew as an archetype of Western lore and legend characteristically figures as a father or old man—because he represents an older, superannuated dispensation and because he is associated with the “Old” Testament that is displaced by the New. In the anti-Semitic versions of this archetype, Norman Cohen has persuasively argued, he is a castrating or vampiric father, perhaps because he is dimly perceived by Christendom as having imposed upon it an onerous and restrictive moral code. In Joyce's deft hands, the whole archetype is given a decidedly philo-Semitic spin. He neatly binds together the Jew as father with the Homeric image of Ulysses the father seeking reunion with Telemachus his son. Bloom is actually only thirty-eight, but he feels much older: experience has bruised him, crumpled him, left him with a certain sense of fatigue and diminished capacities, and that youthful moment when he lolled in the grass with Molly on Ben Howth seems hopelessly distant.

In normal literary circumstances, comedy is a young man's game: it is the young lovers who are the locus of the desire of comic fulfillment while the old folks create the obstacles the younger generation must overcome. One of the distinctive features of Joyce's Ulysses is that it creates a resonant comedy of middle life: Molly in her thirties can still dream, quite exuberantly, of a horizon of fresh mornings bursting with flowers and love; and Bloom, dog-tired from his wanderings, bearing a lifetime's sackload of failures, can fantasize becoming a father again, at least symbolically, and can sense in his return to Molly's recumbent body “the islands of the blessed, the isles of Greece, the land of promise … adipose posterior female hemispheres, redolent of milk and honey and of excretory sanguine and seminal warmth.” Precisely in this regard, Joyce grasps the potential for a reversed directionality in the historical archetype he exploits. The exiled people of Israel, seen from without, is the Wandering Jew, the ancient, undying figure of the blighted outcast; seen from within the people that stubbornly clings to its messianic expectations through long exile, praying, “Renew our days as of old,” is the very type of hope triumphing over experience, nurturing through adversity the dream of return to the warm seedbed of origins and new birth.

All this works beautifully in Joyce's novel because it is not merely an idea, cleverly elaborated, but a rich attitudinal ambiance that is generated through the realized individual character of Bloom, who is often ridiculous, sometimes pathetic, and frequently ignorant or even foolish, but nevertheless persists in his hopefulness and his simple decency, like Sancho Panza (with a strong admixture of Quixote), or like Chaplin's Tramp. This poignancy of Bloom as comic hero is nowhere more vivid than in the moment he leads Stephen through the early morning darkness with a candle—“a light unto the gentiles”—to the rear entrance of his home. Bloom's last act of fumbling (he has forgotten his key) becomes a seriocomic image of his role as existential Everyman. “What comforted his misapprehension?” asks the catechist-narrator, referring to Stephen's philosophically fraught, and drunken, words just spoken that Bloom has not altogether grasped.

That as a competent keyless citizen he had proceeded energetically from the unknown to the known through the incertitude of the void. In what order of precedence, with what attendant ceremony was the exodus from the house of bondage to the wilderness of inhabitation effected? Lighted Candle in Stick borne by BLOOM.

Diaconal Hat on Ashplant borne by STEPHEN. With what intonation secreto of what commemorative psalm?

The 113th, modus peregrinus: In exitu Israel de, Egypto: domus Jacob de populo barbaro. What did each do at the door of egress? Bloom set the candlestick on the floor. Stephen put the hat on his head. For what creature was the door of egress an ingress? For a cat.

What spectacle confronted them when they, first the host, then the guest, emerged silently, doubly dark, from obscurity by a passage from the rere of the house into the penumbra of the garden?

The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.

The way not to read this passage, or Ulysses as a whole, is to take the symbolism too seriously. Joyce is obviously playing with Dante but it is a game, not rigorous emulation. He pointedly invokes Dante's system of layered significances by quoting the very psalm Dante used in his letter to Can Grande to illustrate the traditional four levels of simultaneous meaning that he sought to use in The Divine Comedy. (But note the satiric paradox in the transition from “the house of bondage” to “the wilderness of inhabitation.”) The enrapturing vision of the stars vouchsafed Bloom-Virgil and Stephen-Dante is of course a citation of the last line of the Inferno, though elaborated by the metaphor of the celestial tree heavy with nocturnal fruit.

Yet Bloom is not really Virgil but only a comic gesture toward him, and toward Ulysses, and toward the Messiah. He is a “guide” to Stephen only in the limited sense that, even with his modest intellectual resources, he is more in touch with the carnal and ethical imperatives of human existence than Stephen is, though it takes an optimistic reader to imagine this will lead Stephen to change his life. And so we remain with the image of a middle-aged man and a young man—the one bleary with fatigue and the other with drink—standing together in a Dublin backyard by the cat door, looking up at the starry sky and seeing in that silent heaventree a sidereal efflorescence of the recurrent dream of luscious fruit and beauty that Bloom has nurtured from the start. It is a moment of genuine vision, and through the next few pages it will launch Bloom on a mental trajectory across light years and eons. The messianic side of Bloom is drawn back to these dizzying, perhaps restorative, perspectives of cosmic vastness, of perfection and beauty. Bloom as “Messiah” serves the purpose of repeatedly projecting out of the represented world of the novel a horizon of other, and better, possibilities. Bloom, however, is not only imagined by the novelist with uncompromising realism but, for all his quixotic impulses, is finally a realist himself; and this earthbound other side—is it the Ulyssean side?—of the visionary hero leads him to the conclusion, after a few minutes' reflection, “That it was not a heaventree, not a heavengrot, not a heavenbeast, not a heavenman. That it was a Utopia … a mobility of illusory forms immobilised in space, remobilised in air: a past which possibly had ceased to exist as a present before its actual spectators had entered actual present existence.” This is perhaps comedy's greatest gift, to convey a sense of real things, unsparingly shorn of the veil of illusion, and yet to sustain, as Bloom under the vastness of the heavens goes on to do, the stirring prospect of hope for a more perfect order of things.