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Joyce Studies Annual, Volume 2008, pp. 163-171 (Article)

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DOI: 10.1353/joy.0.0014

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http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/joy/summary/v2008/2008.slote.html

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1904: A Space Odyssey

SAM SLOTE

Ithaca is a seemingly infinitely expansible episode in that each answer

to each question yields further questions. Beyond this proliferating enumeration, the expansiveness of this episode also extends heavenwards.
While working on Ithaca in early 1921, Joyce explained part of his strategy to Frank Budgen: All events are resolved into their cosmic physical,
psychical etc. equivalents . . . Bloom and Stephen thereby become heavenly bodies, wanderers like the stars at which they gaze (SL: 278). This
claim is not entirely an exaggeration. After Stephen leaves Eccles Street,
Bloom prepares to go to sleep until finally, in the narratives peroration,
Blooms thoughts of the days past wandering and exile are mapped out
onto the solar system, if not beyond:
Would the departed never nowhere nohow reappear?
Ever he would wander, selfcompelled, to the extreme limit of his
cometary orbit, beyond the fixed stars and variable suns and telescopic planets, astronomical waifs and strays, to the extreme boundary of space, passing from land to land, among peoples, amid events.
Somewhere imperceptibly he would hear and somehow reluctantly,
suncompelled, obey the summons of recall. Whence, disappearing
from the constellation of the Northern Crown he would somehow
reappear reborn above delta in the constellation of Cassiopeia and
after incalculable eons of peregrination return an estranged avenger,
a wreaker of justice on malefactors, a dark crusader, a sleeper awakened, with financial resources (by supposition) surpassing those of
Rothschild or the silver king. (U 17.201223)
The question is phrased as a triple negative, never nowhere nohow,
thereby projecting a space of supposition, a journey into the subjunctive.1

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In this duly hypothetical answer Bloom is equated with a comet roaming

through the darkest reaches of the solar system and elsewhere. His Dublin
odyssey is translated and projected into outer space. But there is more to
this passage than simply an exaggerated cosmic scale. This is a very dense
paragraph that brings together a number of key referential clusters that
have been threaded through the text of Ulysses. The identification of
Bloom as a comet proceeds by incorporating several other identifications
and figurative equivalences in a way that suggests how symbolism might
work, or not work, in Ulysses.
Joyce chose comets as the symbol of this episode in the Gilbert
schema. In an earlier scene in Ithaca, when Bloom and Stephen are in
the garden discussing matters astronomical, the pertinence of comets to
this episode and to Ulysses becomes apparent as Bloom describes their
vast elliptical egressive and reentrant orbits from perihelion to aphelion
(17.1113). The extreme elliptical orbits of comets take them from very close
to the sun (perihelion) to very, very far away (aphelion). But, no matter
how far a comet travels, it will turn back toward the sun, even if the time
between successive perihelia is several millennia. Despite the vast distances
they traverse, comets remain suncompelled, that is, susceptible to the
suns gravitational influence. And so Joyce uses a comet as an astronomical
figuration of, say, Odysseus, in that it inevitably returns after a lengthy
absence. But, of course, in Ulysses Odysseus is hardly the only thing to
return, and so in the astronomical odyssey passage, the cometary Bloom
accrues a few other figurations.
Even as Bloom is being figured as a comet, the comet is already becoming something else. On the one hand, the aphelion is impossibly far:
beyond the fixed stars and variable suns and telescopic planets, astronomical waifs and strays, to the extreme boundary of space. Bloom is far
out, man. Because comets remain within the solar system, the claim that
they would travel to the extreme boundary of space is clearly hyperbolic.
On the other hand, even as Blooms trajectory is described in cometary
terms it is also being described in earthly terms: no matter how far he
travels he still remains terrestrial as he travels from land to land, among
peoples, amid events. Two orders of space are conflated here, the celestial
and the earthly. Bloom may travel far, but he also travels amidst earthly
events. The symbolic order (the astronomical) is enmeshed within the
literal (the earthly).
Now, Bloom, in his cometary escape from earth, will appear to disappear in the constellation of the Northern Crown (also known as the

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Corona Borealis or Corona Septentrionalis) as he recedes away from view.

For many centuries, the sudden and transitory appearance of comets was
believed portentous: an unpredictable omen of some potentially epochshattering event, such as the comet that preceded the battle of Hastings,
as is depicted in the Bayeux tapestry (this comet is now known to be
Halleys comet).2 Earlier in Ithaca, we were told that a nova had
appeared in Corona Borealis at about the period of the birth of Leopold
Bloom (17.112526). This information is accurate: on May 12, 1866, the
year Bloom was born (U 5.199, et passim), a nova, T Coronae Borealis,
appeared in the Northern Crown. This nova reached the 2nd magnitude,
but then, as is usual for such phenomena, faded rapidly (this nova is
recurring and erupted again in 1946). Frequently, comets and nov are
confused in their initial appearances; however, a nova spends its visible
lifetimesuddenly brightening and eventually dimmingin one fixed
location, whereas a comet appears to traverse the sky during its brief interval of visibility at and around perihelion. So here, Bloom, selfcompelled, disappears in the constellation of his birth-star, the Northern
Crown, only to reappear, suncompelled, after a suitably lengthy peregrination, in the constellation of Cassiopeia. His voyage between the two
constellations is out of sight.
The Cassiopeian re-emergence is also potentially portentous. When
Bloom and Stephen were in the back garden, they discussed the appearance of a star (1st magnitude) of exceeding brilliancy dominating by night
and day . . . about the period of birth of William Shakespeare over delta
in the recumbent neversetting constellation of Cassiopeia (17.111823).
This formulation echoes Stephens description of Shakespeares putative
birth-star in Scylla and Charybdis: A star, a daystar, a firedrake, rose
at his birth. It shone by day in the heavens alone, brighter than Venus in
the night, and by night it shone over delta in Cassiopeia, the recumbent
constellation which is the signature of his initial among the stars (9.928
31). In fact, a supernova was discovered by the great Danish astronomer
Tycho Brahe just above the star delta Cassiopeia on November 11, 1572
(Brahe also is the one who coined the term nova for these temporary
new stars).3 This supernova faded from view about eighteen months later.
The main stars in Cassiopeia are aligned in the shape of a W and so
would form the initial of Shakespeares first name as Stephen here claims.
However, Shakespeare was born in 1564, eight years before the appearance
of this nova, which thus cant really be considered to be his birth-star.

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In any case, after his celestial voyage, Bloom is born again, brighter, as
Shakespeare. Shakespeare is the telos to this odyssey.
The link between Bloom and Shakespeare was first suggested in
Scylla, where Stephen initially posits Shakespeare as the father of a dead
son and the husband of an unfaithful wife who writes himself into the
role of the ghost of King Hamlet as his patriarchal revenge (9.17180).
Now, Bloom is also the father of a dead son and the husband of an
unfaithful wife, and so Stephens account of Shakespeare is also, in part,
an account of Bloom. Bloom becomes Stephens Shakespeare, and this
figuration reaches its apotheosis (or perihelion) in the comet passage. In
this way, Bloom would be fulfilling his preterite career choice of being an
exponent of Shakespeare (17.794). Connections between Bloom,
Shakespeare, and Stephen occur elsewhere in Ulysses, notably in Circe
when both Bloom and Stephen see themselves in the face of a beardless
Shakespeare in the mirror (15.3822), the image of the face crowned by the
antlers of a cuckold. In Shakespeare, Bloom and Stephen are united
(albeit asymmetrically), just as Stephens theory links two cuckolds,
Bloom and Shakespeare (although, of course, Stephen is oblivious to the
connection he enables).
Furthermore, in Lestrygonians, Blooms interior monologue is filled
with citations, or rather, mis-citations of Shakespearean cliches such as
Look on this picture then on that (8.675) and Method in his madness, both from Hamlet.4 Bloom is probably oblivious to the Shakespearean provenance of most of these lines. However, the one line he does cite
deliberately is the one that further imbricates him within Stephens theory, as well as within at least one other referential web. Thinking of how
Shakespeare handles blank verse, Bloom recalls King Hamlets admonition to his son, Hamlet, I am thy fathers spirit / Doomed for a certain time
to walk the earth (8.6768). The line in Hamlet is slightly different: I
am thy fathers spirit; / Doomd for a certain term to walk the night
(I.v.910).5 Blooms mis-citation is significant in that it recalls Deasys
anti-Semitism in Nestor: They sinned against the light, Mr Deasy said
gravely. And you can see the darkness in their eyes. And that is why they
are wanderers on the earth to this day (2.36163). Blooms mistake thus
casts King Hamlet as the Wandering Jew, a role that Bloom himself plays
in Ulysses, as when he passes between Buck Mulligan and Stephen on the
Library steps and Buck comments: The wandering jew, Buck Mulligan
whispered with clowns awe. Did you see his eye? (9.120910).6 In

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returning as a Shakespearean avenger, Bloom also further performs the

Wandering Jew.
Padraic Columnoting the influence upon Joyce of Victor Berards
notion of a Mediterranean and Semitic Odysseusclaimed that Odysseus and the Wandering Jew are different versions of the same character.7
The figure of the Wandering Jew is also associated with violent retribution. Amidst the drunken babble of the allincluding most farraginous
chronicle (14.1412) that closes Oxen of the Sun we hear: Sinned
against the light and even now that day is at hand when he shall come to
judge the world by fire (14.157577). The vengeful he here is presumably Christ, Whose last judgment will consume the world by fire, a consequence of this purification being the end of the Wandering Jews travels.
However, because the he is lowercase, it could also refer to the he who
has sinned against the light, that is, the Wandering Jew himself. Thus, this
passage already casts the Wandering Jew into the role of the estranged
avenger (17:2021).
And so, returning to the cometary Bloom of Ithaca, we see how, on
the one hand, this passage translates Bloom into being not just an astral
voyager but also an avenger of Shakespearean magnitude, a ghost that
returns after having been doomed to walk the earth (or, improving ourselves, the night); as Stephen says in Scylla, a ghost from limbo patrum,
returning to the world that has forgotten him (9.15051). But in recalling
Stephens vision of Shakespeare, Bloom is also, on the other hand, the
Wandering Jew (a role he has been cast in elsewhere). The Shakespearean
figure is already multiple and overlaid, if not overdetermined. Determining Blooms celestial vagabondage as Shakespearean also entails overdetermining his space odyssey.
Now, in enabling this referential connection to the Shakespearean
avenger, Stephen played a bit loose with Tycho Brahes supernova in
claiming that it was Shakespeares birth-star. However, there is a way in
which Brahes supernova would be applicable here, although it is unlikely
that Joyce would have been aware of this connection. In 1998, the husband and wife team of Donald and Marilynn Olson (an astronomer and
an English professor, respectively) suggested that Brahes star is present in
Hamlet as a portent that accompanies the apparition of the ghost of King
Hamlet. Bernardo, one of the night watchmen, remarks that the ghost
comes When yond same star thats westward from the pole / Had made
his course t illume that part of heaven / Where now it burns (I.i.3638).8

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And so Joyces reference to the astral apparition in Cassiopeia is potentially not without relevance to vengeance in Hamlet.
In any case, in becoming Shakespeare, Bloom blooms; that is, he
becomes multiple and in so doing also, somehow, becomes himself. As
we hear in Circe: What went forth to the ends of the world to traverse
not itself, God, the sun, Shakespeare, a commercial traveller, having itself
traversed in reality itself becomes that self (15.211719). Shakespeare is
but one term in a displaced series of displacements, the Wandering Jew is
another, and, of course, there are others still intercalated into Blooms
eccentric orbit.
For example, the reference to the dark crusader in the comet passage
is a plausible allusion to Edmund Dantes, the Count of Monte Cristo, a
character whom Stephen had thought, as a young man, to be a dark
avenger (P 62).9 Furthermore, in returning, Bloom is also called a
sleeper awakened, which brings into this constellation of mixed references an allusion to Rip Van Winkle, who has also been associated with
Bloom throughout Ulysses, first in Nausicaa when he recalls that he
mimed Rip Van Winkle in a game of charades when he first met Molly
(13.110916). Rip is, of course, appropriate here in that he too returned
after an extended absence, although upon his return he finds All
changed. Forgotten (13.1115). Indeed, in Eumaeus, the story of Rip
Van Winkle is listed as one of the many variants of the generic tale of
Across the world for a wife (16.424). Like Odysseus, Rip was absent for
twenty years, but unlike Odysseus, he deliberately left his shrewish wife.
Furthermore, Odysseus left to fight in the Trojan War (albeit reluctantly),
whereas Rip, during his slumber, avoided participating in the American
Revolutionary War (in contemporary parlance, he cut and ran).10 Additionally, the story of Rip Van Winkle already bears an affinity to one
variant of the legend of the Wandering Jew: apparently after many years
of wandering, he is to sleep for a certain length of time in order to be
rejuvenated. In the comet passage, references accumulate, thereby generating patterns of reference and cross-reference and inter-reference or
interference.
Unsurprisingly, the paragraph thus ends with further hyperbolic allusions. Bloom, the returning astral avenger, is fortunate to be far from
impecunious as he has financial resources (by supposition) surpassing
those of Rothschild or the silver king (17:202324). Bloom shares his
first name with one of the scions of the Rothschild family, Leopold de
Rothschild. Along with Rip Van Winkle, Baron de Rothschild is listed as

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one of the historical personages whom Bloom resembles momentarily

during one of the more fraught episodes in the Messianic scene in Circe
(15.184551).11 The final allusion here, to the silver king, is unusual in that
it is uniquethat is, it is not mentioned anywhere else in Ulysses. Thornton notes that The Silver King is the title of a popular 1882 play by Henry
Arthur Jones.12 The somewhat melodramatic arc of this plays plot is not
inappropriate to the themes of return, revenge, and triumph variously
enumerated here. The plays main character, Wilfrid Denver, is falsely
accused of a murder, although he believes himself guilty. He flees to
Nevada and makes a fortune in silver. He returns home in secret, saves
his family from poverty, brings the true murderer to justice, and is finally
reunited with his wife and children.
And so in this paragraph of the cometary Blooms travels, we have a
surfeit of hyperbolic reference and cross-reference, for most of the references here listed have been deployed in complex fashions throughout
Ulysses. The cometary vagabondage is eminently unfaithful to any one
guiding pole of reference. The journey to reassert patriarchal authority is
thus compromised by symbolic infidelity, that is, infidelity to any one
sign. In a sense, the cometary journey has not been through space but
rather through a variety of different, postulated symbolic equivalents. But
ultimately the symbolism is overloaded: in effect, so many different meanings are suggested here that Blooms passage is ultimately meaningless; or
as is stated elsewhere in Ithaca, if the progress were carried far enough,
nought nowhere was never reached (17.106869). The subjunctive procession is never actualized as such. While the allusions to Shakespeare, the
Wandering Jew, comets, Rip Van Winkle, the Count of Monte Cristo,
the silver king, and so on all share certain thematic congruities of peregrination, revenge, and return, they are far from homogenous. This morass
of references refuses neat synthesis. The entire hypothetical voyage of
reference and return thus gets Bloom nowhere. And so, in a sense, after
his odyssey, Bloom is right back where he started from. Longest way
round is the shortest way home, as he thinks in Nausicaa (13.111011).
Indeed, the question posed after the overdetermined space odyssey indicates that Blooms hypothetical, hyperbolic, vengeful cometary return is
irrational:
What would render such return irrational?
An unsatisfactory equation between an exodus and return in time
through reversible space and an exodus and return in space through
irreversible time. (17.202427)

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Bloom can return to his house but he cannot return to what has been lost
during the interval of his exile; that is, he cannot regain or reclaim the
level of intimacy he had once enjoyed with Molly. The Shakespearean
revenge predestined by constellations of astral coincidences is thus ultimately undone by the apathy of the stars (17.2226). Ultimately, the
overdetermined, overcathected cometary references augur nothing, or
rather, nothing special. Bloom does not a Shakespeare rebloom. And so,
instead of revenge, Bloom ultimately attains in sequence Envy, jealousy,
abnegation, equanimity (17.2155). Instead of being a body in motion,
Bloom ends as a body at rest, even if such rest is restlessthat is, not
undisturbed by infidelities of both the marital and symbolic orders.
NOTES

1. On the Rosenbach manuscript, which has the earliest extant draft of this passage, the question was originally phrased without self-cancelling negation, never
anywhere somehow; the revisions to the final form are indicated on this manuscript.
James Joyces Ulysses: A Facsimile of the Manuscript (New York: Octagon: Philadelphia: The Philip H. & A.S.W. Rosenbach Foundation, 1975), 3 vols.
2. Halley dispelled the superstitions attendant to comets by demonstrating how
they follow predictable paths and are thus eminently natural recurring phenomena.
Indeed, Hegel writes that comets are essentially systematic rather than countersystematic: The idea that the solar system is itself a true system on account of its
essentially coherent totality, necessarily rules out the formal interpretation of comets,
in which their appearances are regarded as being in accidental opposition to the
entirety of this system when they cross and impinge upon it. G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of Nature, v. 2, ed. and tr. M.J. Petry (London: George Allen and Unwin,
1970), 26.
3. The term nova was applied to a new star, that is a star that seemingly
appears out of nowhere, only seemingly to disappear again after an interval of several
months or so. Originally, the term supernova was applied to an exceptionally
bright nova. Currently, these terms are applied to distinct stellar phenomena: a nova
is an explosion on the surface of a white dwarf star that results from the accumulation
of hydrogen dragged onto it from a companion star. In distinction, a supernova is a
much more violent event: when a white dwarf above a certain mass (the Chandrasekhar limit) can no longer sustain thermonuclear fusion, it expels much of its material into space at a velocity potentially approaching a tenth of the speed of light. Such
an eruption can even outshine the galaxy that is host to the event. Virtually all elements in the universe heavier than oxygen are produced in such explosions. Comets
are entirely different beasts and are much more local than novae and supernovae:
they are chunks of ice and other detritus left over from the formation of the solar
system that are still under the sway and thrall of the suns gravitational influence.

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4. The lines are Look here, upon this picture, and on this (III.iv.53) and
Though this be madness, yet there is method in t (II.ii.21112). The Oxford Shakespeare, ed. W. J. Craig (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1943).
5. Stephen also cites the first part of this line in Scylla, and he repeats Blooms
mistake of the apostrophe to Hamlet Hamlet, I am thy fathers spirit (9.170). Stephens argument is that Shakespeare, in playing the role of King Hamlet, is addressing his dead son Hamnet (9.17173) and so the apostrophe serves to buttress that
argument, yet the apostrophe is actually absent in the play. So it seems that Stephen
is fudging the text to further his thesis.
6. Buck Mulligan is not the only one to comment upon Blooms eyes, which seem
to be a visible mark that differentiates him. Gerty MacDowell could see at once by
his dark eyes and his pale intellectual face that he was a foreigner (13.41516; cf.
14.1058). And after the performance of a certain act on the beach, the eyes return as
an overdetermined mark of errancy: An utter cad he had been! He of all men! But
there was an infinite store of mercy in those eyes, for him too a word of pardon even
though he had erred and sinned and wandered (13.74749).
7. Mary and Padraic Colum, Our Friend James Joyce (New York: Doubleday,
1958), 112.
8. Donald W. Olson, Marilynn S. Olson, and Russell L. Doescher, The Stars of
Hamlet, Sky and Telescope (November 1998), 6873.
9. Don Gifford and Robert J. Seidman, Ulysses Annotated, second edition
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 601.
10. In Circe, when Zoe is reading Blooms hand she first diagnoses him as a
Ulyssean adventurer: Travels beyond the sea and marry money (15.3701). When
Bloom informs her that she is wrong, she then proposes that he is a Henpecked
husband (15.3706). This is exactly how Rip Van Winkle is first described: a simple
good natured man . . . a kind neighbour, and an obedient, henpecked husband.
Washington Irving, Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (San Diego:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984), 4.
11. Rothschild is also mentioned slightly earlier in Ithaca in a list of financiers,
with the first name listed suggesting Bloom: Blum Pasha, Rothschild . . . (17.1748).
12. Weldon Thornton, Allusions in Ulysses (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1968), 481.

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