The ‘Everyday’ in Ulysses

Ulysses’ fascination with low culture, the everyday, the popular, and the disposable is everywhere in the ‘Calypso’ episode, which acts as an overture to this important aspect of the novel’s style. Bloom’s reach for his ‘Plasto’s high-grade hat’ is the first instance of his tendency to make sense of his own selfhood in terms of marketing strategies and discourses.

Walking away from the butcher’s shop that morning, Bloom considers his own body, on the brink of middle age, and thinks ‘Must begin again those Sandow’s exercises’. Eugene Sandow was an internationally famous celebrity strongman and fitness instructor, and, later in Ulysses, we learn that Bloom has bought one of his books, Strength and How to Obtain It. Sandow, like modern-day influencers, has made his body and his fitness into a brand, and Bloom, like thousands of others, buys what he promises—the prospect of reshaping himself into an exemplar of health and strength.

If Bloom’s body is subject to branding and marketing, then so are other aspects of his complex identity. Bloom is of Jewish heritage, but his breakfast of a pork kidney fried in butter breaks multiple kosher laws. As we’ve seen, while queuing to buy his kidney at Dlugacz’s, Bloom picks up and reads an advertisement inviting European Jews to invest in farming land in Palestine. This Zionist project prompts Bloom to imagine ‘Orangegroves and immense melonfields north of Jaffa’, before he resists the narrative that the flyer is selling to him: ‘No, not like that. A barren land, bare waste’. The richness of Bloom’s Orientalist daydream shows us how profoundly his imagination is stimulated and engaged by promotional discourses.

Bloom understands himself—his clothing, his body, his religious and racial identity—through advertisements and branding, and his family members are similarly positioned. His fifteen-year-old daughter Milly is working at the seaside resort of Mullingar as a ‘Photo girl’, employed to persuade passing tourists to have their pictures taken. She is, in effect, a walking advertisement, hired for her youth, prettiness, and charm, as Bloom uneasily understands: ‘Wild piece of goods’. He thinks of her in terms of a popular song, ‘Those Lovely Seaside Girls’ (1899)—a favourite of his wife’s lover, Blazes Boylan, and a refrain repeated throughout Ulysses. The ‘seaside girl’ is a bathing beauty, a pin-up, and an icon of commodified sexuality, used to sell all manner of goods and services.

Bloom’s wife Molly has long been embedded in the imagery of promotion and advertisement, most obviously through her career as a concert singer specialising in light opera and popular classics. Bloom compares her to the framed picture over their marital bed, The Bath of the Nymph—a ‘splendid masterpiece in art colours’ resembling ‘her with her hair down: slimmer’. The Bath of the Nymph is another ‘seaside girl’ supposedly with a classical pedigree, since ‘Naked nymphs’, Bloom thinks, suggest ‘Greece: and for instance all the people that lived then’. Yet the image is not from Homer, but from a far lowlier source, ‘Given away with the Easter number of Photo Bits’, an occasionally-suppressed soft pornography magazine.

Lowbrow erotica and highbrow culture are similarly enmeshed in the library book that Molly is reading, Ruby: The Pride of the Ring, in which she finds the curious word ‘Metempsychosis’. Bloom looks to The Bath of the Nymph to explain the term as ‘from the Greek’ and meaning ‘the transmigration of souls’, but Ruby too appears to be popular erotica: ‘Fierce Italian with carriagewhip. Must be Ruby pride of the on the floor naked’. The book is discovered ‘sprawled against the bulge of the orangekeyed chamberpot’, in indecorous proximity to the Blooms’ baser bodily functions.

This conflation of bodily and cultural lowness is a motif that Joyce elaborates in the chapter’s notorious close, which sees Bloom ‘seated calm above his own rising smell’ in the outside privy (the ‘jakes’). Bloom ‘liked to read at stool’, Joyce tells us, and his choice is an old number of Titbits, the most successful magazine of the period. Bloom reads the prize story, Matcham’s Masterstroke, before tearing it in two and wiping himself with it. This incident horrified Ulysses’ first editor Ezra Pound, who censored it before publishing the instalment in the New York modernist magazine The Little Review. Pound was aghast at Joyce’s vulgarity, urging him to ‘leave the stool to Geo. Robey’, a music-hall comedian famed for toilet humour. For Pound, the popular, the vulgar, and the coarsely physical did not belong in Ulysses. But for Joyce, these qualities were an essential part of the texture and fabric of everyday life, every bit as vital to his experiment as classical parallels and allusions.

Pause for thought

Now it’s over to you. Having read this article, please give your thoughts on the following question in the comment section:

• How do Joyce’s references to popular culture help to situate the chapter in place and time? Does an understanding of these references enhance your reading experience?