It is in matters of religion, though, that Bloom and Stephen are furthest apart, philosophically and spiritually. Ironically, Bloom thinks that Stephen is a “good catholic”; he states and restates this judgment, summing it up finally in the statement: “orthodox as you are.” However, it is the word “simple” that Stephen uses in discussing the human soul that clearly delineates the contrast between the two men. Bloom responds: “Simple? I shouldn’t think that is the proper word.” What Stephen has in mind is the scholastic definition of “simple”—that is, having no parts. God is simple; so is the soul. But Bloom just does not have the intellectual capacity to appreciate such complexities; he is too mired in the real world of money and politics—as he always will be.
Joyce’s theme of wandering, of people destined never to join significantly but, instead, to move through webs of artifice, is epitomized in the character of W. B. Murphy—if, indeed, that is his true name. The red-bearded Murphy, who, with his typically Irish blather and blarney, resembles the clever narrator of “The Cyclops,” is a drunken, belligerent misfit weaving his life around a tissue of lies. In many ways, Murphy typifies the worst traits of the archetypal Irishman, but, with his colorful personality, he has an abundance of compensating, attractive qualities. Here, Murphy has come from the three-master ship Rosevean, the ship that Stephen saw in “Proteus,” and one wonders if the bricks which the vessel carries will lead to any future foundation (one is reminded of the stones, again, that are supposed to be in Parnell’s coffin—instead of his body—and one is also reminded of the fact that Joyce modeled the amorphous hero of Finnegans Wake upon a drunken hod carrier). Murphy, another mock-heroic avatar of the returned Odysseus, is about to reintroduce himself to the wife that he has not seen in seven years. Bloom thinks of various returned heroes from fiction, and he cannot help projecting his own doubts onto his vision of the upcoming reunion: what if they don’t want the returnee any more, and what is really Murphy’s name, anyway? Is it possibly “Senor A. Boudin,” as the postcard seems to imply?
Even more effectively than Murphy’s own personal myths, however, Parnell’s story better depicts Bloom’s lonely desperation and his status as a wanderer with only a tenuous Ithaca to return to. Parnell, according to the pundits, was destroyed by a woman, Kitty O’Shea, his mistress. Like Molly, Kitty (the wife of Captain O’Shea) was a “fine lump of a woman . . .” and during the O’Shea divorce trial, Parnell became a laughing stock when it was revealed that he was seen scrambling down a ladder from Kitty’s room in his nightclothes; in the next episode, the keyless Bloom will similarly have to scramble to get into his own home. What bothers Bloom about the retelling of the Parnell story in “Eumaeus” is “the blatant jokes of the cabmen . . . who passed it all off as a jest . . . .” To Bloom, who lives only in an imaginary sexual world (either with Martha Clifford or masturbating on the beach in “Nausicaa”), Parnell is a truly sexual, athletic hero, one who literally died for love. Bloom, quite naturally, probably envisions himself as the impotent Captain O’Shea, who, historically, agreed to ignore his wife’s infidelity with Parnell (as Bloom is doing with Boylan) until O’Shea was convinced by a number of politicians that Parnell had to be disgraced and therefore lose office. And, after all, Parnell did thank Bloom once for picking up his hat, a marked contrast to Menton’s treatment of Bloom in “Hades,” when Bloom graciously pointed out a dint in the hat.
Throughout this episode, Joyce infuses a sense of exhaustion, emptiness, and futile wandering. The syntax contributes immensely to this effect, as Joyce fills the chapter with lengthy, unfinished sentences, creating an atmosphere of vast attenuation, artifice, and especially a feeling of tiredness. And in the midst of all this, the dissipated Corley presents a warning of what Stephen might become: “His friends had all deserted him.” The Simon Dedalus that Murphy describes is almost certainly not Stephen’s father, but rather a sharpshooter who traveled with Hengler’s Magic Circus. The fact that knives were used in the Phoenix Park Murders points, according to the logic of the small-minded cabmen, to the fact that foreigners must have been hired to do the killing: a knife, by custom, is not an Irish weapon. The tattoo that adorns Murphy itself is chimerical: if one pulls the skin, the young man’s face changes. Significantly, the tattoo includes the number of this episode—16; and, to some critics, this number signifies homosexuality, though this surmise, of course, is only that, a surmise; yet it is interesting that the number “16” is associated in Europe with homosexuality, just as “69” is associated in the United States with homosexuality.
Returning to the idea of dissipation and tiredness, the patrons of Fitzharris’s establishment are willing to argue so long as no blows are exchanged, a trite and tired (and Irish) standard. They resemble the peasants in Synge’s Playboy of the Western World; these people admire Christy Mahon’s blather about killing his father until the father reappears in person; then Christy, apparently, truly must kill the man. Again, the facts about Skin-the-Goat are wrong; he did not drive the car used by the murderers; he drove only the decoy car. And the newspaper report of Dignam’s funeral is thoroughly phony in both its praise of the deceased and also in its factual information.
Finally, in “Eumaeus,” poor Bloom reveals only too clearly his desperate need to be accepted—as well as to accept—that is, he needs to be comforted, as well as to comfort. The usually equanimous Bloom is still brooding over the insult by the Citizen in “The Cyclops” and, to make his point, pitiably he denies his Jewishness on a technicality: “though in reality I’m not.” Later, he again (sycophantically) turns the conversation around to Molly, showing an outdated photo to an indifferent Stephen. And his plans for “shanghai-ing” Stephen into a singing career are countered by the three turds dropped by a horse at the close of the episode.
The Dublin that Joyce presents in “Eumaeus” is a particularly distressing one, resembling Conrad’s description of London in The Secret Agent: an aquarium after the water has been drained.
