In addition, Hynes asks Bloom after the burial what his “Christian” name is. Hynes (another decent Dubliner) pays so little attention to Bloom’s answer that he garbles his name in a newspaper story, leaving out the “l” from “Bloom,” and fails to include “Bloom’s” first name at all. Also, the mistake over the name “M’Intosh” comes about because Hynes is only half-listening to Bloom (this incident, interestingly, resembles the mistake over Throwaway in the preceding episode); the mourner is a man in a Macintosh coat, not a man called M’Intosh, but Hynes ignores Bloom’s “No,” his answer to the question, “Is that his name?”
Even when Bloom’s friends try to be pleasant, their attempts fail. Mr. Power’s questions about Molly’s upcoming concert tour suggest Boylan to Bloom, and these questions serve to remind Bloom of the reason why he cannot accompany Molly: He must be in Ennis to commemorate the anniversary of his father’s death (June 27, 1886). In addition, Jack Power’s inept query about “Madame” doesn’t help matters any, but it does evoke the picture for us of Molly as a sort of symbolic whore. Finally, it is sad to see Bloom trying to ingratiate himself with these men who, despite their open and basically good natures, simply do not consider Bloom an intimate.
Nowhere is the gap between Bloom and his three acquaintances greater than in matters of religion. This disparity is perhaps seen best when the men discuss the manner of Dignam’s demise. Power thinks that Dignam’s sudden death makes him a “poor fellow.” Bloom feels, though, that this type of death, like dying in one’s sleep, is the best kind. The three men stare at him in wide-eyed silence. To the Roman Catholic, of course, unexpected death is the absolute worst kind of death because the victim has had no time to prepare for it—that is, he has had no time to have confession heard—if he is, by chance, in Mortal Sin. In theory, a drunken, syphilitic Dubliner, dying while asleep, would presumably be dispatched immediately to Hell. But Bloom, possibly influenced by his own father’s worn-out end, which culminated in suicide, has no intimation of his conversational faux pas.
In addition, Power’s discussion of suicide reveals yet another side of his religious alienation from Bloom: the humaneness of the unbeliever Leopold Bloom as opposed to the cold orthodoxy of Power’s brand of Catholicism. Power thinks that suicide is the worst imaginable crime and the greatest disgrace which a family can suffer. For his part, Dedalus believes the act to be cowardly. But the sympathetic Cunningham attempts to soften these strident viewpoints and argues with compassion: even if the suicide did not suffer from temporary insanity, which rules out Mortal Sin (which needs full consent of the will), he says that it is not for us—the living—to judge. Through all of this debate, Bloom, locked in his own world, considers one of the most moving ideas in Ulysses: “They used to drive a stake of wood through his [the suicide’s] heart in the grave. As if it wasn’t broken already.”
At times, however, Bloom’s divergence from accepted religion, his prosaic, “humanist” contemplation of life and death, leads to a good deal of humor and helps to balance the macabre thoughts of death that Joyce indulges in throughout this episode. To Bloom, the heart is merely a pump, and his matter-of-fact opinion anticipates contemporary medicine. Bloom also cannot accept the Resurrection of the Body, one of the chief tenets of Christianity: “every fellow mousing around for his liver and his lights and the rest of his traps.” And Bloom’s comment that when the dead Lazarus was ordered by Christ to come forth from the tomb at Bethany, he “came fifth and lost the job,” is famous among 20th-century puns.
In order to contrast the bland but usually good-natured Bloom with the often aloof Stephen, Joyce includes several parallels between “Hades” and “Proteus.” Both chapters deal with the beginnings of life and with its end: The old lady on the first page of “Hades” who stares at the carriage, happy that it has passed her by, that it isn’t her turn to die yet, reminds one of Florence MacCabe and her friend, mentioned on the first page of “Proteus.” At the graveside, the coiled coffinband is referred to as a “navelcord,” and one thinks of Stephen’s wish to make a telephone call back to Eden, using a telephone wire as a metaphor for all the umbilical cords since the pre-lapsarian Garden. Also, the father-son theme is seen again in Simon’s misunderstanding of Stephen: Mr. Dedalus assumes that his son has been at the Gouldings, whereas the reader knows, from “Proteus,” that Stephen has decided not to visit these in-law “outlaws”; Richie Goulding, whom Mr. Dedalus despises, is the chief of these, and in “Hades” we are told that his back pains are caused by alcohol. Finally, Bloom’s judgment that Molly has retained her original, sensual “shape,” even though she has put on weight, reminds us of Stephen’s musings about appearance, reality, and the shape of objects in the opening paragraphs of “Proteus.”
One image pattern more than any other in “Hades” epitomizes Bloom’s sad state: the motif of the nails. At the start of the episode, Bloom muses that the nails of corpses are clipped and kept in an envelope (another “dead” letter, like Martha’s?). Then later, when the three other men are praising Boylan, Bloom can do nothing but look at his nails. Also, Bloom wonders if Dignam’s body would bleed if it were to fall out of the casket and be cut by a nail. Thus the nails have definite Christocentric significance. Bloom is clearly crucified in “Hades,” and his death is no more palatable because it comes through the agency of well-meaning friends. He is cut off from the present by the ravine that separates him from the others. His future is most unattractive: Bloomsday, his day, marks the beginning of Molly’s affair, and his thoughts return constantly to the past, to the death of his father, Rudolph, and to the death of his son, Rudy.
