Odyssean Culture and Its Discontents

Abstract

This passage introduces Arthur Asa Berger’s student guide to the cultural analysis of everyday life; subsequent chapters explore the semiotics of the clock radio, king-sized beds, comforters, and so forth, suggesting the complexities that underlie the most quotidian of details in our life. Berger’s gesture in assigning the central role in this drama to a person named Leopold Bloom pays homage to the fact that Joyce’s Bloom is, at least materially, the most fully developed and thoroughly furnished of fictional existences. It is arguable that the quantity of represented physical detail that accompanies his actions—including, for example, eight different versions of the cat’s cry and a unique representation of the protagonist’s experience in the jakes—is less an indication of Bloom’s particular character or of the novel’s diegesis than it is of the general experience of everyday life in Dublin, June 16, 1904—the experiential dimension of “Joyce world.” For many critics, in fact, the presentation of Bloom is the best available illustration of the quality of bourgeois “dai-liness” under modernity. The opening pages of Henri Lefebvre’s Everyday Life in the Modern World, the seminal work in this area, are an extended meditation on Joyce’s writing, especially what Lefebvre calls the “profound triviality” of Bloom’s presentation in Ulysses.