Nobody at Home: Bloom’s Outlandish Retreat in the ‘Cyclops’ Episode of Ulysses

Abstract

As Seamus Deane has commented, Joyce’s largely self-cultivated apolitical image has helped to obscure both his keen interest in Irish politics and the fictive nature of his political imagination.¹ What passes for apathy might be better described as disillusionment: for, in the words of David Fitzpatrick, ‘if revolutions are what happens to wheels, then Ireland underwent a revolution between 1916 and 1922 … social and political institutions were turned upside down, only to revert to full circle upon the establishment of the Irish Free State’.² Joyce’s general approval of Arthur Griffith and the antiparliamentarianist Sinn Féin had been tempered (from at least as early as 1906) by Griffith’s cautious appeasement of the Church, and the rhetoric of venereal contamination characteristic of the United Irishman’s robust polemics.³ However, Joyce’s supposed indifference to the Irish struggle for independence (whether a conflation of authorial and textual politics or a projection of Stephen’s ‘non serviam’ onto the author), his apparent distance from the Irish Literary Revival, and the presumedly disinterested character of his work have faced increasing critical scrutiny, led by a wave of postcolonial studies.⁴ As Deane remarks, paradoxically ‘Joyce remained faithful to the original conception of the Revival. His Dublin became the Holy City of which Yeats had despaired.’⁵ But despite some warm early reviews of Ulysses, Joyce was more than a little wary of making a return to that Holy City he had reconstructed through memories from afar — fearing (apart from the risk of entanglement in factional violence) that he might, like Parnell, suffer quicklime thrown in his eyes for his novel’s controversial acclaim.⁶