Part II: Ulysses and Adultery: Homecoming

Abstract

Ulysses is an attempt to create an ethics of love. In the shift from exploring the adulterous pursuits of a dissatisfied husband who feels his own desire constrained—the project of Exiles and Giacomo Joyce, remnants of which we see in the erotic bumblings of Leopold Bloom—to exploring the desires of an adulterous wife and the ambivalences of her still-desiring husband, Joyce offers a possibility for thinking about, exploring, and finally validating the other. Adultery—female adultery—is rendered transformative. In the telling of Bloom’s story, in the profusion of images and memories surrounding his wife Molly, we see a very spilling of self; we see the attempt to join with the other, and we see the impossibility of desire. Yet it is not Bloom who seeks infidelity in any concerted way, despite his several half-hearted moves with Gerty and Martha (not to mention the woman in the butcher shop of “Calypso”); rather he, the husband, facilitates his wife’s affair. And, crucially, finally, the wife gets the last word. This is a necessary move in the fulfillment of the project of Ulysses, as we shall see. No longer cramped in the consciousness of one man jealously pursuing his own jealous desires, we enter into the constantly shifting consciousness of people we never quite know, and who never quite know each other, and become real in the process of not-knowing.