Rip van Winkle
Rip
van Winkle
In Brief
Bloom thinks of three literary figures who exemplify the "Alice Ben
Bolt topic." The second of these, "Rip van Winkle," is
the protagonist of a short story of the same name by American
writer Washington Irving, first published in 1819. It tells of
a man in colonial America who falls asleep for 20 years and
returns to his village to find everything changed. Various
narrative details in Irving's story evoke the other three
stories mentioned in this part of Eumaeus, as well as
Homer's Odyssey. But Joyce has Bloom focus on just one
of the five: Tennyson's narrative poem.
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Rip is a Dutch-American man who lives in a village at the
base of the Kaatskill mountains ("these fairy mountains").
Constitutionally averse to "profitable labour," this
"henpecked husband" goes hunting in the mountains one day,
meets some strange ancient-Dutch-looking men there, drinks
their liquor, and falls asleep. When he wakes up he finds that
his beard has grown long and white, his musket has rusted, his
dog has disappeared, and his joints are stiff. He returns to
the village and finds it larger than before and filled with
unfamiliar faces. His house is in disrepair, his old friends
are dead, and he learns that a Revolution has taken place. A
young woman and a young man with his name turn out to be his
children. His wife, however, is long dead––a great relief to
Rip.
Like Odysseus and Ben Bolt and Caoch O'Leary, Rip is gone
from his home for 20 years. Like Odysseus and Caoch and Enoch
Arden, his tale plays with the question of whether anyone will
recognize the old man after the passage of so much time. Like
Ben, he finds that his village has greatly changed, and a
woman he knew well has died. A dog figures in his story, as it
does for Odysseus and Caoch. Reunion with his now-grown
children is important for Rip, as it is for Enoch, Caoch, and
Odysseus. Even the seafaring theme found in the Odyssey,
Enoch Arden, and Ben Bolt is dimly present in
Irving's story, because Rip learns that the magical men in the
mountains are reputed to be ghosts of the crew of Half
Moon, a ship that explored the Americas in the early
17th century ("it was affirmed that the great Hendrick Hudson,
the first discoverer of the river and country, kept a kind of
vigil there every twenty years, with his crew of the
Half-moon").
Despite these many tantalizing threads connecting the five
stories, only one plot element receives much attention in the
long paragraph in which Bloom thinks of them. That is the
hero's prospect of returning after long absence to find his
wife married to another man. Homer's poem lurks in the
background of this fear, as it does throughout Eumaeus
and indeed all of Ulysses. But the literary work that
is clearly shaping Bloom's thoughts in this paragraph is Enoch
Arden. Joyce must have noticed the other narrative
connections––it is quite remarkable that he found so many
variations on the Homeric theme of an old man returning to his
former home––but in this paragraph he is engaged with
Tennyson's fiction to the exclusion of all the others.
