Returning
Returning
In Brief
The first sentence of Ithaca shows Bloom and Stephen "returning" to Eccles Street, echoing the walk that Odysseus and Telemachus take to get back to the royal palace in Ithaca. But in fact the gerund does not apply to Stephen: he has no home to return to, and the chapter will show that he has miles to go before he sleeps. It is richly evocative for Bloom, however. He is going home at the end of a very long day and, like Odysseus, he is thinking about how to set his house in order. The chapter's crystalline if quirky rationality imitates his process of coming to intellectual rest.
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Odysseus' story is a nostos or homecoming—a return. At the end of the epic he has rejoined his son, wife, and father, regained his ancestral palace, and exterminated the suitors who usurped his place. Bloom lacks nothing but a latchkey to regain entrance to his marital bed, and modern societies frown on shedding adulterers' blood. His task is to regain some of the mental balance that has been threatened by a day full of anxieties: social marginality, vicious antisemitism, grief over lost loved ones, awareness of aging, unfulfilled wishes, frustrated sexual longing, and beneath all these the shame of cuckoldry. The intellectual conversation that he has with Stephen Dedalus on the way to his house, inside its kitchen, and in the yard behind—a more creditable analogue of the reunion of Odysseus and Telemachus than occurred in Eumaeus—sets him on a path to mental equilibrium.
In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Stephen praised art that is static rather than kinetic: "The feelings excited by improper art are kinetic, desire or loathing. Desire urges us to possess, to go to something; loathing urges us to abandon, to go from something. These are kinetic emotions. The arts which excite them, pornographical or didactic, are therefore improper arts. The esthetic emotion (I use the general term) is therefore static. The mind is arrested and raised above desire and loathing." Ithaca shows Bloom working to raise his mind above desire and loathing, and its own relentless catechetical succession of questions and answers arrests the mind of the reader in a kind of Olympian detachment.
For Bloom, this stasis takes the form of calming the troubled
waters of his mind, viewing his situation as rationally and
optimistically as he can, deciding (for the time being, at
least) to return to the bed of his matrimonial violation, and
slipping peacefully into sleep. For Stephen's equally troubled
mind the chapter offers no comparable return to tranquility.
But the book has shown him repeatedly envisioning such a
recapitulation, especially in his account of Shakespeare returning to
Stratford in Scylla and Charybdis.
1960 photograph by Vincenzo Balocchi of two men walking on a street in Florence. Source: mezzaluna.me.
Odysseus killing the suitors on an Attic red-figure skyphos, ca. 440 BC, from Tarquinia, by the Penelope Painter. Source: www.mlahanas.de.