Hayward, M. “Bloom’s Job: The Role of the Advertisement Canvasser in Joyce’s Dublin.” Modernism/modernity, vol. 22 no. 4, 2015, pp. 651-666.

Related Topics

Colonialism

Consumerism

Link to full text: http://muse.jhu.edu/article/605713

Hayward begins by summarizing the development of the scholarly discourse on advertising in Ulysses, noting that the 1993 double issue of the James Joyce Quarterly devoted to the subject was considered by some to be the last word on the subject. Hayward declares that their goal is to reopen the topic for renewed scrutiny, with a special focus on Bloom and his role as an advertising agent. Hayward then posits that Bloom’s role has often been misinterpreted by scholars, and attributes this, in part, to shoddy and broad historicization

Hayward argues that while recent critics have taken Bloom’s status as an adman quite seriously, Joyce’s portrayal of Bloom gains a significant layer of irony when one considers Bloom’s lowly position with the industry. Joyce breaks from previous writers such as Trollope and H.G. Wells, who both satirized the advertising industry, by allowing humor to emerge from Bloom’s failure to participate significantly in his own business.

Hayward then goes on to critique claims that Bloom’s position as a canvasser is anachronistic, and that this represents the backward nature of Dublin’s advertising industry relative to London. Hayward argues that this claim represents a misinterpretation or outright dismissal of extant facts, and that Dublin in fact possessed a flourish advertising industry. Hayward concludes that Bloom’s seeming inability to acknowledge other parts of Dublin’s advertising world is due not to the nonexistence of this world, but rather that, “Bloom is meant to be a very small player in the Dublin advertising industry.” (657)

Hayward concludes by analyzing Bloom’s responsibilities in his occupation; he finds that Bloom is solely the negotiator in the case of the Keyes add, a job Bloom thoroughly botches. Hayward then brings up the fact that Blazes Boylan apparently has his own billsticking company, meaning he has a relatively significant role in Dublin’s advertising industry. This point allows Hayward to finally bring his argument back to Ulysses itself, as he concludes that, “Bloom’s disconnection from his trade emphasizes his social alienation as a Jewish outsider in Dublin, and his material powerlessness against his “rival” Boylan.” (663)

Citations and Related Sources

Jennifer Wicke, Advertising Fictions: Literature, Advertisement, and Social Reading (New York:

Columbia University Press, 1988), 146

Jennifer Wicke, “Modernity Must Advertise: Aura, Desire and Decolonization in Joyce,” James

Joyce Quarterly 30, no. 4–31, no. 1 (1993): 611.

Forms

Geld, Gelded, Gelding

Explication

Gelding and the state of being Gelded relates to a pervasive male anxiety that has cultural and political connotations, but especially relates to the character of Leopold Bloom, his status as a cuckold, his fruitless relationships with women, and his strange, uneasy presence in male environments. Odysseus, Bloom’s Homeric analogue, is defined by his violent phallic and penetrative power, evidenced by such actions as the blinding of Polyphemus with a stake, Odysseus’ rape of Circe and the destruction of her wand, and, almost comically, Odysseus’ signature feat of shooting an arrow through the heads of a dozen axes. While attempting to map Homer’s Odyssey directly onto Ulysses may not be a universally productive strategy, the dissonance in this aspect of Bloom’s relationship to Odysseus is pointed. Bloom may be, in some ways, reductively figured as a gelded Odysseus.

Of particular interest are the animalistic connotations of the word; it refers with equal ease to male humans and male animals, blurring the boundary between the two. This aspect of gelding becomes particularly relevant in Circe, where, in a hallucinatory sequence, Blazes Boylan, entering Bloom’s home for his rendezvous with Molly, “hangs his hat smartly on a peg of  Bloom’s antlered head.” (15.3763-3764) Bloom, bearing the cuckold’s antlers, assists in his wife’s adultery. While the antlers mark him as cuckold, they also introduce an animalistic quality to his humiliation and abasement. Moreover, Circe sees Bloom dominated by Bella/Bello Cohen, and in the course of this Bloom is referred to by feminine pronouns. In the midst of all of this, Bloom submissively refers to Bella/Bello as “Master! Mistress! Mantamer!” (15.3062) Thus, the act of gelding, advocated for use upon Bloom by Mrs Bellingham earlier in the episode, and its figurative echos of humiliation and domination, blurs and perhaps collapses the boundaries between man and animal, as well as male and female identities.

A final aspect of geld that never occurs explicitly in Ulysses, but lurks pertinently in the background is that of geld as gold, as a historical reference to money, especially taxes, in an Anglo-Saxon context. The issue of money haunts Bloom and others’ perception of him; a key incident in Episode XII involves bar patrons speculating that Bloom has won a significant sum in the Gold Cup race. This exchange circles back to the fears of castration induced by the word geld: the Gold Cup is won not by the phallic stallion, Sceptre, but a filly, Throwaway, who is aligned in several places with Bloom himself.

Definitions and Examples

I. Gelded, adj. (OED 1.a) Of a person or animal: Castrated.

“A choir gives back menace and echo, assisting about the altar’s horns, the snorted Latin of jackpriests moving burly in their albs, tonsured and oiled and gelded, fat with the fat of kidneys of wheat.” (Ulysses 3.116-119)

II. Geld, v. (OED 1.a) To deprive (a male) of generative power or virility, to castrate or emasculate.

“MRS BELLINGHAM: (Shakes her muff and quizzing-glasses vindictively.) Make him smart, Hanna dear. Give him ginger. Thrash the mongrel within an inch of his life. The cat-o’-nine-tails. Geld him. Vivisect him.” (Ulysses 15.1112-1115 )

III. Gelding, n. (OED 2) A gelded or castrated animal, especially a horse.

“When countrybound velocipedes, a chainless freewheel roadster cycle with side basketcar attached, or draught conveyance, a donkey with wicker trap or smart phaeton with good working solidungular cob (roan gelding, 14 h).” (Ulysses 17.1575-1578)

IV. Geld, n. (OED a) A tax paid to the crown by English landholders before the Conquest, and continued under the Norman kings.

Stephen Daedalus may not have much, being young, poor, indebted, and dispossessed of his lodgings, but he fervently believes that he maintains a degree of purity in his artistic endeavors that must be protected and maintained, no matter the consequences. At the beginning of the novel, Stephen clearly sets out to distance himself from a nationalistic mode of art-making, likening Irish art to the cracked looking-glass of a servant, something that is tarnished in itself but also devalued through its place in a larger system of power relations. While Stephen clearly understands Irish art as that of a colonized people, he has no interest in resistance or improvement, rejecting Buck Mulligan’s proposal that they intellectually “Hellenize” Ireland. While talking to Bloom in Eumaeus, Stephen defines his work as existing outside of a nationalist discourse of Irishness; Irishness is subordinate to him, rather than the other way around. While this speaks, in part, to Stephen’s fierce independence and unwillingness to participate or to be led, it also leads to Stephen’s predilection for the abstract, as Irish nationalism ultimately leads to questions of the material conditions of British occupation. Simply put, Stephen wishes his art to exist outside the world, removed from material experience. His meeting with other intellectuals at the National Library in episode IX highlights this in terms of both space and ideas, as the group retreats to an inner chamber of the library to discuss thoroughly opaque and esoteric topics. However, Stephen’s attempts to isolate art from the world are frustrated at every turn by Leopold Bloom. Bloom provides a handy demonstration of the materiality of art by wiping himself with a short story in Episode IV. Bloom provides constant examples of how art is embedded, both materially and commercially, in the world at large. Like the Titbit story Bloom wipes himself with, many of his own artistic endeavors are tied to money, such as the verses he sent in to a contest as child. Moreover, Bloom’s own art is advertising, and he displays plenty of energy and creativity in his mental practice of it throughout the day. While Stephen refuses all of Bloom’s offers to put his intellectual gifts to profitable use, Stephen is perhaps not quite vindicated in this choice; art seems to be irrepressibly material, and besides, Stephen has debts to pay.

Forms

Geld, Gelded, Gelding

Explication

Gelding and the state of being Gelded relates to a pervasive male anxiety that has cultural and political connotations, but especially relates to the character of Leopold Bloom, his status as a cuckold, his fruitless relationships with women, and his strange, uneasy presence in male environments. Odysseus, Bloom’s Homeric analogue, is defined by his violent phallic and penetrative power, evidenced by such actions as the blinding of Polyphemus with a stake, Odysseus’ rape of Circe and the destruction of her wand, and, almost comically, Odysseus’ signature feat of shooting an arrow through the heads of a dozen axes. While attempting to map Homer’s Odyssey directly onto Ulysses may not be a universally productive strategy, the dissonance in this aspect of Bloom’s relationship to Odysseus is pointed. Bloom may be, in some ways, reductively figured as a gelded Odysseus.

Of particular interest are the animalistic connotations of the word; it refers with equal ease to male humans and male animals, blurring the boundary between the two. This aspect of gelding becomes particularly relevant in Circe, where, in a hallucinatory sequence, Blazes Boylan, entering Bloom’s home for his rendezvous with Molly, “hangs his hat smartly on a peg of  Bloom’s antlered head.” (15.3763-3764) Bloom, bearing the cuckold’s antlers, assists in his wife’s adultery. While the antlers mark him as cuckold, they also introduce an animalistic quality to his humiliation and abasement. Moreover, Circe sees Bloom dominated by Bella/Bello Cohen, and in the course of this Bloom is referred to by feminine pronouns. In the midst of all of this, Bloom submissively refers to Bella/Bello as “Master! Mistress! Mantamer!” (15.3062) Thus, the act of gelding, advocated for use upon Bloom by Mrs Bellingham earlier in the episode, and its figurative echos of humiliation and domination, blurs and perhaps collapses the boundaries between man and animal, as well as male and female identities.

Definitions and Examples

1. Gelded, adj. Of a person or animal: Castrated.

“A choir gives back menace and echo, assisting about the altar’s horns, the snorted Latin of jackpriests moving burly in their albs, tonsured and oiled and gelded, fat with the fat of kidneys of wheat.” (Ulysses 3.116-119)

1. Geld, v. To deprive (a male) of generative power or virility, to castrate or emasculate.

“MRS BELLINGHAM: (Shakes her muff and quizzing-glasses vindictively.) Make him smart, Hanna dear. Give him ginger. Thrash the mongrel within an inch of his life. The cat-o’-nine-tails. Geld him. Vivisect him.” (Ulysses 15.1112-1115 )

III. Gelding, n. A gelded person, a eunuch. Obs.

“When countrybound velocipedes, a chainless freewheel roadster cycle with side basketcar attached, or draught conveyance, a donkey with wicker trap or smart phaeton with good working solidungular cob (roan gelding, 14 h).” (Ulysses 17.1575-1578)

In Eumaeus and Ithaca we see the culmination of Bloom and Stephen’s trajectories as proponents of divergent vision of art. In Bloom’s explanation of his imaginary utopia to Stephen, Bloom, the scientist, classes the literary arts alongside other forms of labor. Stephen, however, is wary of the inherent commodification of art that Bloom proposes in his somewhat callously nationalistic plan. Stephen, as an Irish artist, articulates his relationship to national identity in a manner diametrically opposed to Bloom’s notion. In Ithaca, then, we are exposed to multiple examples of Bloom’s own attempts at literary arts. The verses that seem to have led to Bloom imagining himself as possessing an artistic nature are comical in effect considering the timing of their revelation. His artistic pursuits, imaginary or real, inevitably seem to be tied to financial gain as well. We are thus to led to a final binary of artmaking: Bloom, cosmopolitan, both Irish and not-Irish, envisions art crudely as entertainment, one of many paths to wealth, while Stephen, cynical with regards to Irishness, including his own, presents art as a pure, academic pursuit, intensely intellectual to the point of obscurity and opacity. The temperaments Joyce ascribes to Bloom and Stephen, the scientific and the artistic, seem in this context to both be thoroughly flawed.

Artmaking in Ulysses seems to be inexorably pulled toward the domain of the political, and the Circe episode in many ways represents the continuation as well as the vexation of this theme. The episode contains Bloom’s surprising declaration that he is, in fact, an “author-journalist.” (15.802) This at once represents a grandiose overstatement of Bloom’s actual profession in advertising, as well as a window into what he imagines to be his own artistic sensibilities. Interestingly, what follows another assertion from Bloom, that he is “connected with the British and Irish press.” (15.804-5) Almost immediately after Bloom’s claim to international connections, Philip Beaufoy, author of episode IV’s prize Titbit story, appears to revile Bloom as a plagiarist. Later in the episode, the confounding of Shakespeare and Martin Cunningham creates another connection. Cunningham and Shakespeare seem to be confused based on the psychic dominance of their wives, a qualification that Bloom surely shares. Thus Bloom, the “author-journalist” with British connections transitively collides with Shakespeare, the British writer who dominates the mind of Stephen Daedalus. The episode completes the domination of Irish art with the introduction of physical violence. Despite Bloom’s protests that Steven is “a gentleman, a poet,” (15.4488) the British soldier Private Compton responds, “We don’t give a bugger who he is,” (15.4495) and ultimately knocks Steven to the ground.

Forms

Geld, Gelded, Gelding

Explication

Gelding and the state of being Gelded relates to a pervasive male anxiety that has cultural and political connotations, but it especially relates to the character of Leopold Bloom, his status as a cuckold, his fruitless relationships with women, and his strange, uneasy presence in male environments. Odysseus, Bloom’s Homeric analogue, is defined by his violent phallic power, evidenced by such actions as the blinding of Polyphemus with a stake, Odysseus’ rape of Circe and the destruction of her wand, and, almost comically, Odysseus’ signature feat of shooting an arrow through the heads of a dozen axes. While attempting to map Homer’s Odyssey directly onto Ulysses may not be a universally productive strategy, the dissonance in this aspect of Bloom’s relationship to Odysseus is pointed. Bloom may be, in some ways, reductively figured as a gelded Odysseus.

Definitions and Examples

I. Gelded, adj. Of a person or animal: Castrated.

“A choir gives back menace and echo, assisting about the altar’s horns, the snorted Latin of jackpriests moving burly in their albs, tonsured and oiled and gelded, fat with the fat of kidneys of wheat.” (Ulysses 3)

II. Geld, v. To deprive (a male) of generative power or virility, to castrate or emasculate.

“MRS BELLINGHAM: (Shakes her muff and quizzing-glasses vindictively.) Make him smart, Hanna dear. Give him ginger. Thrash the mongrel within an inch of his life. The cat-o’-nine-tails. Geld him. Vivisect him.” (Ulysses 15)

III. Gelding, n. A gelded person, a eunuch. Obs.

“When countrybound velocipedes, a chainless freewheel roadster cycle with side basketcar attached, or draught conveyance, a donkey with wicker trap or smart phaeton with good working solidungular cob (roan gelding, 14 h).” (Ulysses 17)

After writing a response to Martha Clifford’s earlier letter, Bloom stops to reflect on it and concludes that his response is “Too poetical that about the sad.” (11.904) This is presumably in reference to line 894, “P.P.S. La la la ree. I feel so sad today. La ree. So lonely. Dee.” As the music in the background intrudes upon Bloom’s thoughts, he finds himself spontaneously confiding in Martha, who he had so hastily dismissed in Episode V. While the influence of music on the mind obviously ties in to the episode’s theme, it also brings us back to episode III, wherein Stephen experiences a spontaneous creative burst under the influence of thoughts of the past.

Moreover, Bloom’s solitary, secretive creative act of letter-writing stands in stark contrast to the boisterous, masculine creative displays in the main room. The music continuously intrudes on Bloom’s thoughts and produces a certain longing within him. Thus, the self-censoring “too poetical” remark he makes to himself may indicate a certain inadequacy brought on by his proximity to, but alienation from, the singing in the other room. There is no way for him to join in, a point hammered home in episode XII.

Geld is intriguing in that it has widely varying meaning as a noun and a verb, and also touches on a range of historical contexts. The reference to castration, especially of animals, as well as money, specifically taxes, gives the word almost uncontrollable resonances in the context of Bloom.

From the O.E.D. :

Geld, n.

a. The tax paid to the crown by English landholders before the Conquest, and continued under the Norman kings.

Geld, v.1

a. to deprive (a male) of generative power or virility, to castrate or emasculate. Obsolescent in general literary use; current in technical language with reference to animals.

b. to extirpate the ovaries of (a female), to spay.

a. trans and fig. To deprive of some essential part; to cut down the resources of; to impair the strength or force of, to weaken, enfeeble. Obs.

b. To mutilate (a book, a quotation, etc.) by excising certain portions, esp. objectionable or obscene passage; to expurgate.

Geld, v.2

1. trans. To charge with ‘geld’.

Episode VIII brings us the discovery that Bloom begins his correspondence with Martha Clifford via a personal ad reading, “Wanted, smart lady typist to aid gentlemen in literary work.” (326-327.8) This connects to several other occurrences to open up a variety of interpretive possibilities. Firstly, we may use this to interpret Bloom’s correspondence with Martha, posing as Henry Flower, as an act of art-making. The idea of viewing of a man’s idle, absent-minded attempt at an affair as a sort of literature is very much in line with Joyce’s other jabs at art, such as Stephen comparing Irish art to the cracked looking-glass of a servant or Bloom wiping himself with a prize-winning story. Another angle is to look the ad through the lens of Bloom; his only other attempts at art-making are centered around women as well, specifically Molly. In Episode IV, Bloom remembers how he used to record everything Molly said while she dressed (especially interesting given the importance of her dressing in Episode VII). It’s worth noting that both of these literary endeavors are, in a sense that might be significant to Bloom, fruitless, as they are both centered around women with whom Bloom could potentially, but does not, have a sexual relationship.