Since my obsession is haunting I find it hard to stay away from writing about the events of episode 6, Hades. My blog post is going to be a little different than normal as I try to sort out some big ideas that had begun developing by the end of that section and informed my reading for today.

The characters of Ulysses have been very preoccupied with the cyclical nature of life. See: Stephen mentioning womb and tomb in the same breath (3.402 among others), Hamlet fathering himself (1.556), a fox burying his grandmother (2.115) and so on. Birth, life, and death are a circle that even sometimes get confused with each other – “In the midst of death we are in life” (6.759). This constantly cyclical motion complements Bloom’s preoccupation with the idea of metempsychosis and reincarnation, concepts which recycle soul and energy. (Ooh, and remember how the book begins and ends with the same letter?)

So, what does this have to do with haunting? Ulysses is much less a book about the human life cycle than a book about how that cycle gets disrupted. Death in infancy, suicide, necrophilia, and castration are a few of the fun ways that the natural order of birth-life-and-death gets fiddled with but what I’m most interested in of course is haunting (which by the way Hades lays down pretty specifically three times in a row: “I will appear to you after death. You will see my ghost after death. My ghost will haunt you after death” (6.1000).)

I wanted to include that in my blog post because it seems important to share the lens that I’ve started to see this book through. Accordingly I also want people to let me know if they disagree with parts (or all…) of my ideas because I want to address that before I try to take them further. Anyway at the risk of having little to discuss about today’s reading here’s a thought:

In episode 7 Bloom is referred to out loud as a “ghost” (237). Obviously this is partially because he is seen as laughably subdued and colorless by the other men in the office, but it is still an interesting word choice. Why else is Bloom a ghost? Usually we regard Rudy as the ghost that haunts Bloom. (I think I’ve heard something about fathers-being-sons-being-fathers before…) Maybe Bloom is a ghost of the man he was before Rudy’s birth-death (and when he still had sex with his wife.) He does do quite a bit of wandering, watching, and repeating. Hmm.