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.