Leopold Bloom

Leopold Bloom
Ulysses character
Drawing of Leopold Bloom by Joyce
Created by James Joyce
Information
Nickname(s) Poldy
Aliases Henry Flower
Occupation Advertising agent
Family Rudolph Bloom (né Rudolf Virág) (father)
Ellen Bloom (née Higgins) (mother)
Spouse(s) Marion (Molly) Tweedy (m. 1888)
Children Millicent (Milly) Bloom (b. 1889)
Rudolph (Rudy) Bloom (b. 1893 – d. 1893)
Religion Catholicism

Leopold Bloom is the fictional protagonist and hero of James Joyce's Ulysses. His peregrinations and encounters in Dublin on 16 June 1904 mirror, on a more mundane and intimate scale, those of Ulysses/Odysseus in Homer's epic poem the Odyssey. The character's name and some of his personality was inspired by James Joyce's friend Leopold Popper. Popper was a Jew of Bohemian descent who had hired Joyce as an English tutor for his daughter Amalia. Popper managed the company of Popper and Blum and it is believed that Leopold Bloom was invented by taking Popper's first name and Anglicizing the name Blum.[1][2]

Fictional biography

Bloom is introduced to the reader as a man of appetites:

Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods' roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.

The Bloom character, born in 1866, is the only son of Rudolf Virág (a Hungarian Jew from Szombathely who emigrated to Ireland, converted from Judaism to Protestantism, changed his name to Rudolph Bloom and later committed suicide), and of Ellen Higgins, an Irish Protestant. He is uncircumcised. They lived in Clanbrassil Street, Portobello. Bloom converted to Catholicism to marry Marion (Molly) Tweedy on 8 October 1888. The couple have one daughter, Millicent (Milly), born in 1889; their son Rudolph (Rudy), born in December 1893, died after 11 days. The family live at 7 Eccles Street in Dublin.

Episodes (chapters) in Ulysses relate a series of encounters and incidents in Bloom's contemporary odyssey through Dublin in the course of the single day of 16 June 1904 (although episodes 1 to 3, 9 and to a lesser extent 7, are primarily concerned with Stephen Dedalus, who in the plan of the story is the counterpart of Telemachus). Joyce aficionados celebrate 16 June as 'Bloomsday'.

As the day unfolds, Bloom's thoughts turn to the affair between Molly and her manager, Hugh 'Blazes' Boylan (obliquely, through, for instance, telltale ear worms), and, prompted by the funeral of his friend Paddy Dignam, the death of his child, Rudy. The absence of a son may be what leads him to take a shine to Stephen, for whom he goes out of his way in the book's latter episodes, rescuing him from a brothel, walking him back to his own house and even offering him a place there to study and work. The reader becomes familiar with Bloom's tolerant, humanistic outlook, his penchant for voyeurism and his (purely epistolary) infidelity. Bloom detests violence, and his relative indifference to Irish nationalism leads to disputes with some of his peers (most notably 'the Citizen' in the Cyclops chapter). Although Bloom has never been a practising Jew, converted to Roman Catholicism to marry Molly, and has in fact received Christian baptism on three different occasions, he is of partial Jewish descent and is sometimes ridiculed and threatened because of his being perceived as a Jew.[3]

Richard Ellmann, Joyce's biographer, described Bloom as "a nobody", who "has virtually no effect upon the life around him". In this Ellmann found nobility: "The divine part of Bloom is simply his humanity - his assumption of a bond between himself and other created being."[4]

Joyce told Sylvia Beach that Holbrook Jackson resembled Bloom.[5]

Writer-director Mel Brooks used the name "Leo Bloom" for the mousy accountant in his film/musical The Producers.[6] Leo is a nervous accountant, prone to panic attacks, who keeps a security blanket to calm himself. Nevertheless, it is Leo who has the idea of how to make money from a failed play. In the 2005 film, after realizing his inner potential, Leo loudly asks "When's it gonna be Bloom's Day?" Hidden in the background of the office of Max Bialystock is a calendar marked for June 16, which is Bloomsday.[7]

Former Pink Floyd bandmate Roger Waters references Leopold Bloom in his song "Flickering Flame" as sitting with Molly Malone.[8]

It has also been suggested by Jeffrey Meyer in "Orwell's Apocalypse: Coming Up For Air, Modern Fiction Studies" that George Orwell's primary character George Bowling in Coming Up For Air was modelled on Leopold Bloom.

Leopold Bloom also serves as an archetype, due to his non-identity and political indifference, for the nihilistic and apathetic mass in contemporary society in the French radical fringe publication Tiqqun.

Grace Slick's song "Rejoyce", from the album After Bathing at Baxter's concerns the novel Ulysses, and Bloom is mentioned in the song.

References

  1. ↑ Hughes, Eileen Lanouette (2 February 1968), The mystery lady of Giacomo Joyce. A newly published work reveals an early Molly Bloom Life Magazine.
  2. ↑ Partridge, Craig (2016), Juda Loebl Popper of Ostrovec-Lhotka, Bohemia, and His Family, privately printed, pp. 241ff.
  3. ↑ Hezser, Catherine (18 May 2005). ""Are You Protestant Jews or Roman Catholic Jews?": Literary Representations of Being Jewish in Ireland". 25 (2). Modern Judaism: 159–188 – via Project MUSE.
  4. ↑ Goodman, Walter (May 14, 1987). Richard Ellmann dies at 69; Eminent James Joyce Scholar. The New York Times.
  5. ↑ Rintoul, M. C. (2014-03-05). Dictionary of Real People and Places in Fiction. Routledge. ISBN 9781136119408.
  6. ↑ "The Producers". IMDb. 10 November 1968.
  7. ↑ Simonson, Robert (16 June 2002). "'When Will It Be Bloomsday?' June 16 at Symphony Space". Playbill.
  8. ↑ "The Flickering Flame Lyrics". Roger Waters Web Ring.
  • "The Greatest Jew of all" : James Joyce, Leopold Bloom, and the Modernist Archetype, Morton P. Levitt, Papers on Joyce, 10/11 (2004–2005), pp. 143–162
  • Ulysses Seen – ch. IV Calypso visualisation of Bloom in his first appearance in Ulysses
  • John Henry Raleigh (1977). The Chronicle of Leopold and Molly Bloom: Ullysses as narrative. University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-03301-9.
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