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Leopold Bloom’s Fanciful Notions

So warm. His right hand once more more slowly went over his brow and hair. Then he put on his hat again, relieved: and read again: choice blend, made of the finest Ceylon brands. The far east. Lovely spot it must be: the garden of the world, big lazy leaves to float about on, cactuses, flowery meads, snaky lianas they call them. Wonder is it like that. Those Cinghalese lobbing about in the sun in dolce far niente, not doing a hand’s turn all day. Sleep six months out of twelve. Too hot to quarrel. Influence of the climate. Lethargy. Flowers of idleness. The air feeds most. Azotes. Hothouse in Botanic gardens. Sensitive plants. Waterlilies. Petals too tired to. Sleeping sickness in the air. Walk on roseleaves. Imagine trying to eat tripe and cowheel. Where was the chap I saw in that picture somewhere? Ah yes, in the dead sea floating on his back, reading a book with a parasol open. Couldn’t sink if you tried: so thick with salt. Because the weight of the water, no, the weight of the body in the water is equal to the weight of the what? Or is it the volume is equal to the weight? It’s a law something like that. Vance in High school cracking his fingerjoints, teaching. The college curriculum. Cracking curriculum. What is weight really when you say the weight? Thirtytwo feet per second per second. Law of falling bodies: per second per second. They all fall to the ground. The earth. It’s the force of gravity of the earth is the weight

Ulysses, James Joyce

This is a fantastic observation that touches on one of the most debated aspects of Joyce’s writing: is he mocking the subject, or the person observing the subject?
The answer is likely a bit of both. In this passage, Joyce is using Bloom to critique the “Colonial Mindset” of 1904 Dublin, while also showing Bloom’s specific psychological state.
1. Bloom’s “Elementary” Ignorance
You are right that his views on Sri Lanka are fanciful and objectively wrong. However, Joyce isn’t necessarily making Bloom “unintelligent” so much as he is making him provincial.
* The Information Gap: In 1904, the average Irishman’s knowledge of the “East” came from tea packets, missionary pamphlets, and “Exotic” travelogues.
* Intellectual Laziness: Bloom is usually very inquisitive, but here he wants to be lazy. He is projecting his own desire for a “painless” life onto a distant culture. He doesn’t want to know the real Sri Lanka; he wants to imagine a place where nobody has to work or deal with unfaithful wives.
2. Joyce’s Satire of “Orientalism”
Joyce is likely satirizing Orientalism—the tendency of Westerners to view the East as a static, mystical, and “lazy” place.
* By having Bloom think these cliché things while looking at a commercial tea shop window, Joyce is showing how global capitalism (the Belfast and Oriental Tea Company) packages and sells “exoticism” to the masses.
* Bloom is literally “buying” the marketing of the tea company as if it were a geographical fact.
3. The “Lotus Eaters” Parallel
Structurally, this chapter corresponds to the Lotus Eaters episode from the Odyssey.
* In Homer, the Lotus Eaters are people who eat a plant that makes them forget their homes and their duties.
* Bloom’s “Lotus”: For Bloom, his “lotus” is his daydreaming. He uses these “fanciful notions” about lianas and waterlilies to numb himself against the “thumping” reality of the funeral and Boylan.
4. The Science Confusion
His confusion about gravity (32 \text{ ft/s}^2) and buoyancy isn’t just a lack of education; it’s a distraction. He is throwing “facts” at his brain to stop it from thinking about Molly. It’s “Cracking curriculum”—a bit of noise to drown out his internal silence.

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Joyce, Nolan, Tolstoy: The Idea of Simultaneity

The very thing that makes Ulysses the “Big Bang” of modern storytelling. While Joyce didn’t invent the idea of multiple plots, he refined the technique of simultaneity—showing exactly what different people are doing at the same “absolute” moment—in a way that feels like a precursor to the editing in Inception or Dunkirk.
Prior to Joyce, writers used parallel timelines, but they usually served the plot rather than the concept of time itself.
1. The Victorian “Meanwhile” (Dickens & Tolstoy)
In the 19th century, writers like Charles Dickens used parallel plots extensively (A Tale of Two Cities, Bleak House).
* The Style: Dickens would follow one character for three chapters, then write, “Leaving Mr. Pip to his reflections, we now return to…”
* The Difference: This is linear parallel storytelling. It’s like a relay race where one runner finishes their leg before the camera moves to the next. Joyce, like Nolan, prefers the simultaneous cut, where the two timelines are “vibrating” against each other at once.
2. Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina
Tolstoy was a master of the “cross-cut” between the urban tragedy of Anna and the rural spiritual quest of Levin.
* Joyce’s Reference: Joyce admired Tolstoy’s “stream of consciousness” (especially in the final moments of Anna Karenina). However, Tolstoy’s timelines are broad; Joyce’s are measured by the minute.
3. Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (The Agricultural Fair)
This is perhaps the most direct “ancestor” to Joyce’s style. In a famous scene, Flaubert intercuts a romantic seduction with the shouting of prize-winning livestock at a fair.
* The Effect: It’s a “spatial” cross-cut. By putting two unrelated events in the same paragraph, Flaubert creates irony. This is the “God’s eye view” that Nolan uses when he cuts between the different levels of the dream in Inception.
The “Nolan-esque” Innovation: The Synchronized Watch
What Joyce did that was truly new (and what Nolan mimics) is Synchronicity.
In Chapter 10, Wandering Rocks, Joyce gives us 19 short vignettes.
* The Technique: He will describe a character walking down a street, and in the middle of the paragraph, he’ll insert a single sentence about a bell ringing across town or a “crumpled throwaway” floating in the river.
* The Purpose: To show that all these people are trapped in the same “block” of time. It’s exactly like the Interstellar “tesseract” moment where all times and places exist in one physical structure.
The Cinema Factor
Joyce was obsessed with the early cinema (he actually opened the first cinema in Dublin, the Volta). He realized that film could do something books couldn’t: The Jump Cut. Ulysses is his attempt to make a book behave like a movie camera, cutting between Stephen on the beach and Bloom at the butcher shop without needing a narrator to explain the transition.

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Making of Ulysses

Those two stories—the daily grind of teaching and the grand legal battle for the soul of literature—represent the two poles of Joyce’s life: the struggle to survive and the struggle to be heard.
1. The Berlitz School: Joyce the Teacher
While writing about Stephen’s “school kip,” Joyce was living his own version of it in Trieste.
* The Method: The Berlitz method was “direct immersion”—no translation allowed. Joyce had to teach English using only English.
* The Students: His classes were a mix of naval officers, wealthy socialites, and shopkeepers. One of his students was the famous writer Italo Svevo, who eventually became a close friend and a model for Leopold Bloom.
* The “Boredom”: Joyce hated the repetition. He often arrived late or spent the lesson gossiping about Irish politics. However, this job gave him the perfect “ear” for how language is actually spoken, which he used to create the incredibly realistic dialogue in Ulysses.
2. United States v. One Book Called Ulysses (1933)
This is one of the most important court cases in literary history. After years of being smuggled into the US in brown paper wrappers, the book finally faced a judge.
* The Strategy: Random House (the publisher) wanted to get caught. they literally sent a copy through customs so it would be seized, allowing them to sue the government.
* Judge John M. Woolsey: He was a sophisticated, literate judge. He spent weeks reading the book.
* The Verdict: In a landmark decision, Woolsey ruled that the book was not obscene. He wrote that while it was “somewhat emetic” (made you want to vomit) in places, it was not “aphrodisiac” (meant to cause lust).
* The Famous Quote: Woolsey stated that Joyce was attempting to show how the “screen of consciousness” actually works, and that his “experiments” were a sincere attempt to record the human mind. This opened the doors for modern literature to discuss the body and the psyche without fear of jail time.
Etymology of “Berlitz”
* Origin: Named after Maximilian Berlitz, a German immigrant to the US.
* Etymology: The name is a variant of Berlic, of Slavic origin (Sorbian), likely meaning “little bear” or related to a geographical location.
* Significance: In the book, Stephen feels like a “little bear” or a caged animal in his teaching job, trapped by the need for “four shining sovereigns.”
Etymology of “Obscene”
Since this word almost ended Joyce’s career:
* Origin: From the Latin obscenus.
* Etymology: Uncertain, but often thought to be from ob- (against/away) + caenum (“filth” or “mud”).
* The Irony: As we discussed, Joyce’s name Loyola (his school) means “muddy place.” He leaned into the “filth” of reality to find the “shining” truth beneath it.

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The Universal Man of Joyce

To wrap up this journey, we can see that for Joyce, the “Universal Man” is a composite of all these figures. He believed that whether you are a Greek king, a Danish prince, a Dublin advertising canvasser, or an Indian revolutionary, the core “experiments” of the human soul remain the same.
The Convergence: The “Everyman”
The diverse influences we’ve discussed—Gandhi, Shakespeare, and the Vedas—converge in Joyce’s work through three main pillars:
* The Commonality of Guilt: By linking Stephen Dedalus to Hamlet and (as you noted) Gandhi, Joyce shows that “filial guilt” is not a local Irish problem. It is the fundamental friction of the “Son” trying to become his own “Father.”
* The Language of the Soul: Joyce used the “refined” nature of Sanskrit and the “artful forging” of Greek to show that while our languages differ, our “inwit” (conscience) is a shared human constant.
* The Micro-Macro Parallel: Joyce’s theory was that a single day in Dublin (June 16, 1904) could contain the entire history of the world. A man buying a “rasher” of bacon is no less significant than Odysseus fighting a sea monster or a seeker finding “Shanti.”
The “Atman” of Leopold Bloom
In the end, Leopold Bloom is Joyce’s most “Indian” creation. Bloom possesses a quality of equanimity—the ability to stay calm and compassionate despite being an outsider and facing betrayal. While Stephen is trapped in his “agenbite of inwit,” Bloom moves through the world with a “Tathāgata-like” acceptance. He is the “Universal Man” because he accepts the “bitter mystery” of love and death without letting it crush him.
Etymology of “Atman”
To end on the core of the self:
* Origin: Sanskrit Ātman.
* Etymology: Likely from the root an, meaning “to breathe.”
* Significance: It refers to the “true self” or “soul.” In Ulysses, Joyce is essentially trying to capture the “breath” of Dublin—the Atman of a city—by recording every tiny thought and sensation of its inhabitants.

It is a fascinating bridge to cross. Joyce was a linguistic scavenger; he didn’t just stay within the “Sassenach” or Latin traditions. He looked toward the East to find a language that could hold the “universal” psyche you mentioned.
While Ulysses is deeply rooted in the Mediterranean (Greek) and the Northern (Shakespearean) traditions, Joyce’s interest in Indian philosophy blossomed fully as he moved toward his final work, Finnegans Wake.
The Sanskrit Connection: “The Word”
Joyce was deeply aware of the Vedas and the concept of Aum (Om). To a writer who believed that words were the “vibrations” of the universe, Sanskrit—the “perfected” language—was the ultimate playground.
* The Cycle of Time: Joyce was obsessed with the philosopher Giordano Bruno and Giambattista Vico, whose theories of “cyclical history” mirror the Hindu concept of Yugas. Just as the Mahabharata moves through cycles of destruction and rebirth, Ulysses (and even more so the Wake) is circular—ending where it begins.
* The Ending of the Wake: The final pages of Finnegans Wake are seen by many as a “passing over” into a state of peace. He uses the word “Tathāgata” (a title of the Buddha, meaning “one who has thus gone”). It represents the final release from the “filial guilt” and “brooding” that traps Stephen Dedalus.
The “Shanti” Connection
Joyce was a contemporary of T.S. Eliot, who famously ended his poem The Waste Land (published the same year as Ulysses, 1922) with the Sanskrit mantra:
> Shantih shantih shantih
>
Joyce and Eliot were both trying to find a “peace that passeth understanding” to heal the “bitter mysteries” of a broken Europe. For Joyce, this meant looking at the Upunishads to find a way to describe a consciousness that wasn’t just Irish or English, but human.
Etymology of “Sanskrit”
Since we are tracking the “forging” of language:
* Origin: From the Sanskrit Saṃskṛtam.
* Etymology: Composed of sam (together/completely) + kṛta (made/formed).
* Significance: It literally means “refined,” “polished,” or “highly wrought.” This is the exact goal Stephen Dedalus sets for himself: to take the “mud” of his life (remember Loyola means “muddy place”) and refine it into a “polished” work of art.

That is a profound observation. Connecting Stephen Dedalus to Mahatma Gandhi’s autobiography brings a fascinating cross-cultural layer to the theme of “filial guilt.”
In The Story of My Experiments with Truth, Gandhi famously recounts the “double shame” of being with his wife when his father passed away in the next room. Like Stephen, Gandhi carried that moment as a lifelong scar, and both men transformed that private “offence” into a public, creative, or spiritual quest.
The Psyche as a Laboratory
You’ve hit on exactly why Ulysses changed literature. Joyce didn’t just write a story; he performed an autopsy on his own soul.
* No Filters: Most authors “curate” their protagonists to be more heroic or likable. Joyce did the opposite. He gave Stephen his own arrogance, his own hygiene issues, his own “beastly” thoughts, and his most shameful memories of his mother.
* The Universal through the Particular: By being so brutally specific about his own psyche—his guilt, his lust, his intellectual vanity—Joyce tapped into a universal human experience. We recognize ourselves in Stephen’s “brooding” and Bloom’s “scientific” curiosities.
* Vulnerability as Strength: As you noted with Gandhi, there is a transformative power in admitting one’s “experiments” or failures. By putting his psyche up for examination, Joyce moved beyond “storytelling” into a form of secular confession.
The “Hamlet” Connection (Final Note)
In the end, all three—Hamlet, Stephen, and Gandhi—are men struggling with the Ghost of the Father (or Mother). They are trying to figure out how to be “truthful” to themselves while carrying the heavy weight of their ancestors’ expectations.
Etymology of “Gandhi”
In keeping with our theme of names and identity:
* Origin: From the Sanskrit gandhika.
* Etymology: It literally means “perfumer” or “grocer/seller of spices” (from gandha, meaning “smell” or “fragrance”).
* Significance: Much like “Bloom” (flower) or “Lalouette” (lark), the name is grounded in the sensory, physical world—a sharp contrast to the “wetted ashes” and “ghosts” that haunt the beginning of Ulysses.