Leopold Bloom

Leopold Bloom is the fictional protagonist and hero of James Joyce's 1922 novel 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.

Leopold Bloom
Ulysses character
Drawing of Leopold Bloom by Joyce
Created byJames Joyce
In-universe information
AliasHenry Flower
NicknamePoldy
OccupationAdvertising agent
FamilyRudolph Bloom (né Rudolf Virág) (father)
Ellen Bloom (née Higgins) (mother)
SpouseMarion (Molly) Tweedy (m. 1888)
ChildrenMillicent (Milly) Bloom (b. 1889)
Rudolph (Rudy) Bloom (b. 1893 – d. 1893)
ReligionCatholicism

Factual antecedents

When Joyce in 1906 started planning a story called "Ulysses" to be included in Dubliners, the central character was based on a Dublin acquaintance named Alfred Hunter whom Joyce had met traveling to a funeral in July 1904.

Another model was probably Italo Svevo.

The character's name (and maybe some of his personality) may have been inspired by Joyce's Trieste acquaintance Leopoldo 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 possible that the name 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 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] Others such as Joseph Campbell see him more as an Everyman figure, a world (cosmopolis) traveler who, like Homer's Odysseus "visited the dwellings of many people and considered their ways of thinking" (Odyssey 1.3).

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]

Jeffrey Meyer suggested in "Orwell's Apocalypse: Coming Up for Air, Modern Fiction Studies" that George Orwell's character George Bowling was modelled on Leopold Bloom.[9]

Grace Slick's song "Rejoyce", from the album After Bathing at Baxter's, concerns the novel Ulysses; Bloom is mentioned in the song.[10]

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. Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  4. Goodman, Walter (May 14, 1987). Richard Ellmann dies at 69; Eminent James Joyce Scholar. The New York Times.
  5. Rintoul, M. C. (5 March 2014). 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. Archived from the original on 22 February 2019. Retrieved 14 November 2016.
  9. Hunter, Jefferson (1980). "Orwell, Wells, and "Coming up for Air"". Modern Philology. 78 (1): 38–47. doi:10.1086/391004. ISSN 0026-8232. JSTOR 437247. S2CID 162037316.
  10. ""A Man of Genius Makes No Mistakes": A Joycean Playlist Just in Time for Bloomsday 2015". FLOOD. Retrieved 7 November 2020.
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