Reading Scenes

With regard to Milly’s letter in 4. Calypso, M. has mentioned Bloom’s impressionistic way of letter-reading (4.281f.) before his daughter’s letter proper is quoted verbatim (4.397ff.).

Reading-scenes in novels (and in literary works in general) have often poetological (meta-poetic, meta-literary) potential: they may point to the reading strategy that is required by the literary text in which they appear. Lotus Eaters is full of reading scenes, Bloom’s reading of Martha’s letter (239ff.).

Furthermore, reading scenes, in a more general sense of the word “reading”, can indicate more general issues about deciphering, understanding, and making sense of reality, of being in the world. Cp. for example, Bloom’s way of listening to M’Coy while watching people across Westland Row (5.82ff.), and , his reading of the Catholic mass (340ff.)

Writing Scenes

And the same holds true for writing scenes, in our case, Martha’s letter (241-59).

Critique of Enlightenment (Aufklärungskritik)

Part of the modernism of Joyce’s Ulysses is that it critically reviews the project of modernity and modernization itself. From the Renaissance to the Enlightenment and beyond, modernity has been associated with self-determination, freedom, the understanding of natural processes and their domination. Towards the end of the 19th century, this project entered a state of crisis which culminated in the two World Wars.

Homer’s Odyssey can be seen as a founding text of the modern project to master nature and the self. Cp. the disciplinary aspects connected to Odysseus’s journey and to his intention to regain sovereignty and self-control

The scouts encountered humans, Lotus-Eaters,
who did not hurt them. They just shared with them
their sweet delicious fruit. But as they ate it,
they lost the will to come back and bring news
to me. They wanted only to stay there,
feeding on lotus with the Lotus-Eaters.
They had forgotten home. I dragged them back
in tears, forced them on board the hollow ships,
pushed them below the decks, and tied them up.
I told the other men, the loyal ones,
to get back in the ships, so no one else
would taste the lotus and forget about
our destination. They embarked and sat
along the rowing benches, side by side,
and struck the grayish water with their oars. 

Odyssey bk 9: 90-105; transl. Wilson

“Between 1942 and 1944, two German-Jewish exiles in California – Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno – also returned to the Odyssey. Their reading of the ancient epic was to become part of one the most significant philosophical texts of the twentieth century, Dialektik der Aufklärung: Philosophische Fragmente (hereafter DdA). DdA is an intense lament which mourns the ‘eclipse of reason’ amid the catastrophes of the twentieth century. It is an attempt to answer what was, and still remains, one of the most pressing questions of the modern age: why, when the Enlightenment seemed to guide the way to reason and progress, has modernity plunged into a new era of horror and irrationalism, as typified by fascism? This project was, by the authors’ admission, an ambitious one, promising to span virtually the entirety of Western thought. Horkheimer and Adorno extrapolate the inexorable and self-perpetuated descent of enlightened thought into barbarism, by exposing the orientation of enlightenment towards calculation and domination over nature. It is … through its lack of self-consciousness that enlightenment … regresses to the very mythology it attempts to supersede. It is also responsible for the restrictive and oppressive structure of modern, capitalist, bureaucratic society which is in fact the very opposite of freedom. For the authors, the defining and paradoxical characteristic of fatally flawed enlightenment is this: that myth is already enlightenment; and that enlightenment reverts to mythology. To demonstrate this, Horkheimer and Adorno turn to the Odyssey, asserting its important place in the political, social, and cultural history of the West: it is nothing less than “one of the earliest representative documents of bourgeois Western civilization.”

Katie Fleming: “Odysseus and Enlightenment: Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialektik der Aufklärung”

From this vantage point, “Lotus Eaters” reads like a revision of this narrative. Giving way to distraction, forgetfulness, daydreaming, and the regression into embryo-like bodily pleasures, Bloom incorporates a radical counter-version of the self-constrained, civilized self:

He foresaw his pale body reclined in it at full, naked, in a womb of warmth, oiled by scented melting soap, softly laved. He saw his trunk and limbs riprippled over and sustained, buoyed lightly upward, lemonyellow: his navel, bud of flesh: and saw the dark tangled curls of his bush floating, floating hair of the stream around the limp father of thousands, a languid floating flower. (5.566–72)