Behold the beholder: The construction of character in James Joyce's 'Ulysses' (Ireland)

Patterns of perception distinguish the mind of Leopold Bloom as it is presented in Ulysses. Throughout the fictional day, June 16, 1904, in ways great and small, he apprehends limited views of people around him and supplements them with a mixture of inductive leaps, cliched assumptions and projections from his own experience to the point that he imagines acquaintance approaching intimacy.; The ability to divine in superficially available details the dark personal secrets of another has its own burden of vulnerability. Bloom is aware that as he is constructing others, others may be constructing him. And although mostly innocent, he is uneasy in situations that he knows may lead others to classify him negatively, costing him his respectable social position.; In these essays I contend that these patterns of construction are operating from the first Bloom chapters and are explored in extensive ways in later chapters. Minor characters such as the Blind Stripling and Martha Clifford, even Bloom's cat, with whom he conducts his early morning dialogue, provide exemplary instances. Extended passages of “Circe” come into focus as Bloom's dramatized anxiety about negative constructions to which his perambulations in Nighttown and his interest in Stephen leave him open. “Nausicaa” yields itself to a new clarity when read as Bloom's most extensively reported construction, an erotic fantasy around a young woman's figure spied on the beach. “Penelope” showcases Molly Bloom's internal reality and provides a contrast to Bloom's view of the “intimate Molly.” The habits of construction have affected even the most intimate relationship in Bloom's life, reducing his wife to an object of personal fantasy.; Bloom's habits of mind, his ways of constructing reality and considering the ways in which others might construct him, are not mere peculiarities of personality. These investigations trace parallel patterns to these habits in the popular culture of the turn-of-the-century. By examining trends in advertising, the law, the press and in figures such as Freud and Sherlock Holmes, I argue that Bloom's processes of perception are in perfect synch with contemporary trends. This congruence confirms the basic health of Bloom's psyche. If elements of dysfunction are revealed in his most intimate relationship, these elements are the etchings of modernity on the spirit of a benevolent Everyman.; This reading of Ulysses reinstates the centrality of character in the style-driven later chapters of the book. It also suggests that patterns implicit in earlier chapters are extrapolated in the later ones. Joyce's interest in characters does not wane, as some critics have suggested, but moves to a new level of sophistication and intimate penetration. In this exploration of character, popular culture is not merely a source of local color; it is a dynamic force and the source of absorbed habits of perception that shape human interaction and the sense of self.