Inventorying "Ithaca": Things, Identity, and Character in James Joyce's Ulysses

Abstract

James Joyce’s Ulysses is full of the representations of ordinary, material things.  Things come to especially central prominence in the penultimate chapter, “Ithaca,” when Leopold Bloom, the novel’s central character, returns home and engages with numerous household items and memorabilia.  Critics have puzzled over how to regard all of this materiality.  One critic remarks that the things in “Ithaca” are seemingly “random” and “resist recuperation as part of the symbolic schema and thus dramatize the innate recalcitrance that materiality presents to the shaping imagination.” She adds, “They represent the wealth of life that cannot be assimilated to literary purposes.”  I suggest, to the contrary, that the things in Ulysses are far from random, recalcitrant, and unassimilable, but instead play a crucial role in the definition of character and identity.  For Bloom, things are encoders of personal history, everyday partners in action, and resources for the imagination.  Bloom, as we come to know him, is co-constituted with his things, and they help give his character continuity, solidity, and verisimilitude.  We, as readers, intuitively appreciate this accomplishment in Ulysses, because it is closely akin to the way in which we constitute our own identities in the context of the material world.  Accordingly, Joyce’s grasp of the relationship between the human and the material engages realism in a fundamental way by drawing on the material grounding of actual human identity.