Leopold Bloom
| Leopold Bloom | |
|---|---|
| Ulysses character | |
 Drawing of Leopold Bloom by Joyce | |
| Created by | James Joyce |
| In-universe information | |
| Alias | Henry Flower |
| Nickname | Poldy |
| Occupation | Advertising agent |
| Family | Rudolph Bloom (né Rudolf Virág) (father) Ellen Bloom (née Higgins) (mother) |
| Spouse | Marion (Molly) Tweedy (m. 1888) |
| Children | Millicent (Milly) Bloom (b. 1889) Rudolph (Rudy) Bloom (b. 1893 – d. 1893) |
| Religion | Born Jewish Raised Protestant Converted to Catholicism, 1888 |
Leopold Bloom is the fictional protagonist and hero of James Joyce's 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. The character was inspired by James Joyce's close friend Aron Ettore Schmitz (Italo Svevo), author of Zeno's Conscience.
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 different occasions, he is of partial Jewish descent and is sometimes ridiculed and threatened because of his being perceived as a Jew.[1]
Elsewhere in popular culture
Writer-director Mel Brooks used the name "Leo Bloom" for the mousy accountant in his film/musical The Producers. 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 16th, which is Bloomsday.
Former Pink Floyd bandmate Roger Waters references Leopold Bloom in his song "Flickering Flame" as sitting with Molly Malone.
It has also been suggested by Jeffrey Meyer in "Orwell's Apocalypse: Coming Up For Air, Modern Fiction Studies" that George Orwell's primary character George Bowling in Coming Up For Air was modelled on Leopold Bloom.
Leopold Bloom also serves as an archetype, due to his non-identity and political indifference, for the nihilistic and apathetic mass in contemporary society in the French radical fringe publication Tiqqun.
Grace Slick's song "Rejoyce", from the album After Bathing at Baxter's concerns the novel Ulysses, and Bloom is mentioned in the song.
Leo Bloom King is the protagonist and narrator of Pat Conroy's 2009 novel South of Broad. His mother is a huge fan of Joyce.[citation needed]
References
- ^ Catherine Hezser, "Are You Protestant Jews or Roman Catholic Jews?" Literary Representations of Being Jewish in Ireland, Modern Judaism 25.2 (2005) 176
External links
- "The Greatest Jew of all" : James Joyce, Leopold Bloom, and the Modernist Archetype, Morton P. Levitt, Papers on Joyce, 10/11 (2004–2005), pp. 143–162
- The Physical Fitness of Leopold Bloom. Jeff McClung, International Journal of Humanities and Social Science, Vol. 2 No. 2 (Special Issue – January 2012). p. 16
- Ulysses Seen – ch. IV Calypso visualisation of Bloom in his first appearance in Ulysses
- John Henry Raleigh (1977). The Chronicle of Leopold and Molly Bloom: Ullysses as narrative. University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-03301-9.
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