1

Lotus Eaters
1. Closeness and wandering
Odysseus wanderings are caused by chance. The definition of chance is, in tragedy,
a combination of fateful events both ordained by fate and caused by human hybris;
in the epic song, chance postpones the fulfillment mens goals and leads to
unwanted adventure). Whereas in tragedy, the plot followed in the present,
without a narrator, fulfils doom and defeats chance (the plot illustrates sinfulness
and the retribution for human sin)and brings about justice, in Homers epic, chance
does not lead to complete doom (to death). The epic song explores chance and
makes time for a more human present caused by virtue and heroism (see the
connection between heroism and song!). Ulysses wandering from island to island
postpones the denoument and advances towards a happy ending. What matters is
the constant manifestation of the heroic character (temperament, personality),
which defeats adverse chance and triumphs in small steps and to a large extent.
The victories of the present are what matters in epic poetry, by comparison with the
inexorable negativity that defeats man in the present in tragedy. Blind chance is
tamed by man and eventually controlled by the exceptional man in the epic song.
The comparison with the classical origins of literature demonstrates that T.S. Eliot
composed a tragedy, where Joyce composed an epic SONG.
Whereas Stephen Dedalus cannot control otherwise than with his mind and
through questions the adversity and lovelessness of the present that he inhabits
remember the nacheinander/nebeneinander voyage of his soul that contemplates
eternity and ransacks through all that has been written on these themes and
whereas Stephen Dedalus is nobly lost within the present, Bloom, the mature hero
triumphs over the chaotic present in petty steps.
Closeness whose medium is the present is what the reader is enveloped in when
reading both Stephens mind and Mr. Blooms mind. The techniques of presentness
reveal the differences between the two minds. We have read the present (the day of
June 16th, 1904) through Stephens mind and we experienced the quality of a
youthful mind. There is a moving combination between experience and
inexperience in the mind of a learned cultural son who is lost in the present but ripe
with future. He meditates about the bitter mystery of love also owing to his parents 1
1

Stephen has not experienced love with people of his own age, being surrounded by cruel or
stupid young men (like Buck Mulligan or Haines) and is harrassed by ideas about love. He
has been contaminated and made bitter in respect to love for women by other peoples
experience (his mothers flirting in her youthful life and maybe he is jealous of his father,
as explained by Freud). His very complicated mind is filled with lewdish curiosity and cheap
stereotypes and is capable of inventing legends about Shakespeares love life and marriage
(see Scylla and Charibdis. He is inspired in these stories by no first-hand experience of love
and his theory is a young scholars enormity based upon gossip and slandering of women by
men (this theme will be fully developed in The Oxen of the Son about wolewdish curiosity
about women.

2
see the associations with Hamlet but maybe also deficient, and still incomplete in
the present the mind of any son who has lost his father, like Telemachus.

Q: How does Bloom triumph in the present in his wanderings? How is mans
encounter with chance constructed/staged in Ulysses?

A: Bloom (modern heroic man, in general) can triumph in the present by filling the
present with sensuality, by( self-)gratification
The sensuous present and Bloom as a flower of love upon which we
readers are invited to live, like a bee working to make honey (one has to
work at decoding the first allusions in order to enjoy the pleasure of the text, which
is the pleasure of the protagonist)
q : Why are there so many allusions to sloth and flowers together in Lotus
Eaters ? The techniques of sensuality and self-indulging forgetfulness (narcissism,
cf. the general note of the episode, of which one part has been excerpted above) ?

By endless allusions to flowers

Three passages compared:

COMPARE THE WORD WEIGHT, REPRESENTATIVE FOR MR. BLOOMS
STREAM-OF-CONSCIOUSNESS WITH THE PROGRESS OF THE SOUL IN THE
WORLD, A THEME REPRESENTATIVE FOR STEPHEN DEDALUSS

5
CHARACTERIZATION IN THE STREAM-OF-CONSCIOUSNESS PASSAGES AT
THE BEGINNING OF CHAPTER THREE, Proteus:
(see the Technique of Presentness handouts THREE, FOUR, FIVE)

Stephen Dedaluss mind develops the principles of art, Mr. Leopold Bloom
develops the weighty themes of experience. The latter is telluric where
the former was ethereal, referring to the ineluctable modality of the

6
visible and the progress of the soul in the world. The encounter of these
two forces is staged in the father-son plot in Ulysses. It is a substantial,
interesting and important encounter to build upon. Not only in fiction, in
philosophy.
The telluric/sensuous Mr. Bloom : he is both sensuous and ingenious in his rational
minds attention to perception. Sensuality is one of the springs of his associative
mind when turned into discourse:

Wit, another technique for enriching the discursive presentness in Ulysses. See the
funny ending of the scene begun in para 110 above.

There is poetry in Blooms interior monologue, too, but its source is not far-away
meditation but reverie caused by close, immediate objects the objects of his
perception and sensuality.