James Joyce Ulysses, Chapter Five Essay

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However, even Homer's residents, according to Odysseus, were not truly happy -- one of the reasons Odysseus was so eager to escape their allure. For example, when Bloom greets McCoy, both express their unhappiness with their physical lives, despite the fact that Bloom has just been fantasizing about the Far East: "Just keeping alive, M'Coy said." Modern human beings are disconnected from a sense of purpose and joy, and seek refuge in tea, drink, and smoking, supplanting real pleasure with false pleasures, and forget what makes life meaningful. Significantly, the novel opens with an image of a young girl reproaching a boy for smoking, saying that it will stunt his growth. Pleasures can stunt one's emotional development, for the young and the old.

The lotus-eater episode, in Ulysses, rather than being deeply erotic, as one might assume to be the case in a chapter with the title of pleasure seekers, instead is full of incidents of pleasure being thwarted, or being enjoyed in a voyeuristic or fetishistic fashion, such as by gazing at people at the theater, buying feminine-scented soaps, and watching upper-class women walk on the street. "Watch! Watch! Silk flash rich stockings white. Watch!" Even the wealthy woman McCoy spots is described in terms of her clothing and fashion, rather than in regards to her actual body and manner.

The chapter is filled with a sense that there is no real enjoyment of the body in modern life. The real Odysseus was not physically faithful to Penelope, although he was emotionally faithful to his wife during his wanderings -- he enjoyed his sexual and territorial freedom. A true modern man, Bloom does not have an affair with an actual woman, but is merely unfaithful in his head and through an erotic, unconsummated correspondence with a woman named Martha Clifford. Enjoying pleasure through writing, and focusing on things such as stockings rather than women's legs, are the lotus-eating or false pleasures of modern life, according to Joyce.

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Even the newspapers Bloom reads promise happiness with commodity goods: "What is home without Plumtree's Potted Meat? Incomplete. With it an abode of bliss." Bloom may desire Ithaca, but he is diverted by less meaningful pleasures, like the fantasy of a life on a tropical island while sipping tea or an "abode of bliss" of potted meat.

Bloom's wife Molly is even more of a creature of the flesh than her husband, unlike the chaste Penelope. She is, even relatively late in the day: "Not up yet. Queen was in her bedroom eating bread and. No book." Molly's lack of interest in reading illustrates her sensuality: she sings but does not read, and is portrayed laying cards on her thigh. This might seem to make Molly the greatest lotus-eater of all, but Joyce suggests that at least Molly's pleasure is real. It is not a displaced pleasure through reading and writing, as it is for her husband. Molly is really naked, in bed, waiting for her lover. Although she is unfaithful, she at least is in touch with some aspect of herself that the lotus-eaters lack.

Bloom is distinct from the original Odysseus because of the fact that he travels and enjoys pleasures in his mind, and the physical world through which he moves is far more limited in scope. He is also more prey to lotus-eating pleasures, like gambling and drinking tea, that take him from his true destiny of home. Yet like Odysseus, his home is under siege by suitors, in the form of his wife's lover. Bloom is more emotionally vulnerable than the hero Odysseus and also less aggressive in his ability to confront danger and assaults upon his home and wife's honor. But Joyce takes a gentler view of Bloom's dabbling in lotus-eating, even though he suggests that if Bloom embraced real, elemental physical sexuality, he and his wife might have a deeper and more satisfying connection and….....

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