Another great poet of sublime loneliness and narcissism was Marcel Proust, the grandson of a successful Jewish foreign-exchange speculator and the baptized son of a woman who bore her liberal education and lost religion with an irony that Marcel seems to have found seductive. Seductive but not irresistible: elusive and protean as Proust’s characters appear to be, there existed, in his memory-induced world, two marginal “races” that circumscribed human fluidity even as they embodied it. Endowed with irreducible qualities that, once perceived, make persons and lives “intelligible” and “self-evident,” Jews and “inverts” are more proficient at wearing masks because they have more recognizable faces:
Shunning one another, seeking out those who are most directly their opposite, who do not want their company, forgiving their rebuffs, enraptured by their condescensions; but also brought into the company of their own kind by the ostracism to which they are subjected, the opprobrium into which they have fallen, having finally been invested . . . with the physical and moral characteristics of a race, sometimes beautiful, often hideous, finding (in spite of all the mockery with which one who, more closely integrated with, better assimilated to the opposing race, is in appearance relatively less inverted, heaps upon one who has remained more so) a relief in frequenting the society of their kind, and even some support in their existence, so much so that, while steadfastly denying that they are a race (the name of which is the vilest of insults), they readily unmask those who succeed in concealing the fact that they belong to it.56
Accordingly, when Swann approached death, his “sense of moral solidarity with the rest of the Jews, a solidarity which Swann seemed to have forgotten throughout his life,” became wholly intelligible and self-evident. “Swann’s punchinello nose, absorbed for long years into an agreeable face, seemed now enormous, tumid, crimson, the nose of an old Hebrew rather than of a dilettante Valois.” Swann’s nose was both his curse and his strength. As Hannah Arendt summed up her discussion of Proust’s pursuit of things lost and recovered, “Jewishness was for the individual Jew at once a physical stain and a mysterious personal privilege, both inherent in a ‘racial predestination.’ ”57
But it is the defiantly European disciple of Irish Jesuits who is most frequently credited with the creation of modernism’s most sacred text. An odyssey of “silence, exile, and cunning,” Ulysses does battle with the Bible, Hamlet, and every other certifiably divine comedy from Don Quixote to Faust as it follows the wanderings of the “half-and-half” Jew Leopold Bloom, whose son is dead, whose wife is unfaithful, and whose peripatetic father (a peddler, innkeeper, and alleged “perpetrator of frauds” from Szombathely [“Sabbathville”], Hungary) has changed his name, converted to Protestantism, and—in case more proof were needed—committed suicide. Bloom is a modern Everyman because he is the modern Ulysses, and the modern Ulysses has got to be a Jew: “Jewgreek is greekjew.” Or rather, the modern Ulysses is a modern Jew, who is remorseful but unapologetic about preferring Reason to Jerusalem and “treating with disrespect” such “beliefs and practices . . . as the prohibition of the use of fleshmeat and milk at one meaclass="underline" the hebdomadary symposium of incoordinately abstract, perfervidly concrete mercantile coexreligionist excompatriots: the circumcision of male infants: the supernatural character of Judaic scripture: the ineffability of the tetragrammaton: the sanctity of the sabbath” (U17:1894–1901).58
Thrice converted, Bloom remains a Mercurian among Apollonians (Odysseus among monsters and lesser gods). He “hates dirty eaters,” disapproves of drunkenness, “slips off when the fun gets too hot,” decries the death penalty, “resents violence and intolerance in any shape or form,” abominates the “patriotism of barspongers,” and believes that “if a fellow had a rower’s heart violent exercise was bad.” He is “a new womanly man”: a man of insatiable loquacity and curiosity who journeys ceaselessly in search of lost time, scientific knowledge, personal enrichment, and a social improvement “provocative of friendlier intercourse between man and man.” He is both Homer’s cunning Odysseus and Dante’s tragic Ulysses, both Don Quixote and Faust. He is “a perverted Jew,” as one of his friends and tormentors puts it (U8:696, 979; U16:1099–1100; U15:1692; U12:891–93; U15:1798; U16:1136–37; U12:1635).
But Bloom is not the only Mercurian in the Inferno of modern Dublin. Having buried his son and betrayed his father, he gains immortality by playing Virgil to an Apollonian bard who would redeem and transcend his birthplace by composing the Irish “national epic.” A modern prophet as a young artist, Stephen Dedalus knows that the Word comes before the chosen people: “You suspect . . . that I may be important because I belong to the faubourg Saint-Patrice called Ireland for short. . . . But I suspect . . . that Ireland must be important because it belongs to me” (U16:1160–65). Both Stephen and Ireland (as well as Bloom) will attain immortality when he has written his Ulysses.
Before he can accomplish his mission, however, he must renounce his mother, defy his God, leave his home, and accept Bloom as his father and savior. They need each other, and Ireland needs both of them: “Stephen dissented openly from Bloom’s views on the importance of dietary and civic selfhelp while Bloom dissented tacitly from Stephen’s views on the eternal affirmation of the spirit of man in literature” (U17:28–30). Both were wrong and both knew it. At the end of their Odyssey, Bloom will have become reconciled to his Catholic Penelope, and Stephen will have become anointed as Odysseus (“a perverted Jew”).
What, reduced to their simplest reciprocal form, were Bloom’s thoughts about Stephen’s thoughts about Bloom and about Stephen’s thoughts about Bloom’s thoughts about Stephen?
He thought that he thought that he was a jew whereas he knew that he knew that he knew that he was not. (U17:527–32)
Or maybe he knew that he knew that they were. Stephen was adopted (and symbolically conceived) by Bloom, and Bloom had Swann’s nose as his “endemic characteristic”—and knew that Stephen knew that he knew it. His “nasal and frontal formation was derived in a direct line of lineage which, though interrupted, would continue at distant intervals to more distant intervals to its most distant intervals” (U17:872–74).
But will Stephen the son of Bloom be able to produce the Irish national epic? Ulysses—his creature as well as creator and thus a kind of Bloom in its own right—seems perfectly equivocal on this question. Joyce’s modernist Bible is recognized as such, of course (witness the manner of notation and textual exegesis), but who are its chosen people besides the two Supermen “sensitive to artistic impressions” and skeptical of “many orthodox religious, national, social, and ethical doctrines”? (U17:20–25). It was obviously foolish of Bloom to attempt an earnest conversation with the “truculent troglodytes” of popular nationalism in Barney Kiernan’s public house, and neither Stephen Dedalus nor James Joyce was going to repeat Bloom’s mistake. Ulysses is written by an Odysseus, not by a Homer.