JOYCE		LUCK CLUB
DUBLINERS	ULYSSES	THE PORTRAIT

Chapter 4 - Summary: After Stephen with his intellectual intensities, it is a pleasure to join Leopold Bloom. The problems are not less but they are differently ordered. The missing "t" in the word "hat" in the lining of his hat reverberates with his intention (unfulfilled) to get tea from Tom Kernan. His forgotten housekey reverberates with his effort (unconcluded) to secure an ad from Alexander Keyes. These subterranean connections are part of Joyce's method. The ad that Bloom picks up at the butcher's contains a name, Bleibtreu. This name is repeated in the Scylla and Charybdis section but there it is the name of a writer that believes Shakespeare was really the fifth earl of Rutland.. In the ad the numerals of the address give Molly's age and the date of her birth. At the butcher's we get our first glimpse of Bloom's status as a Jew. The question is never resolved satisfactorily but he only considers himself to be a Jew when he feels like it and that assumption of Jewishness fulfills a creative need in his life. Even if it is not a genuine part of him, it is his finer part. Joyce uses him, the alien, to test and criticize the Irish. Bloom is also Joyce as Joyce imagines himself returned to Ireland from exile and facing the mental and spiritual insularity of the Irish. It is easy to miss very much if one concentrates on Ulysses as a stream of consciousness novel. Like Bloom's Jewishness, Ulysses is s.o.c. only when Joyce feels like it. Joyce replaces Bloom's certainly more prosaic version of an event with this: Quick warm sunlight came running from Berkeley road, swiftly, in slim sandals, along the brightening footpath. Runs, she runs to meet me, a girl with gold hair in the wind." Home from the butcher's, Bloom picks up the mail: two letters and a postcard. One of the letters is to his wife Molly. It is from Blazes Boylan. We will later learn that Molly will betray Bloom with Boylan and it will happen that afternoon. Right now all we see is a shuffle with the letter. Molly reads it while Bloom is out of the room. She hides it in the bedclothes as he notices when he returns. While Bloom defecates, he reads a silly story that he, however, admires and wishes he could emulate. When he finishes defecating he wipes himself with the story. This echoes Stephen's action when he tore a piece from Deasy's letter for his poem. Crawford later will tie the two actions together with a coarse joke that suggests the connection between excretion and creativity, a theme that the infantile world of Finnegans Wake will give Joyce further opportunity to explore. Best Bob Top! HOME!