Ulysses & The Odyssey: Hades

Part of an occasional series on the Homeric parallels in James Joyce’s Ulysses.

The Odyssey, Book XI:

Odysseus travels to the underworld and meets the prophet Tiresias, who reveals the ultimate fate of Odysseus and his crew. Odysseus has a chance to speak to other souls in the underworld, including his mother, a parade of impressive women, and Trojan War heroes such as Agamemnon, Achilles, and Ajax. He also meets Hercules and beholds the cruel and unusual punishment that has befallen Tantalus and Sisyphus in the afterlife. It is Odysseus’ only non-seafaring adventure.

Tiresias appears to Ulysses during the sacrifice, Henry Fuseli, 1780-85 — *Tiresias appears to Ulysses during the sacrifice,* Henry Fuseli, 1780-85

In “Hades,” the sixth episode of Ulysses, Bloom and his peers travel across Dublin, from Sandymount in the southeast to Glasnevin in the north, to attend the funeral of their friend Paddy Dignam. Bloom wasn’t close to Dignam, and it seems he wasn’t particularly close to the other men he shares a carriage ride with, though they are clearly all from the same social circle. The Homeric parallels of “Hades”are overt and abundant, with Glasnevin Cemetery as a clear stand-in for The Odyssey’s mythical underworld. While the company Bloom keeps may not be as illustrious as the gods and heroes Odysseus encounters, this is the first time we see Bloom interacting with his peers in a meaningful way. And just as Bloom is a sideways version of Odysseus, the other attendees at poor Dignam’s funeral are all sideways versions of various characters from ancient Greece.

Let’s start with Paddy Dignam, Bloom’s friend whose funeral is at the center of “Hades.” Dignam’s sudden and tragic death is attributed throughout the book to heart failure or to “apoplexy,” but it seems those who knew him know the real cause - alcoholism. The theme of booze-soaked tragedy runs throughout the works of Joyce, but at least in this case, it also has an ancient root. Dignam’s parallel in The Odyssey is Elpenor, one of Odysseus’ crew who over-imbibed and fell to his death from the roof of Circe’s palace. Elpenor has arrived in the land of the dead ahead of Odysseus and is the first ghost Odysseus meets there. Similarly, Dignam, nestled in his coffin, arrives at Glasnevin Cemetery before Bloom and the rest of the funeral cortege. Stuart Gilbert notes in Ulysses: A Study that Victor Bérard believed that Elpenor’s name came from the Semitic root El-penor, meaning “the blazing face.” Indeed, notice Bloom’s description of Dignam:

“Blazing face: redhot. Too much John Barleycorn. Cure for a red nose. Drink like the devil till it turns adelite. A lot of money he spent colouring it.”

Bloom shares a carriage with Mr. Jack Power, Stephen’s sharp-witted father Simon Dedalus, and Dublin’s own Sisyphus, Martin Cunningham. While in the Underworld, Odysseus observes Sisyphus, condemned to roll a boulder up a hill only to have it always roll back down just before it reaches the top. Cunningham is the most empathetic of the group, a gentle foil to Simon’s irascibility and sarcasm. Bloom describes him thus:

“Martin Cunningham’s large eyes. Looking away now. Sympathetic human man he is. Intelligent. Like Shakespeare’s face. Always a good word to say.”

For all his decency, Cunningham is married to an alcoholic wife who pawns their furniture every Saturday, requiring her husband to repeatedly re-furnish their home. It speaks greatly to Cunningham’s character that he shows such warmth to his peers, particularly with regards to Bloom’s father’s suicide. Cunningham has every right to be embittered like Simon, but he maintains an outward grace. It’s particularly insightful that Joyce portrayed the alcoholic’s husband as Sisyphus, showing the futility of his attempts to mitigate the effects of her drinking and spending rather than trying to strike directly at the underlying problem.

Gustave Doré’s illustration of Charon for Dante’s Inferno, 1857 — Gustave Doré’s illustration of Charon for Dante’s *Inferno*, 1857

Just as one must cross four rivers (Styx, Acheron, Cocytus, and Phlegethon) to enter the Greek underworld, Dignam’s funeral procession must cross four waterways between Sandymount and Glasnevin - the rivers Liffey and Dodder, the Grand Canal, and the Royal Canal. Souls were transported across the water in ancient Greece by the phantasmal ferryman Charon. In Dublin, there are many such psychopomps guiding the men on their journey. Bloom and Co. spot Reuben J. Dodd, who paid a boatman a measly florin for the trouble of fishing his son out of the Liffey with a pole. The florin is reminiscent of the obol coin placed over the eyes of the dead in ancient Greece to pay Charon’s toll into the underworld. As the carriage crosses the Royal Canal, Bloom spots “a man stood on his dropping barge, between clamps of turf.” Another Charon. The dead are welcomed into Glasnevin Cemetery by assistant to the undertaker H. J. O’Neill, Corny Kelleher, a terrestrial Charon figure. While he doesn’t command a waterway, Corny assists the dead across the threshold of their final resting place.

Cerberus the three-headed dog posed an obstacle to ancient Greek heroes trying to gain access to the realm of the dead. Though Cerberus is hostile toward the living, he is friendly to the dead, as long as they don’t try to leave, that is. While Glasnevin Cemetery lacks multi-headed canines, it does have something far more fearsome - a jowly priest with a name like a coffin. Father Coffey, who barks the funeral mass at Bloom and the other mourners, is the earthly middleman between the dead and God’s kingdom. The simnel cakes for sale outside the cemetery (“Simnel cakes those are, stuck together: cakes for the dead. Dogbiscuits.”) are there to placate the Cerberus of Glasnevin, who looks like he’s about to “burst sideways like a sheep in clover Dedalus says he will.” Stephen isn’t the only Dedalus with a facility for poetry.

The ancient Greek underworld is ruled by the god Hades and his wife, the fertility goddess Persephone. The Irish god of death is the affable John O’Connell, Glasnevin Cemetery’s caretaker both in Ulysses and in real life. Everyone in town seems to be on good terms with him, which is advantageous since all must eventually meet with the lord of the Underworld. O’Connell is also married to a fertility goddess of sorts, as his wife is mother to eight children, all presumably conceived in their home in the graveyard.

In Greek, the eleventh book of The Odyssey is entitled Nekuia, which means a rite to summon ghosts in order to question them about the future. In Bloom’s case, many ghosts are summoned, but they mainly speak of the past. Like Odysseus, Bloom looks upon the faces of the dead during his carriage ride. Bloom’s ghosts take the form of public statues honoring great men of the past on the streets of Dublin - Sir Philip Crampton, William Smith O Brien (whose statue was sculpted by Sir Thomas Farrell), and the Liberator Daniel O’Connell. Once inside the cemetery, Bloom is confronted with monuments to more of Dublin’s glorious dead. The body of Daniel O’Connell, the Irish Hercules, is interred beneath “the lofty cone” of a roundtower, a sort of Irish omphalos. His heart, however, really is buried in Rome like Mr Power says. Charles Stewart Parnell, the Irish Agamemnon brought low by a lover, is entombed there as well. John Henry Menton, a less eminent figure, is our sideways Ajax. Menton begrudges Bloom over some old slight just as Ajax snubbed Odysseus in the underworld over a petty slight. Joyce saw a great generosity displayed in Odysseus’ outreach to Ajax, as is reflected in Bloom’s attempt to help Menton repair a “dinge” in his hat.

The Joycean stand-in for the Theban prophet Tiresias is a slipperier figure. Odysseus traveled to the underworld so that he could speak with Tiresias, but it’s not clear at first glance who fills this role for Bloom. Gilbert points to a brief reference to fallen Irish rebel Robert Emmet as Bloom’s Tiresias:

“Who lives there? Are laid the remains of Robert Emery. Robert Emmet was buried here by torchlight, wasn’t he? Making his rounds.”

Gilbert points to Emmet’s famous quote from his 1803 “Speech from the Dock”:

“When my country takes her place among the nations of the earth, then and not till then, let my epitaph be written: I Have Done.”

Gilbert worked quite closely with Joyce on his reading guide, so it’s likely Joyce pointed out this parallel to Gilbert, who wrote about the ambiguity in Emmet's quote. If you were feeling creative or maybe just sarcastic, you might wonder if Emmet would postpone Ireland’s moment of freedom by choosing to remain alive. Like, he couldn’t have an epitaph written until Ireland is free and that couldn’t happen until Emmet died, pushing Ireland’s freedom further and further away if Emmet had lived into old age. Joyce, speaking through Gilbert, found this quote to be an ambiguous bit of prophecy along the lines of Tiresias’ prophecy for Odysseus:

“Upon yourself death from the sea shall very gently come cut you off bowed down with hale old age.”

I find this all a bit perplexing as both Joyce and Gilbert would surely have known that Emmet had died at the ripe old age of 25. It all seems like a bit of a stretch. It is fitting, however, that Leopold Bloom doesn’t have a prophet to guide his way home. R. M. Adams wrote that rather than finding clarity in the “underworld” of the cemetery, Bloom “receives neither enlightenment nor direction as to his future.” He embraces the land of the living, certain in the belief that he’s still got time on this earth and that “they are not going to get me this innings.” I suppose this is life-affirming, but it is also not substantially far-removed from where we left him at the end of “Lotus Eaters.” Bloom will find personal revelation, but his will come from the hallucinatory netherworld of “Circe” rather than the oppressive oblivion of death. Without a seer to guide him, the Joycean Odysseus makes his own path.

The Chapel & O'Connell Tower, Glasnevin Cemetery. Circa 1900. (from Glasnevin Museum)

Bloom not finding his prophecy in “Hades’ is as much an issue of logistics as it is of thematics. Odysseus travels to the land of the dead in Book 11 of The Odyssey, just on the heels of his misadventure with Circe. It’s no coincidence that Odysseus encountered the Underworld in the eleventh book; the number eleven has long been associated with death. For instance, in The Iliad, Hector’s funeral lasted for eleven days. Funeral odes (such as Milton’s “Lycidas”) are traditionally eleven stanzas long. In “Nestor,” Stephen’s impenetrable riddle, which ends in a fox burying his grandmother (or mother), the clock is striking eleven. Rudy Bloom died eleven years ago. Bloom had a bath at the Turkish baths at 11 Lincoln Place, a sort of ritual ablution before Bloom’s own journey to the land of the dead. The “Hades” episode takes place at 11:00. There were eleven mourners at Dignam’s funeral (plus the enigmatic M’Intosh, plus the priest). However, Paddy Dignam’s funeral could not take place in the eleventh episode of Ulysses, because funerals are morning affairs in real-world Dublin.

Bloom’s ruminations on death and loss contribute to our understanding of him as a fully developed man with a mature sense of the world. “Hades” concludes a three episode arc for Bloom and shows Bloom as a sensitive, thoughtful character. “Calypso” and “Lotus Eaters,” though delightful in their own ways, depict a man mired in physical pleasures - unhealthy food, fantasies of a whimsical Orient, cheeky bathtub masturbation. Of course, Odysseus’ own encounters with Calypso and the Lotus Eaters also depict the corruption of overindulgence in sex and sloth. Facing the grim reality of mortality, Bloom doesn’t shrink away or hide himself in denial - he is thoughtful and melancholy as he recalls his lost loved ones and explores his personal relationship with death. This is Bloom’s “Proteus.” He is confronted with his loneliness and outsider status just like Stephen, but Bloom is alone in a crowd rather than alone on an empty beach.

In his book Ulysses on the Liffey, Richard Ellmann sees “Hades” as the conclusion of a larger Viconian cycle, running parallel to Stephen’s journey in the first three episodes. Joyce was fascinated with Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico’s view that history occurred in cycles, though the recurrence of each cycle diminished in quality. Thus Greek hero Odysseus can transform into a humble ad canvasser in Dublin. Vico’s cycles ramble through three ages (theocratic, aristocratic, democratic) before returning to the beginning of a new cycle. In Ellmann’s view, both Stephen and Bloom’s first three episodes follow this pattern as well.

As there is nothing more democratizing than death, Bloom’s democratic “age” occurs in the graveyard. Both Stephen and Bloom deal with death and grief in their third, democratic episode - Stephen with his mother’s death and Bloom with his father and son’s deaths. Bloom, less intellectually sophisticated but more emotionally mature, feels a hollowness at their absence, but is not tortured by images of flesh-chewing ghouls. Both Stephen and Bloom reflect at one point about seadeath, supposedly the easiest of all deaths as well as the death predicted for Odysseus by Tiresias. Bloom thinks, “Drowning they say is the pleasantest,” while Stephen reflects that “seadeath is the mildest of all deaths known to man.”

By comparing Stephen and Bloom’s thoughts we can see the emerging pattern that life and death are two sides of the same coin. Stephen agonizes over the details of life’s origin, and by extension, his origin. Stephen puzzles over the origins of life, pondering two midwives while Bloom contemplates women as preparers of corpses:

“...an old woman peeping. Nose whiteflattened against the pane. Thanking her stars she was passed over. Extraordinary the interest they take in a corpse. Glad to see us go we give them such trouble coming. Job seems to suit them.”

Stephen imagines an all entwining navel cord trailing back to Adam and Eve, while Bloom sees a uniting symbol in the coffin band. Stephen tangles next with consubstantiality and the horror of being born Simon’s son, while Bloom, Stephen’s non-consubstantial father, sits beside Consubstantial Simon in a funeral carriage. Perhaps Simon was a prophet in his own way, as he advised Stephen in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man:

“But we were all gentlemen, Stephen - at least I hope we were - and bloody good Irishmen too. That’s the kind of fellows I want you to associate with, fellows of the right kidney.”

Bloom certainly knows a thing or two about kidneys.

At the close of “Hades,’ then, Bloom has completed his cycle. He is able to return from the land of the dead intact, while also concurring with Martha that “I do not like that other world.” Bloom doesn’t encounter any literal ghosts while in Glasnevin -only memories. He has fared well against the pain of death and oblivion; he doesn’t fear or deny the power of death:

“I do not like that other world she wrote. No more do I. Plenty to see and hear and feel yet. Feel live warm beings near you. Let them sleep in their maggoty beds. They are not going to get me this innings. Warm beds: warm fullblooded life.”

The rituals on offer to soothe the grief of losing a friend are of no use to Bloom because he doesn’t believe in their power - they’re simply a bunch of nominedomines. He doesn’t have intimate connections with his fellow mourners to lean on for support. Even poor Paddy seems like an acquaintance at best. Odysseus traveled to the underworld to learn his fate from the seer Tiresias, but Bloom leaves Glasnevin with no such illumination. He re-emerges, instead, with the knowledge of pain of the living world and his place within it. He is not engulfed in supernatural horror or a fear of hell. He does the most life-affirming thing that he can: he goes on living.

﻿The Odyssey, Book XI:

Further Reading:

Who Was the Real Paddy Dignam?

Sweny the Alchemist

The Odyssey, Book XI: