Who is the Man in the Macintosh?

“Now who is that lankylooking galoot over there in the macintosh? Now who is he I’d like to know? Now I’d give a trifle to know who he is.” - Leopold Bloom, p. 109

To listen to a discussion of this topic, check out the podcast episode here.

Who doesn’t love a good mystery ? Even high-falutin’ literature like Ulysses has a few enduring puzzles of its own woven into its fabric, such as an identity crisis that arises in “Hades”, Ulysses sixth episode. Scholars and experts have argued back and forth for decades about the identity of the man in the macintosh that Leopold Bloom sees in Glasnevin Cemetery, but the fact that all these clever people haven’t landed on The One True Solution makes the puzzle all that more tantalizing. It’s time for a non-expert to take a stab!

What do we know about M’Intosh?

Before we can piece together M’Intosh’s true identity, we must gather all the information about him available in the text of Ulysses. He only appears a handful of times, so we have to glean what details we can from those brief encounters. He first emerges at Paddy Dignam’s funeral near the end of “Hades.” Leopold Bloom catches sight of him first:

“Mr Bloom stood far back, his hat in his hand, counting the bared heads. Twelve. I’m thirteen. No. The chap in the macintosh is thirteen. Death’s number. Where the deuce did he pop out of? He wasn’t in the chapel, that I’ll swear. Silly superstition that about thirteen.”

Joe Hynes, a reporter from the Freeman’s Journal, also spots M’Intosh among the mourners. His attempt to get the mystery man’s name from Bloom leads to one of the novel’s great communication blunders:

“—And tell us, Hynes said, do you know that fellow in the, fellow was over there in the...
He looked around.
—Macintosh. Yes, I saw him, Mr Bloom said. Where is he now?
—M’Intosh, Hynes said scribbling. I don’t know who he is. Is that his name?
He moved away, looking about him.
—No, Mr Bloom began, turning and stopping. I say, Hynes!
Didn’t hear. What? Where has he disappeared to? Not a sign. Well of all the. Has anybody here seen? Kay ee double ell. Become invisible. Good Lord, what became of him?”

The evening edition of the paper will include a Mr. M’Intosh and L. Boom among those present at Dignam’s funeral. Thus, we can infer that M’Intosh is not a member of Bloom’s social circle. Curiously enough, the other men don’t remark on his presence at all. M’Intosh brings the total number of mourners to 13, as Bloom points out, associating him right out of the gate with death and ill-favor. He is unknown to the men who spot him. He pops in and out of the scene rather suddenly. His arrival is heralded with the braying of a donkey, an ancient omen of death.

M’Intosh re-surfaces in “Wandering Rocks,” as the Viceregal Cavalcade clatters through the streets of Dublin:

“In Lower Mount street a pedestrian in a brown macintosh, eating dry bread, passed swiftly and unscathed across the viceroy’s path.”

Assuming this is our same M’Intosh, we learn that he likes snacking on dry bread. M’Intosh next arises in the thoughts of the unnamed narrator of “Cyclops”:

“The man in the brown macintosh loves a lady who is dead.”

M’Intosh has a tragic, but unknown, backstory. Next, M’Intosh appears amidst the drunken cacophony of medical students in Burke’s Pub that closes out “Oxen of the Sun”:

“Golly, whatten tunket’s yon guy in the mackintosh? Dusty Rhodes. Peep at his wearables. By mighty! What’s he got? Jubilee mutton. Bovril, by James. Wants it real bad. D’ye ken bare socks? Seedy cuss in the Richmond? Rawthere! Thought he had a deposit of lead in his penis. Trumpery insanity. Bartle the Bread we calls him. That, sir, was once a prosperous cit. Man all tattered and torn that married a maiden all forlorn. Slung her hook, she did. Here see lost love. Walking Mackintosh of lonely canyon. Tuck and turn in. Schedule time. Nix for the hornies. Pardon? Seen him today at a runefal?”

This section is the hardest to parse, but both confirms and adds to the riddles surrounding M’Intosh. “Dusty Rhodes” is a general nickname from the period for a tramp, and M’Intsoh fits the bill in his threadbare “wearables” and “bare socks.” He’s sipping Bovril, a beef tea used to support health and treat illnesses. One of the medical students recognizes him as a patient from “the Richmond,” meaning the Richmond Asylum, referred to as “Dottyville” back in “Telemachus.” It seems M’Intosh delusionally complained that he had a “deposit of lead in his penis.” We learn another of his nicknames - “Bartle the Bread,” possibly because of the dry bread. He “was once a prosperous cit[izen]”, so he seems to have fallen on hard times, perhaps because of mental illness or because of a broken heart. His lost love “slung her hook,” which could mean she either left him or died. The final line quoted above, “Seen him today at a runefal?” seems to be directed at Bloom. “Runefal” is a play on funeral. Here we see a man consumed by insanity and destitution, adding to M’Intosh’s air of tragedy. It might also explain why M’Intosh was at Glasnevin Cemetery that morning: he was visiting the grave of his lost love.

“Circe” offers a few, final hallucinatory hints about M’Intosh. He surfaces through a trap door while Bloom is riding high, only to tear him down:

“(A man in a brown macintosh springs up through a trapdoor. He points an elongated finger at Bloom.)
THE MAN IN THE MACINTOSH: Don’t you believe a word he says. That man is Leopold M’Intosh, the notorious fireraiser. His real name is Higgins.
BLOOM: Shoot him! Dog of a christian! So much for M’Intosh!”

M’Intosh gains power in “Circe,” toppling the mighty Leopold Bloom at the height of his power and popularity. Interestingly, he does so by claiming Bloom is a member of his own clan, “Leopold M’Intosh.”

These descriptions of M’Intosh are all we can truly claim to “know” about him - a lovelorn, raincoat-clad figure who frequents cemeteries, eats dry bread and Bovril, and is possibly mentally ill, poverty-stricken and vengeful. But who is he? Scholars have debated this back and forth for decades, but no one has stitched together the Grand Unified Theory of M’Intosh yet. Some commentators have simply thrown their hands up in exasperation, like literary scholar Phillip F. Herring, who stated that M’Intosh was simply “his author’s deceitful ploy to keep us guessing.” I don’t think we should fall victim to this negativity, though. Even if by the end of this examination we don’t have a definitive answer, we can still learn a lot about the themes of Ulysses through an examination of M’Intosh. Maybe the real man in the macintosh is the friends we made along the way?

Claud Sykes, an American friend of Joyce’s in Zurich, recalled how Joyce would go around asking people who they thought the man in the macintosh might be. Setting aside that this could have been some next-level trolling, this implies there is an answer to be had, and that since Joyce put this question to non-Irish folks in Switzerland, the answer doesn’t require specialized knowledge of 1904 Dublin. Let’s proceed in the belief that there is an answer that can be discerned by a person other than James Joyce.

Educated guesses at M’Intosh’s identity fall broadly into three categories: M’Intosh might be a real person or a character from the Joycean Expanded Universe © (or JEU), M’Intosh might be a supernatural entity, or M’Intosh might be purely conceptual. For the last few years, I’ve always imagined him to be either the god of death or Paddy Dignam’s secret lover. After reading all these articles and essays on M’Intosh’s identity, I’ve developed a new conclusion of my own, but you’ll have to wait until the end for that.

Easter Egg Hunt

Let’s start from the assumption that M’Intosh is based on an identifiable person, either from real life or literature. This is a sensible starting point since many, many characters in the JEU (yes, I’m running with this) are based on people Joyce knew. Ulysses is also rife with literary parallels because anything is possible through metempsychosis. We know that Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom and Molly Bloom all have parallels in Homer’s Odyssey, so that seems like a good starting point.

Stuart Gilbert, author of the first Ulysses reading guide and friend of Joyce, thought so, too. In his 1930 Ulysses: A Study, he posits that M’Intosh is a parallel to Theoclymenos, a wandering soothsayer who predicts the slaughter of Penelope’s suitors and then disappears from the narrative without explanation. M’Intosh’s “prediction” is the choice to wear a raincoat on a sunny day, correctly foreshadowing the thunderstorm that occurs during “Oxen of the Sun.” Joyce’s use of Homeric allusion was heavily based on the work of Victor Bérard, and it was Joyce who called Gilbert’s attention to Bérard’s analysis of Theoclymenos. This theory kind of works, but isn’t really a satisfying conclusion. It fulfills a scaffolding of allusion, but doesn’t really satisfy any larger narrative or thematic arc.

This theory led scholar Robert M. Adams to conclude that Joyce simply had more parallels built into his schemata than he could ever use, so there are some strays. As discerning readers, we should ask ourselves the following: if Joyce made the effort to knit this complex allusion into the fabric of Ulysses, what purpose does it serve? What does it tell us about the larger themes in the novel? What does it tell us about Leopold Bloom? If a M’Intosh theory doesn’t satisfactorily answer these questions, then I think it is ok to set it aside. Ulysses is packed with plenty of little Easter eggs to be discovered by those of us with insider-knowledge, but M’Intosh is too prominent to just be an Easter egg.

M’Intosh as a Real Person

The Easter egg conundrum comes up again and again when trying to associate M’Intosh with a real-world figure. There is an abundance of hints and clues that can be teased out to seem like Joyce has built a secret message into his novel about a certain political or literary figure, but while intriguing, these theories fall short for me on the question of themes. A prime example of this is the theory that M’Intosh is meant to be an analogue for Irish poet James Clarence Mangan. Joyce admired Mangan in his university days, and Mangan was indeed a jilted eccentric who wore a brown cloak, but if M’Intosh is Mangan, what purpose does it serve within the novel apart from being a fun Easter egg? Gilbert, for his part, later claimed that M’Intosh was W. Weatherup, a man who once worked for James’ father John Joyce. A “Wetherup” gets a fairly substantial shout-out in “Aeolus”, headlined as “What Wetherup Said,” but beyond that, how unsatisfying would it be if Wetherup were the answer to the mystery? Also, what’s the point of asking around Zurich if anybody could guess the name of some guy Joyce’s dad knew decades in the past? In his book Surface and Symbol, Adams states:

“But if Mackintosh is really only Wetherup and Wetherup only an ancient friend of Joyce’s father, we may be excused for feeling that the fewer answers we have for the novel’s riddles, the better off we are. As with Stephen’s shaggydog riddle at the school, the puzzle is less puzzling than the answer.”

Sorry, folks. We’ll have to dig just a bit harder.

M’Intosh as a Fictional Person

If not a real person, perhaps M’Intosh is a character from the JEU? Joyce was quite fond of Dubliners characters crossing over into Ulysses. Most of the men attending Paddy Dignam’s funeral feature in the Dubliners story “Grace,” so this seems like another solid starting place. Additionally, a character from the Dubliners story “A Painful Case,” Mrs Emily Sinico, is mentioned in the paragraphs following M’Intosh’s appearance:

“Last time I was here was Mrs Sinico’s funeral. Poor papa too. The love that kills.”

“A Painful Case” tells the story of James Duffy and Mrs Sinico, who have what we would now call an emotional affair. Duffy is an overly-serious aging bachelor and Mrs Sinico is a married woman with an inattentive husband. Their affair gets a little too real for Duffy, so he breaks it off. Later he sees an article in the newspaper reporting that Mrs Sinico had died by accidentally falling in front of a train, but Duffy supposes it wasn’t an accident. Bloom must have known the Sinicos because he recalls attending her funeral in 1903 three times in Ulysses. Perhaps M’Intosh is a bereaved Duffy, mourning a lady who is dead, as described in “Cyclops” and “Oxen.” This overlaps with my theory that M’Intosh was Dignam’s secret lover. Maybe Duffy was a very closeted gay man, and that’s why he pulled away from Mrs Sinico and now he regrets her untimely end. I was drawn to his line that Duffy had written to Mrs Sinico in one of their final correspondence:

“Love between man and man is impossible because there must not be sexual intercourse and friendship between man and woman is impossible because there must be sexual intercourse.”

However, Stanislaus Joyce wrote in My Brother’s Keeper, that James had based Duffy on him - a lifelong, curmudgeonly bachelor. The lines quoted above were written by Stanislaus Joyce and later included in the text of “A Painful Case.” James worried that Stanislaus would end up miserable and isolated like Duffy, and so he included Stanislaus’ own words in his short story. My theory is thus shattered. James Duffy may not have been Dignam’s secret lover, but he is a stronger case for M’Intosh than Wetherup. He fits some of the key descriptions of M’Intosh, but I’m not totally convinced that he totally fits the bill. I think I would be more convinced by this theory if he only appeared in the graveyard scene in “Hades.” I’m not sure what purpose it would serve for James Duffy to make a handful of further cameos in Ulysses.

M’Intosh as The Artist

One final option for a real-life counterpart of M’Intosh is James Joyce himself. Many commentators see M’Intosh as Joyce’s Stan Lee cameo, turning up in his own work as a stylistic choice. Famed Russian novelist Vladimir Nabokov supported this theory, believing that Joyce appearing in the guise of M’Intosh allows Bloom to gaze upon his creator. As evidence, Nabokov pointed to a passage in “Scylla and Charybdis” where Stephen expounds on one of the Shakespeare’s quirks:

“He has hidden his own name, a fair name, William, in the plays, a super here, a clown there, as a painter of old Italy set his face in a dark corner of his canvas.”

If it’s good enough for Shakespeare, it’s good enough for James Joyce.

This idea seems to be popular among commentators and casual readers alike. It’s satisfying inasmuch as it offers us an answer to a question that seemingly has no answer. Oh! M’Intosh is inscrutable because it’s just a cameo for the author. Case closed. Like James Duffy, I think this would work if M’Intosh didn’t pop up outside of Glasnevin Cemetery. It doesn’t work as an author cameo for me if James M’Intosh is seen swilling Bovril and stepping in front of cavalcades and mourning a lost love. Why not give those traits to an actual character with greater thematic resonance? Also, doesn’t Joyce have enough authorial presence in Ulysses in the forms of its two protagonists? I suppose M’Intosh could be the Holy Ghost to Bloom and Stephen’s Father and Son in the Ulyssean Trinity. Maybe.

Overall, I don’t think M’Intosh represents a human person from our temporal realm. He’s too otherworldly - appearing and disappearing at will, seemingly only visible to certain people, skulking in a graveyard like a goth teen, eating dry bread while wandering into traffic. The theories that posit M’Intosh is a human tend to leave out these odder traits entirely. Perhaps M’Intosh is a supernatural being of some sort? Afterall, Shakespeare relied on ghosts to drive his plots, too. If we’re looking to M’Intosh’s traits to develop themes, it might be easier to do if we’re not trying to shoehorn him into a pre-existing human identity. Another of Ulysses’ great thematic mysteries is the question Stephen poses in “Proteus” - What is the word known to all men? Common interpretations are that the word is either love or death, which are both major themes in Ulysses, and both of which are embodied in some way by the presence of M’Intosh. James Duffy’s story involves both love and death. Are there other interpretations of M’Intosh that include these themes?

A Spooky M’Intosh

The graveyard setting of “Hades” allows us to bridge the gap between the living and the dead. M’Intosh first manifests in the great necropolis of Glasnevin Cemetery, so maybe this is a clue to his identity? Scholar John Gordon has written extensively that he believes M’Intosh to be the ghost of Rudolph Bloom, Leopold’s deceased father, crafting a very well-rounded argument that incorporates many of M’Intosh’s traits. For instance, he can easily cross the path of the viceregal cavalcade unscathed if he’s a ghost. Why does M’Intosh wear a macintosh? Well, because Rudolph’s sciatica could predict weather, as Bloom states in “Circe”:

“I have felt this instant a twinge of sciatica in my left glutear muscle. It runs in our family. Poor dear papa, a widower, was a regular barometer from it.”

Rudolph loved a lady who is dead, his wife Ellen. In life, he never really recovered from his grief over her loss. In “Ithaca”, Bloom recalls fragments of the letter Rudolph sent him before he took his life in Ennis:

“Tomorrow will be a week that I received... it is no use Leopold to be ... with your dear mother... that is not more to stand... to her... all for me is out... be kind to Athos, Leopold... my dear son... always... of me... das Herz... Gott... dein…”

This extract makes it sound like a desire to be with his wife motivated his suicide. Now that Rudolph is also dead, he continues to wander the earth, mourning a lady who is dead. A common trope in ghost stories is that the ghost has unfinished business to attend to before they can cross over into the afterlife. Because Rudolph died by suicide, he wouldn’t be allowed burial in Glasnevin beside his wife, and thus is buried in Ennis, on the other side of the country. Bloom thinks about how Ellen’s grave is “over there” while attending Dignam’s funeral, so we can infer that if M’Intosh is lurking near her grave, he’s not too far from Dignam’s burial. Earlier in “Hades” Bloom also thinks about the tradition of burying suicides with a stake in their heart to keep them from returning to the land of the living:

“Refuse christian burial. They used to drive a stake of wood through his heart in the grave. As if it wasn't broken already.”

The ghost of a father who appears to his son due to unfinished business ties into Ulysses’ Hamlet motif. After all, both King Hamlet and Rudolph Bloom were killed by poison - Rudolph poisoned himself with aconite. In “Oxen,” M’Intosh is called “Walking Mackintosh of Lonely Canyon.” Consider this alongside Bloom’s misquote of Hamlet in “Lestrygonians.” In Hamlet I:v, King Hamlet is described as “doomed for a certain term to walk the night,” which Bloom imprecisely renders “doomed for a certain time to walk the earth.” If Rudolph is still floating around Dublin 18 years after his death, this is a more apt description, especially since he seems to get around on foot and doesn’t seem bothered by appearing in the day.

In the “Oxen” passage, word play such as “runefal” connects Bloom, M’Intosh and Dignam’s funeral. Similarly, Joyce wrote in his notes that “trumpery insanity,” rather than being a prescient commentary on American politics, was a corruption of the phrase “temporary insanity,” which Martin Cunningham used to soften Jack Power’s disdainful comments about suicide:

“—The greatest disgrace to have in the family, Mr Power added.
—Temporary insanity, of course, Martin Cunningham said decisively. We must take a charitable view of it.”

According to Gordon, M’Intosh’s taste for Bovril can be read as a Homeric parallel. Bovril is a beef tea, and thus parallels another hot, beefy beverage - the blood of sacrificed cattle devoured by hungry ghosts in The Odyssey. M’Intosh too seems to be a hungry ghost - pining for his lost love and nourishing himself as best he can on Bovril and dry bread. Like M’Intosh, Rudolph was once a “prosperous cit” who fell into financial ruin towards the end of his life. M’Intosh is nicknamed “Dusty Rhodes,” who appears in the Bloom family genealogy in “Circe”:

“...ben Maimun and ben Maimun begat Dusty Rhodes and Dusty Rhodes begat Benamor and Benamor begat Jones-Smith and Jones-Smith begat Savorgnanovich and Savorgnanovich begat Jasperstone and Jasperstone begat Vingtetunieme and Vingtetunieme begat Szombathely and Szombathely begat Virag and Virag begat Bloom et vocabitur nomen eius Emmanuel.”

In the same episode, Bloom appears in the guise of his father, donning “dusty brogues” and stating:

“I am ruined. A few pastilles of aconite. The blinds drawn. A letter. Then lie back to rest. (He breathes softly.) No more. I have lived. Fare. Farewell.”

It might seem problematic that Bloom wouldn’t recognize his own father, but Odysseus didn’t recognize his father either upon returning to Ithaca because so much time had passed and because Laertes had become “all tattered and torn” in the intervening decades. When Odysseus meets him, he is coated in dust and ashes and pining for death because he is grieving his wife. Additionally, Joyce listed Odysseus’ father in his Linati schema for “Hades”. Bloom’s lack of recognition bolsters this theory and ties it into the novel’s overarching Homeric motif. On top of the thematic reasons, even if M’Intosh were the spitting image of his father, Bloom is not expecting to see him in Glasnevin that day. Bloom is a rational thinker and doesn’t really believe in ghosts, so seeing the ghost of his father is totally incompatible with his worldview. The fact that people sometimes see what they expect to see is demonstrated in the anecdote shared by Mr O’Connell, the caretaker of Glasnevin Cemetery:

—They tell the story, he said, that two drunks came out here one foggy evening to look for the grave of a friend of theirs. They asked for Mulcahy from the Coombe and were told where he was buried. After traipsing about in the fog they found the grave sure enough. One of the drunks spelt out the name: Terence Mulcahy. The other drunk was blinking up at a statue of Our Saviour the widow had got put up…. And, after blinking up at the sacred figure, Not a bloody bit like the man, says he. That's not Mulcahy, says he, whoever done it.”

If Jesus Christ can become Mulcahy of the Coombe, Rudolph Bloom can become Dusty Rhodes in a macintosh.

If you, dear reader, share Bloom’s materialist worldview, it might be hard to accept that a literal ghost appears to Bloom under the very mundane circumstances of Glasnevin. Joyce, for his part, had a supernatural worldview when it suited him. As a young man, he participated in a vigil at his mother’s deathbed for her ghost and held a lifelong interest in numerology. Though he was never a devotee of any particular system, Joyce had an interest in the occultism and spiritualism that was popular among intellectuals of his era. Like Catholicism and psychoanalysis, Joyce didn’t wholeheartedly believe in occultism, but he incorporated aspects of occult belief that suited him into his work. It’s not outside the realm of possibility that this is what Joyce was driving at here.

Nadir of Misery

If a ghost is just too much for you, let’s look at a few purely conceptual theories of M’Intosh’s identity, where he is an entity neither natural nor supernatural, but an entity of pure thought and symbol, occurring in the minds of his observers rather than the physical world. Commentators who take this route of explanation generally see M’Intosh as a manifestation of some aspect of Bloom’s psyche; in other words, Bloom is seeing a version of himself reflected as M’Intosh. Jonathan Bricke Rowan points to a description in “Ithaca'' in which Bloom imagines various lowly states that he has managed to avoid, some of which include folks he has met through the day on June 16:

“...sandwichman, distributor of throwaways, nocturnal vagrant, insinuating sycophant, maimed sailor, blind stripling…”

In the very last line, Bloom describes:

“Nadir of misery: the aged impotent disfranchised ratesupported moribund lunatic pauper.”

M’Intosh is a manifestation of Bloom’s fear of what he might become in old age. Due to Rudy’s death, Bloom is already wrangling with fear and insecurity about his manhood and his failure at fathering a son and heir. Notice that in the sequence in “Oxen” that M’Intosh is said to have come to the Richmond Asylum complaining of lead in his penis. Rather than being a physical blockage making him unable to ejaculate and conceive a son, the “lead” is a psychological blockage that is holding back the “lead in his pencil,” so to speak. Bloom’s sexual blockage is more psychological than physical.

“Disenfranchised” and “ratesupported” go together with “pauper.” We know that M’Intosh is down on his luck given the description of his “wearables” in “Oxen,” particularly his bare socks. We can infer that he drinks Bovril because he is malnourished and hoping to get some relief (“Wants it real bad.”) and is eating dry bread in “Wandering Rocks” because that’s all that is available to him. If he’s a pauper, he may well be “ratesupported,” meaning he is living on money for the poor paid for by taxes (rates). In this era, only taxpayers were allowed to vote, so by accepting taxpayers’ money for support, M’Intosh would lose his right of franchise, or the vote. Bloom is currently a comfortable cit, if not an enormously prosperous one, but M’Intosh represents how far a once-comfortable man can fall. M’Intosh’s love “slung her hook,” leading to his downfall. Molly may be on the cusp of “slinging her hook,” leaving Bloom following her liaison with Boylan. So while anxiety about sliding into poverty may be a long shot in isolation, knowing that M’Intosh fell to ruin after losing his lady love makes Bloom feel like he is one step closer to this personal nadir than he realized.

“Moribund” and “lunatic” are easily connected with M’Intosh. “Moribund” means near death, and he seems deathly enough that I’ve just debated whether or not he could be a literal ghost. M’Intosh has also been identified as a patient from Richmond Asylum. Bloom seems both hale and level headed, but there is a passage in “Circe” where Dr Mulligan shows up to diagnose Bloom with a panoply of mental and physical maladies. At the top of the doctor’s diagnosis, he states:

“Dr Bloom is bisexually abnormal. He has recently escaped from Dr Eustace’s private asylum for demented gentlemen.”

There is some dark corner of Bloom’s mind that fears that he will be found mentally unfirm and locked away in Dottyville like M’Intosh. I think this results from Bloom’s outsider status. He doesn’t fit in well in a conservative, conformist environment. Some of that is cultural - he’s a Jewish man in Catholic Dublin - but Bloom stands out as a feminine man in a macho culture. Would that be enough to put him away for good? M’Intosh isn’t the only “lunatic” that Bloom encounters on June 16. In “Lestrygonians,” he grins as he and Mrs. Breen watch Cashel Boyle O’Connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell weaving down the street. Even Mr. Breen and his mania over U.P.: Up don’t disturb Bloom’s thoughts the way M’Intosh does. In “Ithaca”, Bloom frames M’Intosh’s identity as a “selfinvolved enigma.” Bloom sees something of himself in M’Intosh that he doesn’t in these other two men. Notice how while standing on the strand in “Nausicaa,” Bloom allows his own identity and that of M’Intosh to merge just briefly:

“That’s the way to find out. Ask yourself who is he now. The Mystery Man on the Beach, prize titbit story by Mr Leopold Bloom. Payment at the rate of one guinea per column. And that fellow today at the graveside in the brown macintosh.”

Bloom is fantasizing about one of his moneymaking schemes - getting a prize story in Titbits - entitled with a description of his present state - the mystery man on the beach. Even though his mind is far from the graveyard, his thoughts of himself and M’Intosh overlap nonetheless. M’Intosh is lurking in Bloom’s subconscious in a way that CBOFTF and Mr. Breen don’t.

M’Intosh is a State of Mind

To me, it feels like M’Intosh is a creature of Bloom’s subconscious entirely. Sure Joe Hynes and the medical students encounter him as well, but Ulysses has its fair share of collective hallucinations. It’s Bloom’s experience of M’Intosh that matters most. In my opinion, M’Intosh is a manifestation of Bloom’s Jungian shadow - a projection of his darkest self into the world. Bloom is constantly tortured by fear and insecurity that he is actively and forcibly suppressing. All those emotions have to go somewhere. Bloom relates with M’Intosh because he is seeing a dark aspect of himself and the vision nags at him because M’Intosh represents the aspects of himself that he hates the most.

In Jung’s view, the shadow is the aspect of the subconscious where one’s most shameful thoughts are tucked away, hidden from the rest of the world. If one is unable to face their shadow and understand it, there is a risk of projecting whatever shameful qualities are hidden there into the world and onto the people around them. Originating as a concept in psychoanalysis, projection is a defense mechanism to protect the ego from shame, in this case, the shame hidden in one’s shadow. Shadow projection is done unconsciously - the person projecting is not necessarily cognizant of their projection, but they can be made aware with a little work. In Jungian analysis, shadow projection doesn’t mean literally projecting an image into the world, but in Ulysses, Bloom’s shadow can manifest in this way. Bloom has already seen momentary visions earlier in the day - his dark vision of the Promised Land and the secondary vision of a golden-haired girl that disrupts the darkness. Bloom’s experience in Ulysses starts out mundane and incrementally descends into hallucinatory madness in “Circe.” M’Intosh’s manifestation contributes to this descent into the nightmare of the subconscious present in that episode.

Bloom is repressing an awful lot of dark thoughts - Molly’s infidelity, Rudy’s death, the anniversary of his father’s suicide. Throughout Ulysses, he repeatedly thinks of these things and often shuts the thoughts down as quickly as he can. Notice how he intently examines his nails while the other men in the funeral carriage compliment Blazes Boylan, “the worst man in Dublin” in Bloom’s view. Jack Power awakens the pain Bloom feels at the loss of his father when he refers to suicides as “the greatest disgrace to have in the family.” Simon Dedalus’ comments on Stephen’s reprobate friend Buck Mulligan draw out Bloom’s pain and resentment at never being able to know his own son:

“Noisy selfwilled man. Full of his son. He is right. Something to hand on. If little Rudy had lived. See him grow up. Hear his voice in the house. Walking beside Molly in an Eton suit. My son. Me in his eyes. Strange feeling it would be. From me. Just a chance.”

The loss or betrayal of these family members are the deepest pain and humiliation Bloom feels, and they are all invoked by his carriage-mates on the way to the cemetery. Since Bloom hasn’t dealt with these emotions consciously, they tend to bubble up here and there in his stream of consciousness. The atmosphere of the graveyard overwhelms his ability to repress thoughts of his father and son. At the peak of those emotions, he spots a man in an unseasonal outfit among the funeral party, a spectre of death in a tattered raincoat. Against all odds, this same tattered man appears again while Bloom is caught in a gaggle of drunken medical students, on the threshold of descending into the nightmare of “Circe”. In this episode, M’Intosh indicates that he and Bloom are related, referring to our protagonist as “Leopold M’Intosh.” The way M’Intosh rises through a trap door in “Circe” shows that he is rising from Bloom’s subconscious:

“A man in a brown macintosh springs up through a trapdoor. He points an elongated finger at Bloom.”

“Circe” is so firmly entrenched in a dreamlike atmosphere that it allows M’Intosh to manifest in his most aggressive state, as a psychic attack on poor Bloom. The shadow arises once more at Bloom’s zenith to rip him back down to his nadir through shame and disgrace.

The mystery man’s identity continues to perplex Bloom late into the evening. M’Intosh may or may not be a real person - he could be a hallucination, a ghost, or several different men in similar coats. No matter his true identity, he represents Bloom’s most tightly repressed fears - the death of family members or a slide into destitution and insanity following the loss of his wife. Bloom is seeing his deepest fears reflected in M’Intosh, real or unreal - notice M’Intosh’s identity is described as a “selfinvolved enigma” in “Ithaca.” Until Bloom confronts his own fears and insecurities, his own shadow, M’Intosh will remain an enigma.

In the end, there is no way to know if any, none or all of these theories are what Joyce had in mind. Unless someone unearths a long-lost letter or journal in which Joyce’s states M’Intosh’s true identity, we are likely to remain in a state of unknowing. In the character of M’Intosh, we are encouraged to embrace the unknownable. We can keep digging and speculating and postulating until we arrive at a conclusion that is personally satisfactory. However, this is missing the point. Not all questions can be logicked into an answer. M’Intosh is a Zen koan - existing in a liminal space between answer and no answer. His purpose is to draw our mind into this state. In the end, we readers can only project our own experiences onto M’Intosh. For those among us who want concrete answers, what could be more terrifying?

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