Bloom’s CV: Mimesis, Intertextuality and the Overdetermination of Character in Ulysses

Abstract

ABSTRACT“Bloom’s CV” analyses James Joyce’s representation of Bloom’s early career as a commercial traveller in Ulysses. Reading Bloom’s various jobs—from cattle sales to insurance—in their historical context, the article presents a clearer understanding of Joyce’s mimesis, and shows that he presents a strikingly realistic career path for a second-generation Hungarian-Jewish immigrant in 1904 Ireland. While the recent historicist turn in Joyce studies has tended to suppress the text’s other narrative dimensions, the article proceeds to identify unsettling intertextual connections to anti-Semitic discourses that were contemporary in the Irish nationalist press. Explaining these connections as part of Joyce’s broader reimagining of Odysseus as a Semitic traveller, the article positions Joyce’s overdetermined characterisation of Bloom as a crucial transitional moment between the naturalistic aesthetic the author inherited and developed in Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and his complete transcendence of the realist mode in Finnegans Wake.