The Role of Elijah in <i>Ulysses</i>'s Metempsychosis

Abstract

as we shall see, is Bloom. Announcing Stephen as artist, Mulligan also announces (139). William Tindall's comment on the Telemachus chapter of Ulysses in his A Reader's Guide to James Joyce has persisted as the primary reading of the /Elisha relationship that Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus develop in the novel. This reading accepts that Bloom is a representation of the prophet Elijah, and permits all of the associations of the Wandering Jew to be even more securely attached to Bloom than his assertion of Jewish-ness would otherwise allow. It also centers the father-son relationship of Bloom and Stephen that develops throughout the novel within the context of prophecy. The symbolism of the transfer of prophetic power from Bloom to Stephen in the novel is highly suggestive and, given the popularity of in multiple religions, widely recognizable even to casual readers of Ulysses. Because of this rather obvious connection, other potential aspects of the role of in the text have seldom been explored. Indeed, despite the frequency with which appears in the text, the figure is often not even mentioned in study guides to the novel. Although Tindall's reading of the relationship as emerging through the figure of is accurate, also plays a pivotal role in developing Ulysses as a representation of Joyce's larger literary theories. Traditionally a figure of both eternal life and transfiguration, also has a historical connection with thunder; and it is this aspect of that indicates the development of the relationship between Stephen and Bloom, which suggests Stephen's potential to become an artistic figure. In Giambattista Vico's cycles of human and social development, the human response to thunder is language, intrinsically metaphoric and poetic. In Ulysses Elijah the Thunderer signals a new Vichean cycle, which leads to the death of Bloom in his present form in chapter 17, his reincarnation in the divine mind of Molly, and the potential transformation of Stephen. Joyce's use of Vico's theories in the structure of Finnegans Wake has been widely acknowledged, but he had read Vico much earlier, at least