ABSTRACT
The Homeric parallel is Ulysses’s encounter with the gigantic one-eyed Cyclops, Polyphemus. Ulysses escapes from Polyphemus’s cave by blinding him. The Cyclops hurls a rock at him as he sails away but misses him. The citizen in this episode has Polyphemus’s one-eyed crudity. He can see no point of view other than his own. He is arrogant, cruel, and stupid. Polyphemus’s gigantic stature is reflected in the citizen’s grossly inflated ego and his equally exaggerated claims. The episode is soaked in another form of gigantism too. For though the events are recounted by a nameless narrator, the narration is punctuated by a series of commentaries in vastly different styles—but each style an inflated caricature of the legal, the epic, the scientific, the journalistic, and so on. The total effect is to set the gentle, pacific, charitable Bloom in lonely opposition to a barbaric, bigoted, and aggressive nationalist—and likewise to place Bloom’s mildness and commonsense in lonely isolation within a world given over to vast excesses. The intemperate inflations represent many aspects of culture, many movements in our civilization, that are irrational, violent, or pretentious. The fact that the reader, as well as Ulysses-Bloom, feels swamped under it all is appropriate and of course intentional.
