In fact only one of the two men is "returning"
to the source from which he began his day's journeying.
(Stephen has no home, and halfway through Ithaca it
becomes clear that he has miles to go before he sleeps.) But
by analogy with Homer's Odyssey this chapter does
represent a return, not only because Bloom goes home at the
end of a long day, but also because he sets his mental house
in order. With its crystalline if quirky rationality, the
chapter's prose imitates this process of coming to
intellectual rest.
Odysseus' story is a nostos or homecoming—a
"return." At the end of the epic he has rejoined his son,
wife, and father, regained his ancestral palace, and
exterminated the suitors who usurped his place. Bloom lacks
nothing but a latchkey to regain entrance to his marital bed,
and modern societies frown on shedding adulterers' blood. His
task is to regain some of the mental balance that has been
threatened by anxiety over his wife's unfaithfulness, an
assault by a murderous anti-Semite, snubs by countless
Dubliners, grieving thoughts about his dead father and son,
worries about aging and loss of happiness, and a prolonged
encounter with his own fears, unfulfilled wishes, and sexual
pathologies. The intellectual conversation that he has with
Stephen Dedalus on the way to his house, inside its kitchen,
and in the yard behind—a more creditable analogue of the
reunion of Odysseus and Telemachus than occurred in Eumaeus—sets
him on a path to mental equilibrium.
In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Stephen
praised art that is static rather than kinetic: "The feelings
excited by improper art are kinetic, desire or loathing.
Desire urges us to possess, to go to something; loathing urges
us to abandon, to go from something. These are kinetic
emotions. The arts which excite them, pornographical or
didactic, are therefore improper arts. The esthetic emotion (I
use the general term) is therefore static. The mind is
arrested and raised above desire and loathing." Ithaca
shows Bloom working to raise his mind above desire and
loathing, and its own relentless catechetical succession of
questions and answers arrests the mind of the reader in a kind
of Olympian detachment.
For Bloom, this stasis takes the form of calming the troubled
waters of his mind, viewing his situation as rationally and
optimistically as he can, deciding (for the time being, at
least) to return to the bed of his matrimonial violation, and
slipping peacefully into sleep. For Stephen's equally troubled
mind the chapter offers no comparable return to tranquility.
But the book has shown him repeatedly envisioning such a
recapitulation, especially in his account of Shakespeare
returning to Stratford in Scylla and Charybdis.
