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“Deterrent Effect and So Forth and So On:” Leopold Bloom Behaving Badly

It seems safe to say that most readers of Joyce, if they give the matter a thought, assume that Leopold Bloom is opposed to capital punishment. I disagree. At least he isn’t in “Cyclops,” the one place where we get his views on the subject. At other, happier times he may be—probably is—the compassionate soul we have come to expect, averse to violence, state-sanctioned or otherwise. But in “Cyclops,” he is in a very bad mood, not without a certain component of spite and vindictiveness, because who wouldn’t be? During the previous hour, he was cuckolded by “the worst man in Dublin” (Joyce, Ulysses 6.202). It is five o’clock, but he still cannot go home, for fear that the man might still be there. And now he has somehow gotten himself mixed up as errand boy in what is—as Hugh Kenner pointed out—an ethically dubious project that requires him to wait around for the organizer. In the meantime, he gets involuntarily drawn into just the kind of venue where he feels least at ease—exactly the kind of hypertestoneronic milieu (“Men. Men. Men.”) he had managed to flee in “Lestrygonians” (Joyce, Ulysses 8.653). The result is a spell of what we today call passive-aggressiveness. Hence his attitude toward capital punishment. That issue comes up because of Alf Bergan’s Rumbold letter, itself no advertisement for the noose. Bergan begins by making it clear that he is against the whole business of hanging. There follows a debate: