Joyce’s “Nameless” Hero and Hungarian Jewish Experience

Abstract

The essay considers the background of James Joyce’s “nameless” hero, Leopold Bloom in Ulysses, from the point of view of his Hungarian Jewish ancestry: his family history in the Western Hungarian town of Szombathely and the Jewish history of his town. It shows how a certain reading of the “Circe” and “Cyclops” episodes of Ulysses reveals them in hindsight as anticipating the nightmarish future of the Holocaust in Eastern Europe. This reading is enabled when taking account of the strong parallels that run between the crisis of progress in human history that Ulysses addresses and the idea of history in Walter Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History of 1940. 1882, the year of Joyce’s birth, was a turning point, if not actually a new beginning, in the long history of anti-Semitic feelings in Hungary. There was a blood libel case in the town of Tiszaeszlár in Eastern Hungary that year. More widely-known and central to the story of modern anti-Semitism in Central Europe was the holding of the first International Anti-Jewish Congress in Dresden in 1882. A local politician from Szombathely, called Győző Istóczy, is linked to both of these events, Szombathely being the town from which Leopold Bloom’s family originates in Ulysses. By unfolding some of the oblique references hidden in the novel to the history of the Jews in Eastern Europe, and revealing the background of the invented Bloom (Virág) family, the essay shows what tragic fate awaited the real-life Jewish families to which they allude and what would have happened to the Joycean “nameless” hero had he remained in Szombathely.

Keywords

• james joyce
• leopold bloom
• szombathely
• holocaust
• walter benjamin