Nobody/Outis: Odysseus, Bloom, and the Art of Absent Identity
On June 16, 1904, Leopold Bloom is making his way along the Liffey, and what carries him there is not his will but his feet. James Joyce’s original phrasing is, in a sense, devastating: “His slow feet walked him riverward.” Here, the feet do the walking, and he purely follows. Such tiny grammatical inversion between subject and verb carries the entire epistemological premise of “Lestrygonians” in Ulysses. Indeed, consciousness is a latecomer. It is a witness arriving after the fact, while something older and deeper has already been moving in the dark.
The sentence calls to mind a lie, in the Odyssey, told three thousand years earlier, a lie that Christopher Nolan, in his recent film adaptation, chose to omit. Yet it holds everything. Trapped in the Cyclops’ cave, Odysseus is asked his name. “Nobody,” he says. Outis (ουτις). This trick saves his life: when the blinded giant howls that Nobody has hurt him, his neighbours shrug and go back to sleep. But read today, the ruse leaves a lingering taste that Homer may (or may not) have intended. “Nobody” is perhaps not considered as a stratagem. It is, across the whole length of the homeward journey, Odysseus’s most accurate self-description. Disguised as a beggar, a stranger, a nameless wanderer, accumulating false identities at every port. Who, then exactly, is he? Each borrowed persona carves the outline of an absent real self with greater precision than any honest introduction could.
Bloom and Odysseus, separated by three millennia, share the same predicament: they are men who define themselves through absence.
I have reread “Lestrygonians” through the lens of what I call “inverse hoarding.” By this, I mean a psychic economy in which the subject accumulates not possessions but signs of dispossession; the negative spaces left by meanings that can no longer be inhabited. More precisely, the idea that Bloom’s stream of consciousness is accumulating gaps. On the surface, his observations – kosher dietary laws, the crumbling brickwork of Dublin’s streets and fragments of religious ritual – seem to be cataloguing the world. Beneath the surface, then, they are tracing the contours of all that he has lost: all that he does not belong to; all that he cannot claim. It is not objects that he hoards, but their absence – the permanent vacancy where belonging should be. “Kosher. No meat and milk together” sounds like dispassionate ethnographic observation. It is, in fact, a displaced man repeatedly approaching and retreating from his own cultural dispossession, maintaining the safety of analytical distance while circling what he cannot bring himself to touch directly.
Is Odysseus the opposite case? Not really. His entire journey tells the story of a man travelling purposefully towards a specific destination called home. If you read carefully, however, you will see that Homer’s hero excels at creating an absence. He sheds identities at each new shore and vanishes again when the episode is done. And his famous epithet, polytropos – the first word Homer reaches for in the opening line – is usually translated as “of many ways” or “much-travelled,” but it might equally describe a fundamental fluidity of self, or, a systematic resistance to any fixed identity. The more masterfully he performs each disguise, the more the real Odysseus recedes into something that can only be inferred from the accumulated outlines of what he is pretending not to be. He embodies, in this sense, a figure defined by inverse hoarding. The more personas he stockpiles, the more pronounced the absence at the centre grows.
And indeed, this casts Penelope’s weaving in a new light. In the conventional account, her daily labour at the loom – weaving the shroud by day and unravelling it by night – is seen as a delaying tactic and an act of passive resistance. But viewed through such framework, the weaving is somewhat a ritual management of absence. By perpetually pushing completion back to its starting point, she hoards every day of Odysseus’s not-being-there, preserving the shape of that void against the erosive passage of time. She is not waiting. She is working. The shuttle going back and forth is the most literal Fort!/Da! in Western literature – that is, the deliberate recreation of loss as a form of mastery over it. I would hence consider, Bloom’s wandering through Dublin carries a structurally identical emotional logic. His entire afternoon unfolds within the gravitational field of an absence not yet complete but already certain. At four o’clock, Boylan will visit Molly. Bloom does not think about this directly; he flinches away from it in the street when he glimpses Boylan’s straw hat, plunging into the National Museum to escape. Every sensory accumulation, every detour of consciousness, orbits this approaching void. He is, like Penelope at her loom, circling and circling the thing he cannot directly face, hoarding the periphery of the wound because the wound itself is too large to inventory.
Sigmund Freud described a child’s game: throwing a spool away with a cry of Fort! (gone) then pulling it back with Da! (here). The repetition, Freud argued, was the child’s way of mastering the trauma of the mother’s absence, converting a passive loss into an active, controlled rhythm. Here, both Bloom and Odysseus play versions of this game, except that in their cases, the spool being thrown and retrieved is the self. Odysseus repeatedly throws out a false identity (Fort!) and then, at the pivotal moments of the epic, retrieves his real name (Da!) – before the Phaeacians, his aged father, and, Penelope. The arc of the Odyssey is, in this reading, a sustained Fort!/Da! played with identity itself, and it ultimately pays out: the real Odysseus returns. Bloom’s game has, however, no Da!. He drifts between Jewishness and Christianity without settling in either, between husband and cuckold without resolving the contradiction, as well as between father and bereaved father without being able to grieve cleanly. Where Odysseus’s self is finally anchored by a shared secret – the marriage bed carved from a living olive tree, immovable, the one thing that cannot be faked – Bloom has no such object waiting for him. The bed in his house on Eccles Street has, by the time evening comes, been occupied by someone else. This is perhaps the deepest fissure between the two stories. Homer’s universe ultimately permits Da! to happen. Loss, in the Odyssey, is a problem with a solution. It takes twenty years and extraordinary suffering, but the solution exists, and the poem delivers it. Joyce’s universe revokes this promise. Bloom’s dispossession is not a wound that will heal once he reaches the right shore. It is the structure of his existence. The accumulation of absence is not a phase he is passing through. It is what he is.
Yet Homer leaves an unsettling addendum. Tiresias warns Odysseus that after the homecoming, and after the slaughter of the suitors, he must set out again – carrying an oar, walking inland until he finds people who have never seen the sea, and there plant it in the ground as an offering to Poseidon. The prophecy ensures that every Da! already contains the seed of the next Fort!. The poem closes at the moment of return, but the deeper structure it has quietly installed is one of permanent departure. In this light, Homer may be closer to Joyce than the surface contrast suggests; he simply chose to draw the curtain at the Da!, while Joyce insists on holding it open.
In the cave, when Odysseus finally escaped on the underside of a ram, clinging to its wool in the dark, he gave his real name back to himself only once he was safe on the open water, shouting it back at the blinded giant in an act of pride that nearly got him killed. Bloom never shouts his name. He murmurs it to himself in the interiors of his consciousness, half-swallowed, surrounded by the debris of everything else. But, I guess, the impulse is the same. To accumulate, and insist, against all the evidence of erasure and drift, that somebody is still there.
About the Author
Ka Him Sean NG is a Macao-based freelance writer, researcher and English teacher who
holds an MA in Contemporary Literature, Culture and Theory from King’s College London. His areas of interest emphasise the relationship between subjectivity, culture and politics in contemporary narratives. He also focuses on the cultural turn in the critique of political economy. You can reach him at kahimng21@outlook.com.
