‘Free money, free love in a free lay state’: Leopold Bloom’s politics

In this year of elections, around Bloomsday may be a good time to ask about Leopold Bloom’s politics. We don’t usually think of Bloom, or his creator James Joyce, as political animals, but as it happens both were finely attuned to the ideological currents of early 20th-century Ireland. For Bloom, as for Joyce, there were two presiding political spirits in the Ireland of that time, the late lamented Charles Stewart Parnell and Arthur Griffith, a “coming man” in Bloom’s assessment.

While Bloom obsesses about Molly’s looming infidelity, he is also burdened by questions of Irish identity that were coming to the fore in 1904 – and in 2024 too! His fellow Dubliners were prone to see Bloom as something of an outsider, in ethnic and religious terms. Bloom knows who he is. When asked about his nation, he replies decisively, “Ireland. I was born here. Ireland.” But to some of the other customers at Barney Kiernan’s pub on Little Britain Street, he doesn’t fit their notions of Irishness. One asks “what the hell is he?”

Like his father, James Joyce was a fan of Parnell. Writing in a Trieste newspaper in 1912, Joyce lauded this “extraordinary personality” who had “forced the greatest English politicians to follow his orders”. Parnell, he wrote, had “united every element of national life behind him, and set out on a march along the borders of insurrection”.

We learn from Molly that Bloom once harboured ambitions to stand for parliament. Like Joyce, he was intrigued by Parnell’s mystique, and muses that in politics “You must have a certain fascination. Parnell”. He believed that Parnell had “used men as pawns. … Freeze them up with that eye of his.”

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In the hallucinatory Circe episode, Bloom is presented as a successor to Parnell, seeking to create “a new Bloomusalem in the Nova Hibernia of the future”. He stands for “the reform of municipal morals and the plain ten commandments. New worlds for old. Union of all, jew, moslem and gentile. … Free money, free love and a free lay church in a free lay state.” It seems clear that “Old Ollebo M.P.” (one of the anagrams Bloom had made from his name) would have wanted to be part of Parnell’s parliamentary entourage.

Joyce was an admirer of Griffith and his paper, The United Irishman. He saw Griffith’s Sinn Féin as the latest expression of the separatist Fenian tradition and in Ulysses playfully suggests that Bloom, with his Hungarian father, had given Griffith the idea for The Resurrection Hungary, in which he had argued that Ireland should seek a British-Irish dual monarchy along Austro-Hungarian lines. As is often the case, Molly has her own take on Griffith, “that little man he showed me without the neck is very intelligent the coming man Griffith is he well he doesn’t look it thats all I can say”. She is also put off by the cut of Griffith’s trousers!

Molly tells us that Bloom had been “going about with some of them Sinner Fein lately or whatever they call themselves talking his usual trash and nonsense”. Thus we can safely conclude that Bloom had some association with Griffith’s Sinn Féin. Griffith’s focus on the economics of independence would also have endeared him to Joyce’s prudent, pragmatic Everyman.

The only elected politician to feature in Ulysses is JP Nannetti, a foreman at the Freeman’s Journal. Bloom encounters him in the Aeolus episode - “Member for College green. He boomed that workaday worker tack for all it was worth.” As Bloom’s description of him infers, Nannetti was a committed trade unionist, a founding member of the Dublin Trades Council, thus representing the labour strand in nationalism that was on the rise during the age of Ulysses.

It is not surprising that Bloom should have taken an interest in Nannetti, not only as a conduit for placing ads in the paper, but also because of his foreign roots. Bloom thinks it strange that Nannetti “never saw his own country”. Nannetti had overcome the handicap of his Italian family history and become part of the Irish political establishment while Bloom languished in obscurity, distrusted and disregarded by many of his fellow Dubliners on account of his chequered religious and ethnic background.

On June 16th 1904, Nannetti was on his way to London “to ask a question about the commissioner of police forbidding Irish games in the park.” This tells us that Nannetti was also prominent in the Gaelic Athletic Association which was fast becoming a force in Irish public life in the early 20th century. Nannetti’s connections confirm that the borders between the politics of the Irish party and the new movements that were steadily shifting Ireland’s ideological dial in the decades prior to the Easter Rising were blurred. Nannetti, who also claimed to have been a lifelong member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, certainly had a foot in several tents within the nationalist camp. Among his other distinctions, he was Lord Mayor of Dublin in 1906 when the former Tammany Hall leader, Boss Croker, was made an honorary Dubliner. Croker is mentioned by Joyce as one of his 99 “Irish heroes and heroines of antiquity”.

Like Joyce, Bloom was clearly drawn to both Parnell and Griffith, but was not a fan of either the Irish Ireland ethos or of the Fenian tradition that came into its own as Joyce was busy writing Ulysses between 1916 and 1922. Bloom’s fiery confrontation with “the citizen”, when he pushes back against force, hatred and the abuse of history, marks him out as an advocate of tolerance.

Bloom’s Ireland sat on a cusp between the fading Parnellite world of Joyce’s father and the more combative environment of the decade that followed when Joyce’s contemporaries would reshape Ireland. Mr Cautious Calmer, as Bloom is called in Oxen of the Sun, is a middle-of-the-road nationalist, an outlier in a world increasingly dominated by more adamant political creeds. Like his author, Bloom was a Parnellite Sinn Féiner of 1904 vintage.

Daniel Mulhall’s most recent book is Pilgrim Soul: WB Yeats and the Ireland of his Time (New Island Books 2023).