Standing up against prejudice: James Joyce

[Wikipedia]

James Joyce

Ulysses

Chapter 12 | Wikisource

  But it's no use, says he. Force, hatred, history, all that. That's not life for men and women, insult and hatred. And everybody knows that it's the very opposite of that that is really life. 

  What? says Alf. 

  Love, says Bloom. I mean the opposite of hatred.

James Joyce's untamable power | James Longenbach, The Nation 

In a crucial scene in Ulysses, when he’s assaulted by a rabidly anti-Semitic Dubliner, Bloom does retort, “Your God was a jew. Christ was a jew like me.” But later in the day, when he recounts this incident, Bloom admits that he was pretending to be Jewish—pretending to be what the nameless Dubliner assumed him to be—in order to stand up personally against the forces of prejudice: “So I without deviating from plain facts in the least told him his God, I mean Christ, was a jew too and all his family like me though in reality I’m not.” 

Joyce spreads the evidence regarding Bloom’s relationship to Judaism far and wide, making it difficult to synthesize and allowing his readers to misread Bloom’s identity, just as the citizens of Dublin do. But Joyce is not playing games; Joyce is never merely playing games. He didn’t simply write a book about prejudice; he wrote a book that embodies in its language the ways in which prejudice is perpetuated, carried aloft by language, regardless of the facts. Language alters reality in Ulysses, conferring an identity on Bloom, an identity that in a moment of selfless nobility Bloom embraces as his own.