SOURCE: "Bloom's Sexual Tropes: Stigmata of the 'Degenerate' Jew," in James Joyce Quarterly, Vol. 27, No. 2, Winter, 1990, pp. 303-23.

In the following essay, Byrnes examines James Joyce's use of stereotypes related to Jews, particular those found in Weininger's Sex and Character.

In 1923 Joyce drew a pencil sketch of Leopold Bloom and wrote beside it the Greek for "Tell me, Muse, of the man of many devices, who over many ways" . . . (JJII 482ff.). We can assume he understood the semantic range of polytropes: many tricks, many rhetorical turns, devices of every kind. And we can assume he exploited some interlingual ambiguity because when he sent his abject hero on his travels he armed him not only with devices but with vices, not only with tropes but with perversions. Hence the sexual abominations Joyce credits Bloom with in "Circe." As Stanley Sultan pointed out years ago, Bloom's hallucinatory Odyssey through Nighttown...