Ulysses: The Man in the Macintosh

I’ve been calmly re-reading Ulysses lately. I was forgetting what a nice feeling is to dip into a book without any anxiety of finding something intelligent to say about it. So after a quiet saunder I came to Hades and met the man in the Macintosh once more; one of the famous ‘riddles’ of  Ulysses. Dignam dies and Bloom wonders:

Now who is that lankylooking galoot over there in the macintosh? Now who is he I’d like to know? Now I’d give a trifle to know who he is. Always someone turns up you never dreamt of. A fellow could live on his lonesome all his life.

To be honest, I don’t think the identity of the man in the Macintosh is important at all. Or rather, it might be if we were are able to say something about it. Why is he there? What does it mean?… Just ‘finding it’ is really meaningless. An allusion or a symbol cannot be just a riddle. It needs to have some charge of meaning if its aim is to contribute to the text. This is the main reason why this post is completely useless.

Now, there is a wide variety of the possibilities hovering around that mysterious man. I’ve heard he is Joyce himself, or the ghost of Bloom’s father. Maybe Mr. Deasy… I guess there’s a myriad of colorful alternatives around. Back to the text:

Mr Bloom stood far back, his hat in his hand, counting the bared heads. Twelve. I’m thirteen. No. The chap in the macintosh is thirteen. Death’s number. Where the deuce did he pop out of? He wasn’t in the chapel, that I’ll swear. Silly superstition that about thirteen.

I’m sure the distinction between the twelve and thirteen is the key to the whole issue: Why does Bloom correct himself saying he is not thirteen but twelve? The correction creates two distinct groups among the mourners. Bloom is part of the Twelve, the chap in the Macintosh is not. Any one slightly familiar with the Gospels will immediately discover in ‘the twelve’ a reference to the apostles. The opposition between the mysterious man and the rest of the twelve identifies him with Christ by opposition. This is a common technique in Ulysses. Joyce creates in many opportunities a couple, or two distinct sets of people, then he defines a binary opposition between them, and assigns a specific mythical role to one of them. The reader has then the elements to identify the second person or group. As I wrote in another post, this procedure is very clear in Nausicaa. The basic binary opposition in that episode is Gerty-Bloom. The mythical assignments of Gerty to Nausicaa, Isolde, and the Virgin Mary, help the reader to discover new aspects of Bloom: his journey back home, his foreignness  and his role as sinner in need of mercy.

The problem in the case of the man in the macintosh is that I don’t see how this Christ-figure helps to understand Bloom better.That’s why this post is utterly useless.