to appear in Times Literary Supplement 

Review of Amie Thomasson, Fiction and Metaphysics

It’s no wonder we find Leopold Bloom confusing. One day we encounter him as a living, breathing Irishman, soaping himself in a bathhouse. A day later he turns up as a "fictional character," in which guise he can no more soap himself than the number eleven can smoke a pipe.

How are we to reconcile the internal Bloom -- the one whose adventures are related in Ulysses -- with the external Bloom -- the one discussed by critics and commentators? IB and EB, as we can call them, would seem to have entirely different properties. IB is human, a voyeur, in love with his wife. EB is a literary creation, modelled on Odysseus, Joyce's best-known character.

The strategy of Fiction and Metaphysics is to start with EB and work IB into the picture later. EB is said to be a special sort of artifact. He is brought into existence by a "founding literary work" and the creative act behind it; and he continues to exist as long as a competent readership has access either to that original work or to other works created with the appropriate sort of story-continuing intention. But, and this is where things get interesting, he is not to be found where (copies of) these works are, nor anywhere else, either. This quality of having no permanent or temporary address makes him what philosophers would call an abstract object -- something of the same general sort as a number, except that EB (unlike the number 5) is an abstract artifact.

With the identity of the external Bloom now established, Thomasson turns her attention to IB, the internal Bloom. The book's single greatest surprise is that IB is said to be one and the same as our our old friend EB.

How can that be, if the first is a person, and the second an artifact? No problem, Thomasson says; the Bloom who is said to soap himself is not a person. He is an abstract object whose "real" (external) properties readers are supposed to imagine away. Ulysses in other words misrepresents an abstract artifact as a flesh and blood human being.

Am I the only one who finds this strange? There is no problem about real-world objects being depicted in art. "Nixon in China" is about Nixon, and China. And there is no problem either about this occurring with real-word abstract objects. When Holmes says that Moriarty has to his credit a well-regarded treatise on the binomial theorem, it is our binomial theorem he is talking about.

But to misrepresent a theorem as studied by Moriarty is one thing; to misrepresent it as not a theorem at all but a human being would be quite another. Calvino’s "Numbers in the Dark" is not, alas, a story in which 5 and 19 lose their flashlights on a camping trip. But that is the kind of story one expects from a metaphysical fantasist like Calvino, or Borges. It is not the kind of story one expects from Arthur Conan Doyle, much less Jackie Collins. If Thomasson is right, though, abstract objects are always the subject whenever a fiction-writer sets pen to paper. Hollywood Husbands becomes a Borges-like fantasy in which entities with all the vivacity of the binomial theorem come alive and dance about.

What are the prospects for reversing Thomasson's procedure, that is, starting with IB and folding EB into the mix later? The great thing about IB is that there’s no real reason to think he exists. All of the facts about him can be put into the form "according to Ulysses, there is a fellow Bloom who does such and such" -- and this is just to say that readers of Ulysses are supposed to make as if there is a fellow Bloom who does such and such. A reader who insists on a bona fide Bloom to "pin the story on" can be suspected of not really getting it. One doesn't have to imagine of anything that it enjoys Plumtree's Potted Meat to imagine Bloom enjoying that product.

What about the critic's claim that, say, Bloom is the most fully realized character in Joyce's works? It isn't true according to Ulysses, so how is it true? Thomasson herself hints at a possible answer, when she says that "describing fictional characters as "here" in the work is at best metaphorical" (37). I take it this means that we make as if Ulysses contained EB to call attention to a fact not about EB at all -- the fact that readers of Ulysses are supposed to imagine that there is a fellow Bloom who behaves in the ways described.

Notice what just happened. A sentence that seemed to be offering a literal description of EB turned out on closer examination to be really describing something else -- the book -- by means of an EB-metaphor. Could it be that other statements seemingly about EB are similarly metaphorical? "Bloom was created by Joyce," for example, says more or less that it was a book by Joyce that started the boom in Bloom-imagining. One can argue, of course, about the plausibility of particular readings. But if we are on the right track, then the Bloom people lecture about is just as much a figment of the imagination as the one in the bathhouse.