Having buried his son and betrayed his father, he gains immortality by playing Virgil to an Apollonian bard who would redeem and transcend his birthplace by composing the Irish “national epic.” A modern prophet as a young artist, Stephen Dedalus knows that the Word comes before the chosen people: “You suspect . . . that I may be important because I belong to the faubourg Saint- Patrice called Ireland for short. . . . But I suspect . . . that Ireland must be important because it belongs to me” ( U 16:1160–65). Both Stephen and Ireland (as well as Bloom) will attain immortality when he has written his Ulysses . Before he can accomplish his mission, however, he must renounce his mother, defy his God, leave his home, and accept Bloom as his father and savior. They need each other, and Ireland needs both of them: “Stephen dissented openly from Bloom’s views on the importance of dietary and civic selfhelp while Bloom dissented tacitly from Stephen’s views on the eternal affirmation of the spirit of man in literature” ( U 17:28–30). Both were wrong and both knew it. At the end of their Odyssey, Bloom will have become reconciled to his Catholic Penelope, and Stephen will have become anointed as Odysseus (“a perverted Jew”). What, reduced to their simplest reciprocal form, were Bloom’s thoughts about Stephen’s thoughts about Bloom and about Stephen’s thoughts about Bloom’s thoughts about Stephen? He thought that he thought that he was a jew whereas he knew that he knew that he knew that he was not. ( U 17:527–32) Or maybe he knew that he knew that they were. Stephen was adopted (and symbolically conceived) by Bloom, and Bloom had Swann’s nose as his “endemic characteristic”—and knew that Stephen knew that he knew it. His “nasal and frontal formation was derived in a direct line of lineage which, though interrupted, would continue at distant intervals to more distant intervals to its most distant intervals” ( U 17:872–74). But will Stephen the son of Bloom be able to produce the Irish national epic? Ulysses —his creature as well as creator and thus a kind of Bloom in its own right—seems perfectly equivocal on this question. Joyce’s modernist Bible is recognized as such, of course (witness the manner of notation and textual exegesis), but who are its chosen people besides the two Supermen “sensitive to artistic impressions” and skeptical of “many orthodox religious, national, social, and ethical doctrines”? ( U 17:20–25). It was obviously foolish of Bloom to attempt an earnest conversation with the “truculent troglodytes” of popular nationalism in Barney Kiernan’s public house, and neither Stephen Dedalus nor