James Joyce was going to repeat Bloom’s mistake. Ulysses is written by an Odysseus, not by a Homer. And then there is the question of the lingua Adamica . Ulysses (much of it untranslatable) is as much about the English language as it is about Ulysses. The chapter devoted to Stephen’s conception and subsequent gestation is also a history of English literature, while Bloom the father is also Shakespeare, or perhaps the ghost of Hamlet’s father. The Bible of universal homelessness is an ardent, ambivalent, and mostly unheeded tribute to a bounded speech community. “Our young Irish bards, John Eglinton censured, have yet to create a figure which the world will set beside Saxon Shakespeare’s Hamlet, though I admire him, as old Ben did, on this side of idolatry” ( U 9:43). Perhaps they have created them by now, and have become such figures themselves, but there is little doubt that they have no choice but to inhabit the world fathered and measured by Shakespeare. Hamlet may have had to make some room, but the idolaters of Pushkin and Cervantes only shrugged. Nationalism—the great reward of the Apollonian odyssey and the nemesis of Jewish emancipation—was not the only modern religion. There were two more, both largely Jewish in their origins: Marxism and Freudianism. Both competed with nationalism on its own turf by offering to overcome the loneliness of the new Mercurian world (and by extension human unhappiness); both countered nationalism’s quaint tribalism with a modern (scientific) path to wholeness; both equaled nationalism in being capable of legitimizing modern states (socialism in one case and welfare capitalism in the other); and both seemed to eclipse nationalism by being able to determine the precise source of evil in the world and guarantee a redemption that was both specific and universal. In Marxism, the original sin is in the historical division of labor, which leads to the alienation of labor, the enslavement of human beings by their own creations, and the fall of man into false consciousness, injustice, and degradation. The fall itself ensures salvation, however, for History, in its inexorable unfolding, creates a social class that, by virtue of its utter dehumanization and existential loneliness, is destined to redeem humanity by arriving at full self-realization. Proletarian free will and historical predestination (liberty and necessity) will merge in the act of an apocalyptic revolt against History in order to produce communism, a state in which there is no alienation of labor and thus no “contradictions,” no injustice, and no Time. This is collective salvation, in that the reconciliation with the world is achieved by the