Did Leopold Bloom have ADD?

JOURNEY #23: TO THE WANDERING MIND

"Think you're escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home?"

— James Joyce's Ulysses

Paying my respects at James Joyce's grave in Zurich

Here’s a question I’ve never heard anyone ask about Ulysses. 

Did Leopold Bloom have ADD?

Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) was first named in 1980. Before that, people with ADD were simply called distracted. Dreamers. Their minds would lock onto something interesting and follow it anywhere -- to places nobody expected, least of all themselves. They lost things. They drove people around them crazy. But they also noticed things that few others noticed. 

I've always suspected that Leopold Bloom had ADD. If so, I believe that Ulysses contains the most accurate portrait of the ADD mind ever put on a page. A field guide for anyone who loves someone whose mind won’t stay where it’s supposed to be.

Consider Hades, the funeral episode, where Bloom accompanies the body of his friend Paddy Dignam to Glasnevin Cemetery.

Being at a funeral is one moment that demands stillness. Gravity. Respect for the dead. But Bloom's mind has other ideas.

Bloom spots a rat moving among the graves and his mind starts careening. The priest is still speaking. Everyone is sombre. Yet this is what happens next inside Bloom’s head:

“An obese grey rat toddled along the side of the crypt, moving the pebbles. An old stager: greatgrandfather: he knows the ropes…One of those chaps would make short work of a fellow. Pick the bones clean no matter who it was. Ordinary meat for them. A corpse is meat gone bad. Well and what’s cheese? Corpse of milk. I read in that Voyages in China that the Chinese say a white man smells like a corpse. Cremation better. Priests dead against it.”

Rat to bones to meat to cheese to Chinese travellers to white men to cremation to priests. Eight moves. Five sentences. Each one abandoning the last. And his mind keeps spinning. For pages and pages. What you've just read is a fraction of where Bloom’s mind goes before the funeral ends. 

And he’s supposed to be grieving.

And this is just one episode. Bloom's mind keeps spinning like this across the entire novel. Every chapter he's in. Every hour of the day. The funeral is just a snapshot. 

That's not just a wandering mind -- it's a pinball machine

And Joyce knew what he was doing. Just look at how he treated the thoughts of Stephen Dedalus. Stephen’s mind is restless as well — but it moves with purpose, following philosophical threads to their conclusions. Stephen’s digressions are constructed. Bloom’s just happen.

Joyce wrote both minds with equal precision. Bloom isn’t everyman. He’s a very specific kind of man: a man with ADD.

Which raises the question: How did Joyce get it so right?

Italo Svevo

Joyce’s closest friend in Trieste was Italo Svevo, whose masterpiece Zeno’s Conscience is another one of my favourite novels. Many scholars believe Svevo was the primary model for Bloom — the Jewish outsider, the gentle ineffectual husband, the man who observes everything and controls nothing. Joyce spent years inside Svevo’s mind, absorbing the way he thought. And Zeno, like Bloom, cannot finish a thought, cannot stay in the present moment, cannot stop his mind from going wherever it wants.

Many believe Svevo was the inspiration for Bloom. If so, Joyce spent years inside the mind of someone whose thoughts moved exactly like Bloom’s. Zeno’s Conscience is the proof.

And yet. For all his wandering mind, Bloom moves through Dublin earring a bar of lemon soap he bought in the morning and keeps forgetting it is in his pocket. He left the house without his key. He has ideas he never finished. He spent an entire day circling the one thing he couldn't face. 

If you love someone with ADD and want to understand what goes on inside their head, read Ulysses and Zeno’s Conscience. Nobody has done it better.