Joyce`s Ulysses, like his other works, thematises the motif of adventure and home-coming on the level of narrative. The protagonist Bloom leaves his home in the morning in pursuit of diverse adventures out in the city eventually to return home at night. The contrary motives from which his patterned action of adventure and home-coming arises are curiosity and reassurance, the psychological counterparts of the epistemological concepts of kinesis and stasis. While the first are centrifugal impulses entailing orderly elements such as change, unrest, and the new, the second are centripetal instincts accompanied by disorderly elements such as fixedness, stability, and the old. The oppositional principles of adventure and home-coming, however, are not necessarily incarnated in the novel as irreconcilable; rather, they function in an interdependent and complementary way. Bloom, after coming back home from the danger of the day`s adventurous incidents, finds home-life stabilising, reassuring and rejuvenating. Hence his "less envy than equanimity" in the face of his wife`s infidelity. By the same token, his home-life, which, otherwise, is liable to fall into rigidity and stagnance, is helped by his curious adventures to get renewed, excited, and revitalised. This mode of interactive relationship of adventure and home-coming demonstrates the value of dynamic tension, not binary opposition, in life between kinetic and static principles. Joyce`s flexible perspective concerning the matter of kinesis and stasis finds a happy expression in "natured nature." It implies that the contingent act of sexual desire, a natural phenomenon in itself, derives from the constant law of harmony between sexes. The repeated combination of the two seeming contraries produces, or is reflected in, the pattern of ``cyclic return with a change.`` |