“[D]ead cert for the Gold cup”: Gambling, Animal Life, and Male Communities in James Joyce’s Ulysses

Abstract: Although June 16th, 1904, served as an important one in James Joyce’s actual life, in the world of his Ulysses , the main connective tissue between the date and actual recorded history is the annual Ascot Gold Cup race, run that year on June 16th. Through the extended allegory of the race, from characters gambling on it to the fallout after they lose, Joyce suggests through Bloom’s thoughts and actions an alternate kinship network that eschews conventional winners and losers in the transactional relationships between the humans and animals that inhabit Dublin. Juxtaposing Bloom’s way of being with the selfish system of masculine gambling in the text, Joyce valorizes the gentler, kinder Bloom. The result is that Bloom, unconquered and heroic, wins the day by metaphorically creating “something from nothing” and thereby offering a utopian vision of interconnectedness between all the living things in Dublin.