Trust Your Gut: A Hungry Reading of Ulysses
By Luca Cavallo (Arts & Lit Editor)
Dr. Felicity (Flicka) Small is a Cork-based Joycean, who completed her doctoral thesis at UCC in 2021, titled “The Semiotics of Food in James Joyce’s Ulysses”. In an interview last summer, Small joked that Ulysses is “not a hard read if you concentrate on the food”. Ulysses can be intimidating, but Small’s suggestion of concentrating on food, a simple but central part of everyday life, holds more merit than you would expect. Through the processes of hunger and satisfaction, we can grasp a better understanding of Joyce’s iconic characters, Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom. In this article, I hope to encourage you to replace distaste for Joyce’s challenge, with the delicious appeal of the foods throughout the book.
When discussing food in Ulysses, there is no better place to start than episode 8, “The Lestrygonians”. While Dedalus and the men of the newsroom head off for a liquid lunch, Bloom wanders through Dublin with food plaguing his mind. Considering that this particular episode is dominated by Bloom’s stream-of-consciousness, the implication of food in his thoughts becomes both intended and unintended. The episode is riddled with a mad series of notes on what can be eaten, with Bloom’s imagination stretching the extent of one’s appetite. Bloom finds interest in sandwich-board men, a sweet-faced Carmelite nun, “poached eyes on ghosts”, and envelopes that sadly can’t be licked. The sandwich boards (advertising H. E. L. Y. S. for Wisdom Hely’s) in particular are an example of Joyce’s humorous use of what is known today as “Meat-O-Vision”. This is a corny trope of comedy that has starving characters mistake their friends for certain foods. Think of Fr. Jack confusing Fr. Ted with a blathering pint of stout. The same applies to Bloom in this episode, who ponders what he wants to eat. As he enters the Burton, Bloom's meditation on food takes a turn for the worse.
The Burton restaurant is what the Bloomsday Book rightfully describes as a “Lestrygonian horror”. Bloom is horrified by the brutality with which the men devour their food. In Homer’s The Odyssey, Odysseus, and his crew land briefly on the island of the Lestrygonians but flee when they realise the island’s inhabitants are man-eating ogres. It is largely agreed that the patrons of the Burton are very much Lestrygonian in their habits. Bloom abhors the sights and smells of the place entirely: “Spaton sawdust, sweetish warmish cigarette smoke, reek of plug, spilt beer, men's beery piss, the stale of ferment.” The scene is a major anti-climax, as Bloom's desperate hunger is warped into utter disgust and even shame: “Am I like that? See ourselves as others see us.”
After the disaster at the Burton, the episode’s treatment of food is transformed dramatically into something more hostile, even cannibalistic. This is just one of dozens of examples of Bloom’s mind and manner affecting the atmosphere of the text. What was excited hunger, becomes anticipation and dread. Bloom is quite put-off by meat and begins to sympathise with vegetarians, a rather progressive move for a Dubliner in 1904.
“After all there's a lot in that vegetarian fine flavour of things from the earth garlic of course it stinks Italian organgrinders crisp of onions mushrooms truffles. Pain to the animal too. Pluck and draw fowl.”
This is a remarkable shift in Bloom’s character. If anyone knows anything about Leopold Bloom, it is that he eats ‘with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls,’ but now craves a cheese sandwich from Davy Byrne’s. Bloom is undoubtedly a fickle, shifting character, but his sudden change in appetite, is in fact a major example of the ever-changing nature of Ulysses.
And what is our hero’s change in perspective? His attitude towards his hunger is externalised. Rather than constantly thinking about what he can eat, Bloom ponders what can eat him. Consider the lines as Bloom bites into his Gorgonzola sandwich, to which he has added mustard: “A warm shock of air heat of mustard hanched on Mr Bloom's heart. He raised his eyes and met the stare of a bilious clock.” That word, “hanched”, is explained by The Joyce Project as a rare verb from the British Isles, meaning to snap at noisily and greedily. It is a word associated with large dogs, wild beasts, cannibals, or greedy men. In one bite, Bloom has personified mustard, and fears that its spicy heat will devour his organs.
The personification of inanimate objects, as we have seen rife throughout the episode, does not end with food, as Bloom is watched by a “bilious clock”. “Bilious” is a word associated with vomiting. The personified, staring clock, partnered with Bloom’s anxiety for his wife Molly’s inevitable hook-up with Blazes Boylan that day, results in perhaps the silliest food pun I’ve encountered in the novel: the clock is time-consuming. Silliness aside, it is clear that Bloom’s fear of being devoured, forgotten, and wasted away all starts with food. The episode moves into a poignant reflection on Bloom’s past. He thinks of his lost son, Rudy, his happy days with Molly, and his mixed feelings about her adultery. The key to understanding these reflections is found by concentrating on Bloom’s attitude towards his hunger, appetite, and food.
Joyce’s treatment of food in relation to Bloom is all related to the body, from the very function of food to the processes of ingestion and digestion. When it comes to Stephen Dedalus, everything is related to the mind. Food is addressed as something tied to history, and Stephen responds to his hunger within the context of his ideas about history, as well as his political beliefs. It’s a common note to make that in Ulysses, Bloom is the body and Dedalus is the mind. Now, I’ll let you have three guesses as to what the connection between food and Irish history is… Hopefully you said the Great Famine, and if not, the 1980s Hunger Strikes in Northern Ireland. Of course, the martyrdom of Bobby Sands occurred after Ulysses by about sixty years, but the history of fasting in protest begins much earlier. Self-starvation dates back to mediaeval Ireland, where victims of injustice would starve themselves to oppose those who had caused them injury. Terence MacSwiney, Lord Mayor of Cork, died after a 74-day hunger strike in protest of his arrest on the charge of sedition by the British Government. That was in 1920, just two years before the publication of Ulysses. Dedalus, a character drawn from the tapestry of Irish history, is naturally affected by food in the novel. Like Bloom, Dedalus’ discontent with Ireland, his struggle to identify as an artist, and his contempt for Catholicism, can all be understood through his attitude towards food.
Some critics like to be a tad dramatic and say that Dedalus eats nothing throughout the day of 16 June 1904, but this isn’t entirely true. Dedalus has a few bites with Mulligan and Haines in the Martello Tower in the opening episode, “Telemachus”. Other than that, however, Stephen eats nothing. He drinks copious amounts of alcohol but refuses any opportunity to eat. Considering how Joyce sends Bloom into kitchens, restaurants, bath houses, and bathrooms, it is surely an intended act to have Dedalus abstain from eating. Dedalus is an Irishman in protest. What could be considered the central focus of this protest is religion. Dedalus refused to kneel and pray at his mother’s side as she lay on her deathbed. Throughout the course of this novel, Dedalus’ anger, shame, and frustration crop up, and eventually amount to a vivid manifestation in the dream-like, or “trippy” brothel episode, “Circe” where Dedalus’ mother rises from the floorboards, cursing her son for refusing to accept his faith and pray for her.
A moment like that will always be shocking, but it is only impactful if we have a clear understanding of Dedalus’ headspace. One can only imagine the hunger pangs the poor fellow is dealing with, and now his mother’s corpse is berating him. Dedalus’ self-imposed starvation is silent and personal. He does it in the name of his own struggle, a struggle to find peace with his choices. Of course, Dedalus will always be dramatic, but his reasons can’t be sneered at. That is why food is so crucial to understanding the characters of Ulysses. Once again, this isn’t a guide, and the book is still an arduous challenge, but it is clear now that concentrating on food, and other simple things, can take your knowledge further than you might expect.
