8. THE LESTRYGONIANS

SCENE: The Lunch

HOUR: 1 pm

ORGAN: Esophagus

ART: Architecture

SYMBOL: Constables

Thoughts of lunch are never far from Bloom's mind throughout this episode. The only immediate business he has in hand is a visit to the national library to trace, in a back number of the Kilkenny People, an advertisement which he has promised one of his customers to get republished. Meanwhile he profits by the empty hour to indulge his wanderlust, his hobby of seeing the habitations of many men and observing their various minds. A young man places in his hand a throwaway announcing, "Elijah is coming. Dr John Alexander Dowie, restorer of the church in Zion, is coming." Dilly Dedalus, "lobbing about" outside Dillon's auction-rooms, excites Bloom's compassion. Crossing a bridge, he watches a brewery barge puff its way seawards, the gulls flapping strongly about it and compassionately buys two Banbury cakes to feed them.

The timeball on the Ballast Office reminds him of Sir Robert Ball's Story of the Heavens, and the cryptic word "parallax" enters his mind. Musing that he has never exactly understood the word, he is fascinated by it--for we have not heard the last of "parallax" by any means. The oriental in Bloom is ever in quest of the Word, and, just as any son may be the Messiah, so any word of mystery--why not Parallax--might be the Word Ineffable. But commonsense asserts itself, the earth-sense of Molly Bloom, who has a short way with such "abstruosities" as "parallax" or "metempsychosis."

He sees a procession of whitesmocked men march slowly towards him along the gutter and remembers the time when he worked for Hely and how he disliked collecting debts at a convent. He thinks of the "nice nun there, really sweet face" in those days when Milly was a kiddy and about her "tubbing night" and thus the "American soap" he bought. Those were good times, halcyon days, when Marion was gentle yet. His musings are interrupted by the greetings of Mrs Breen, an old flame, now married to an "old mosey lunatic." Bloom learns from Mrs Breen that their friend Mina Purefoy is in the lying-in hospital, Holles Street--"She's three days bad now." As he walks on, undecided where to take his lunch, he inwardly condoles with the unfortunate Mrs Purefoy.

The sight of a squad of constables reminds him how he got involved in a crowd of young medicals demonstrating against the Boer war. A heavy cloud hides the sun, and his mood is darkened by a sense of the endless, futile routine of things, trams passing one another, ingoing, outgoing, ceaselessly clanging along grooved circuits. He sees A.E. (Geo. Russell) in conversation with a young woman and wonders if she is Lizzie Twigg, one of the numerous Dublin girls who answered his advertisement for a typist "to aid gentleman in literary work."

Bloom enters a restaurant but the sight of the carnivores at their feed revolts him. Nauseated, Bloom backs out and remembers the time when he was employed in the cattlemarket. Not surprising after this reminiscence of the variegated massacre of the slaughter-house, Bloom considers, almost approvingly, the daintier diet of the cannibal. The realism of such passages may seem repulsive to some of the omnivores who read them, but civilized man is apt to forget that as he dies so he lives "beastly" (to quote Buck Mulligan) and, but for his soul, if any, has little to brag about.

At last, in Davy Byrne's, after a cheese sandwich and a glass of Burgundy, Bloom finds that his dark mood is passing and yields to an evocation of remembered beauty, of an earlier romantic experience with Molly, only to quickly change to consideration of their relationship currently: "Me. And me now. Stuck, the flies buzzed. His downcast eyes followed the silent veining of the oaken slab. Beauty: it curves: curves are beauty. . . . Lovely forms of woman sculped Junonian. Immortal lovely. And we stuffing food in one bole and out behind: food, chyle, blood, dung, earth, food: have to feed it like stoking an engine."

Meanwhile the other customers at Davy Byrne's are discussing the runners for the Ascot Cold Cup; Bantam Lyons tells Paddy Leonard that Bloom has given him a tip for the race--a lie which is destined to land Bloom later in the day in trouble with a Cyclops. On his way to the Museum (to examine the anatomy of the Greek goddesses there exhibited) he plays the Good Samaritan to a blind piano-tuner.

Approaching the museum, he espies Blazes Boylan in the offing; as before (see the Hades episode) on the occasion of a similar glimpse of his wife's lover, Bloom's perturbation is indicated by a breaking up of the silent monologue and a self-deluding attention to something about his person. The comedy is played to himself, not for the benefit of possible onlookers.

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One of the preoccupations of the Homeric heroes as they landed at each unknown isle was to discover the kind of food on which the inhabitants lived. The Odyssean formula "men who live upon this earth by bread" is not an empty periphrasis for "human beings"; the food a nation eats is, to a certain extent, the criterion of its civilization, just as the library of an educated man is usually the index of his mental make-up. Pausanias speaks contemptuously of the Arcadians as eaters of acorns and wearers of pigskins and Odysseus and his companions would have ranked the Arcadians lower in the scale than "men who live by bread." Clearly the expression "bread-eaters" distinguishes mortals from Gods and brutes. Wandering Greeks believed they needed to ascertain the table-manners of the folk whose land they had made--whether they were to encounter the charm of kindly lotus-eaters, the culture of the breadline, or--most urgent problem of all--the perils of cannibal hospitality. Had Odysseus known the diet of the "strong Lestrygonians," he would certainly have dissuaded his companions from mooring their ships between the jutting cliffs of the port of Lamos. The decoy, "noble daughter of Lestrygonian Antiphates," inveigled them to the hall of her father, where "they found his wife, huge of bulk as a mountain peak and loathly in their sight." She called renowned Antiphates who forthwith "clutched up one of the company and made ready his midday meal." Then he raised the war cry and the huge Lestrygonians cast at the ships of Odysseus with great rocks "and anon there rose from the fleet an evil din of men dying and ships shattered withal. And like men spearing fishes they bare home their hideous meal."

As in the Odyssey, so in the record of Bloomsday the pangs of hunger and rites of refection have their appointed place. The persistence of the "hunger motif" in the Odyssey is noteworthy; it makes itself heard in season and out of season, as, for instance, when Odysseus is making an impassioned appeal to King Alcinous (Book VII) or, again, at the dramatic moment when Odysseus is about to re-enter his palace (Book XVII). The preoccupation when, where and how to procure the next meal is ever with the wandering man, be he Greek or Jew. In the Lestrygonian episode, however, the "need for food" theme dominates all others and is developed to a climax of disgust, followed by a quiet close--Bloom's frugal collation of a sandwich and glass of wine.

Here, as in the preceding episodes, the metaphors employed are in harmony with the theme, and alimentary allusions add their pungency to the heavy noon-reek of Dublin's luncheon-hour. Thus the pro-Boers are "young cubs yelling their guts out," sentimental verse is "creamy dreamy stuff," Molly Bloom is "well nourished," judges are "crusty old topers," Paddy Leonard adjures Bantam Lyons if he is "worth his salt" to give him the straight tip for the Gold Cup. The art of architecture, which is one of the subjects treated in this episode (the references to buildings range from the pyramids and the Chinese wall to the Dublin Museum, designed by Sir Thomas Deane), is blended with the nutritive theme in Mr Bloom's allusion to "cream curves of stone." Joyce's method of selective terminology is further illustrated by the nomenclature of persons or places seen or mentioned by Bloom in his silent monologue. Thus he pauses at Butler's monument house corner, remembers how he "played the monkey" at Goose Green, recalls Vinegar Hill and the "Butter Exchange Band," passes the Provost's House, occupied by the reverend Dr Salmon.

Also we find some direct recalls of the Homeric description of the disaster which befell Odysseus' companions at Lamos. "The gulls swooped silently two, then all, from their heights, pouncing on prey. Gone. Every morsel. Aware of their greed and cunning he shook the powdery crumb from his hands. They never expected that." Bloom pictures a communal kitchen with a "soup pot as big as the Phoenix Park. Harpooning flitches and hindquarters out of it." The descent of the gulls, pouncing on prey, recalls the onslaught of the Lestrygonians, swooping down from their cliffs upon the unexpected quarry, and the soup pot may be likened to the ring of the harbor, where the crews of all the Achaean ships save that of Odysseus (who bad prudently moored without) were drowned or harpooned by the cannibals. Laestrygonian, too, is the theme of Bloom's limerick on the sad end of a worthy missionary, Mr. MacTrigger, who was eaten up with zeal, and his dyspeptic "feel as if I had been eaten and spewed".

The callous king Antiphates is symbolized by Bloom's imperious hunger; the sight and reek of food are the decoy, his daughter, and the horde of the Lestrygonians may be likened to the teeth, Homer's "hedge of teeth," a palisade of hungry sentinels. Famine, in fact, that greatest tyrant of all, has launched more ships and burnt more towers than Beauty herself, ruin of cities. Hunger could worst even the loyalty of Irish catholics, as Mr Bloom observes. "Why I left the church of Rome? Bird's Nest." (A society for the "conversion" of catholics.) "They say they used to give pauper children soup to change to protestants in the time of the potato blight. Society over the way papa went to for the conversion of poor jews. Same bait. Why we left the church of Rome?" The converts during the potato blight (1847) were known as "soupers" and the term "boiled protestants" which the Irish sometimes use for boiled potatoes may owe its origin to this conversion.