"The Lotus Eaters"

by Andrew Williamson

“Lotus-Eaters,” the fifth episode of James Joyce’s Ulysses, was originally published as an installment in the July 1918 edition of “The Little Review," a “little magazine” of the early 20th century in which the first thirteen episodes of the novel appeared in installments. The episode engages the themes, among others, of marital infidelity, fetishization and Catholicism, which all figure prominently in the work as a whole. Following directly after the pathetic vision of Bloom’s home-life presented in episode 4, “Lotus Eaters” depicts the manifold temptations that might lure Bloom away from Molly. At once carnal, sensorial and religious, these various temptations recreate the effect of the lotus flower, an opiate whose narcotic quality threatens to sidetrack Odysseus’s journey home to Ithaca in Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey.


In the famous schema that he developed for his friend Stuart Gilbert, Joyce called the narrative technique of this episode “narcissism.” In the context of the novel, the word “narcissism” need not carry the negative connotations of its modern synonyms “self-aggrandizement” or “conceit.” More salient to this particular case is the idea of “taking pleasure in or by oneself,” a meaning grounded in the classical Narcissus myth from which the word originates. To take pleasure in oneself is to do so conspicuously without the help of anyone else, which seems appropriate for Bloom since, as the preceding episode demonstrates, his wife Molly offers little support.


In the alternate schema that Joyce wrote for his Italian translator Carlo Linati, he listed the meaning of this episode as “the temptation of faith.” Among the many temptations that Bloom encounters during the course of the episode, one is the All Fellows Catholic church. Bloom feels himself drawn to the church, indeed drawn into the church, and the largest part of the episode is spent in awe of the ritual proceedings of the Mass. Joyce’s words—“temptation of faith”—are carefully chosen; Bloom’s experience of the Mass is memorably sexualized, and he is more interested in the amorous possibilities of the church than with the religion itself. The Linati schema lists “the cabhorses, communicants, soldiers, eunuchs, bather, and watchers of cricket” all as correspondences for the temptation of the Lotus Eaters. The episode occurs at 10 a.m.

Plot Overview

The episode opens with Bloom walking along John Rogerson’s quay. Bloom turns from the quay onto Lime Street, making several more turns before arriving at the window of the Belfast and Oriental Tea Company. Gazing into the window, Bloom has the occasion to imagine the distant and (to his mind) intoxicating lands from which the exotic Ceylon teas originated. “Wonder is it like that. Those Cinghalese lobbing about in the sun in dolce far niente, not doing a hand’s turn all day. Too hot to quarrel. Influence of the climate. Lethargy. Flowers of idleness,” Bloom thinks to himself, invoking commonplace stereotypes about “Far East[earners]” and the soporific effect of the sunny climate (Joyce 58). These daydreams set the tone for the rest of the episode, which will occur in a lethargic haze of sensual tantalization and the vague promise of future sexual gratification.


Bloom continues on walking until he arrives at the post office to collect his mail. We learn, however, that Bloom is not picking up mail for himself per se, but for “Henry Flower Esq,” a fake name that Bloom has chosen for his mailbox. Only in episode 8 does the reader learn that Bloom, the advertisement salesman, has placed an advertisement of his own in The Irish Times (“Wanted, smart lady typist to aid gentleman in literary work.” [Joyce 131]) and that he, for the sake of discretion, has assumed the sobriquet “Henry Flower.” From among the 44 women that responded to his classified ad, Bloom chose Martha to “aid” him in his “literary work.” Of course, neither Bloom nor Martha seems to maintain any pretense about the sort of work to be done or the sort of assistance to be rendered, and it is her raunchy letter that Bloom retrieves from the mail-clerk.


Before he can find a sufficiently private place in which to read the letter, however, Bloom runs into an acquaintance named M’Coy. M’Coy detains Bloom with inane small-talk, and Bloom becomes frustrated. Bloom can feel that the envelope from Martha contains something more than a sheet of paper—and this intrigues him—but he cannot open it until he is in private. Because Bloom is dressed in all-black, the two of them eventually get onto the subject of Paddy Dignam’s death, at which M’Coy expresses his shock and sorrow. For all his concern, though, M’Coy cannot attend Dignam’s funeral later in the day, and so he asks that Bloom put his name down on the list of attendees. Bloom acquiesces, and they part company.


Bloom ducks into an alleyway, and tears the envelope open. Inside, he finds a letter and a desiccated, pressed flower. Martha’s letter indicates that her relationship with Bloom is already strained (“I am sorry you did not like my last letter.” [Joyce 63]), and, despite its suggestive sexual language, implies that she and Bloom have not yet met in person. This is a source of anxiety for Martha, and she entices Bloom with sadomasochistic proposals (“Please write me a long letter and tell me more. Remember if you do not I will punish you. So now you know what I will do to you, you naughty boy…” [Joyce 63-4]). In a phrase that will reverberate through Bloom’s mind for the rest of the day, Martha asks him to “tell me what kind of perfume does your wife wear. I want to know” (Joyce 64). Bloom has the distant sense that the flattened flower is meant to communicate a message, but he has difficulty deciphering that message and eventually continues on his peripatetic exploration of Dublin.


His next major stop is at the All Hallows Cathedral, where a mass is taking place. Bloom, the Jew, enters the cathedral to observe the ritual ceremonies, and although curious about the proceedings, he is predictably light on his Catholic theology. Bloom experiences the mass as an outsider, and so views the ritualized activities from an unorthodox perspective ("Churchgoing" 681). As a result, Bloom spends the large part of the mass attempting to decipher the meaning of the priest’s language (Latin) and his symbolic actions (the giving of the Eucharist). With Martha’s letter still in the front of his mind, Bloom is especially inclined to interpret the priest-supplicant relationship through the lens of sexual domination. Pious acts that, at least officially, have no sexual connotations (such as kneeling in front of the priest to receive the Eucharist) are charged in Bloom’s mind with a sadomasochistic valence that he seems to relish.


Bloom leaves the church and continues on to the chemist’s shop, where he must pick up a tincture for his wife Molly. Bloom has forgotten the bottle, however, so he promises to return later in the day. On the way out of the store, he picks up a bar of lemon soap which the shopkeeper says he can pay for when he returns later that afternoon (Bloom will not actually come back).On his way out of the shop, Bloom runs into an acquaintance named Bantam Lyons. Lyons is preoccupied by the Ascot Gold Cup (a horserace to be run that afternoon), particularly by which horse to place his money on. Bloom is holding the day’s newspaper, and Lyons asks to see it so he can read up on a particular contender. Bloom tells Lyons that he can keep the paper, he was just about to throw it away anyhow. Lyons looks sharply at Bloom because, as we will later learn, there is an outsider horse in the race named “Throwaway” facing steep 20-1 odds against winning. Lyons mistakes Bloom’s unwitting and offhanded remark for a betting tip, and so he rushes off to his bookie. (Lyons will make a fortune when Throwaway beats those steep odds.) The episode closes with Bloom alone in the street, imagining the bath he hopes to take when he returns home, conjuring up the image of “a languid floating flower” (Joyce 71).

Homeric Parallels

Joyce’s title “Lotus Eaters” finds its immediate roots in Book 9 of Homer’s Odyssey, in which the sea-battered Odysseus recounts to his host Alcinous the story of his failed voyage home from Troy. In the course of their voyage from Troy, Odysseus and his crew come across an unknown island whose inhabitants survive on nourishment from the lotus flower. Odysseus dispatches three men to learn more about the island’s “race”:

They fell in, soon enough, with the Lotos Eaters,
who showed no will to do us harm, only
offering the sweet Lotos to our friends—
but those who ate this honeyed plant, the Lotos,
never cared to report, nor to return:
they longed to stay forever, browsing on
that native bloom, forgetful of their homeland.       
        (Homer, Book 9, Lines 98-104)
With this as background, we are launched into the “lethargic,” luxuriating and self-indulgent world of Leopold Bloom in the fifth episode of Ulysses. As with Odysseus, the threat of “forgetting” one’s “homeland” remains ever-present throughout Bloom’s day. Comparing the everyman Bloom with the master tactician Odysseus necessarily involves an element of comedy. Odysseus must face this and manifold other challenges because he offended the god Poseidon by gouging out the eyeball of the Cyclops, Poseidon’s son. Bloom’s temptations are laughably ordinary in comparison: the sound of an eunuch choir heard while passing through a church, the scent of a tincture in the chemist’s shop, the banal sexual proposition of an unknown lover. Even if we never experienced Dublin on June 16, 1904, we have the sense that Joyce has succeeded at evoking the experience of a specific place at a very specific moment time. Bloom’s ordinary encounters are all constitutive of that specific place. Compared to the timeless and universal quality of Odysseus’s decades-long voyage to his homeland, then, Bloom’s problems seem humorously constrained to a specific moment in history, in a specific city, in the life of a specific individual.


And yet, we are meant to understand that, through these commonplace experiences, Bloom is grappling with questions on a cosmic order of magnitude. Where Odysseus must pry himself and his men away from the narcotic lotus flower, Bloom feels himself drawn to the sedative effects of the Catholic mass that he happens upon. For Homer’s lotus flower, Joyce substitutes the Eucharist:

Something like those mazzoth: it’s that sort of bread: unleavened showbread. Look at them. Now I bet it makes them feel happy. Lollipop. It does. Yes, bread of angels it’s called. There’s a big idea behind it, kind of kingdom of God is within you feel. First communicants. Hokypoky penny a lump. Then feel all like on family party, same in the theatre, all in the same swim. They do. I’m sure of that. Not so lonely. In our confraternity. Then come out a bit spreeish. Let off steam. Thing is if you really believe in it. Lourdes cure, waters of oblivion, and the Knock apparition, statues bleeding. Old fellow asleep near that confessionbox. Hence those snores. Blind faith. Safe in the arms of kingdom come. Lulls all pain. Wake this time next year.
                                                       (Joyce 66)
Pericles Lewis has written of these lines that, “[l]ike an amateur anthropologist who has descended from outer space with the vaguest knowledge of Catholic theology, [Bloom] contemplates the sacraments of the Eucharist and Penance and attempts to explain their power. Bloom arrives at a workable theory of the social function of the mass not all that far from the attitudes of contemporary social scientists” (“Churchgoing” 681). Indeed, one is hard-pressed not to hear in Bloom’s ideas echoes of the Marxist opinion that religion is the “opiate of the masses.” That the mass is spoken in Latin is further evidence to Bloom’s mind that religion serves this sedative end, since that foreign language “stupefies them (the worshippers) first” (Joyce 68). The disorienting effect of the Latin language will resurface to Bloom's consciousness throughout the course of the day.

Analysis

In this episode, Bloom is preoccupied by the indulgence of his own sensual and sexual desires. Bloom has trouble paying attention to M’Coy during their exchange, his thoughts continually wandering away from the subject of conversation and toward the unopened letter from Martha. As M’Coy jabbers away, Bloom’s interior, unrelated thoughts intrude into the narrative, thereby displacing M’Coy from center stage. To M’Coy’s verbose expressions of disbelief at Dignam’s death Bloom offers laconic, monosyllabic replies: “Yes, Mr Bloom said” (Joyce 60). Once M’Coy gone on his way, the main character thinks to himself “Didn’t catch me napping that wheeze” (Joyce 62). Bloom’s disinterest in M’Coy’s frenzied speech contributes to the overriding sense of “narcissism” in the episode. Bloom is so wrapped up in his own experience of the world and in the coming thrill of Martha’s letter that he has little regard for others.


Bloom and Martha bear aloft their epistolary flirtation without ever having met in the flesh. In episode 11 “Sirens,” Bloom will make an initial attempt to return Martha’s correspondence, but he will ultimately leave the letter unsent. There is only the simulacrum of interaction between the the unfaithful husband and his mistress, and for all intents and purposes, Martha could just as well be any anonymous woman arousing Bloom with her tantalizing words. Bloom does not so much seem attracted by Martha herself as he does by Martha’s attraction to him, and so the recurrence of her words ("What kind of perfume") to him throughout the day has the masturbatory effect of inflating Bloom's ego. If Narcissus’s primary failing was to become enamored of his own reflection, then falling in love with another person is, in some fundamental sense, an anti-narcissistic act. One’s regard is turned outward rather than inward. But for Bloom, Martha’s attractiveness consists in her obsession with him and her putative submissiveness to his desires, and so this ostensible act of affection only serves to advance Bloom's narcissism. As we will learn in episode 17, Bloom actually has a statue of Narcissus sitting in the kitchen of his home (Joyce 599). This interplay of self-obsession and arousal will appear again in episode 13 “Nausicaa” when Gerty McDowell basks in the sexual attention of the masturbating Bloom.


The pseudonym under which Bloom chooses to conduct his relationship with Martha is at once tongue-in-cheek and tragic. At the most basic level, it seems intended to mirror Bloom’s real-life name. Instead of “Bloom” for the last name, we now have “Flower” (that is, a flower blooms). And Gifford informs us that the name Henry “entered English from the Old High German Heimrich(ruler of the house),” a name that is equally suggestive of his authority as “Leopold” (“the people’s prince,” [Gifford, 85; 70]). Of course, “ruler of the house” is precisely what Leopold Bloom is not, and so the pseudonym establishes an alter-ego through which he can live out his fantasies. The name further implies Bloom’s expectation that, in this relationship at least, he will be “the ruler of the house,” that he will occupy the paternalistic power position as arbiter of the law (“Esq”). By same token, the last name “Flower” is suggestive of Bloom’s prudishness (remember, he has yet to meet Martha face-to-face). Perhaps Bloom cannot escape his own true self even in this escapist fantasy. With the interplay of these competing forces, the name finally reflects Bloom’s self-defeating approach to Martha: he is a man who cheats on his wife without consummating the extramarital affair.


Martha seems willing to play along with this fantasy, however. She declares herself “awfully angry,” repeatedly calls Henry a “naughty boy,” and says she wants to “punish” him, but of course, this banally sadistic sexual language only draws attention to the fact that the power balance seems to run in exactly the other direction: “Henry” will not make plans to see Martha, and she is left pining for him. Although Bloom clearly lusts after Martha, he remains, for the duration of the episode, in a state of lethargic, unexceptionable arousal. It would almost seem that he cannot be bothered to exert the physical energy that the sexual act demands. Martha’s question about what kind of perfume Bloom’s wife wears is a submissive gesture that hints at the lengths to which she will go in order to please “Henry.” Later, in episode 15 "Circe," Bloom will feel compelled to answer for these perceived transgressions. A protracted dramatic interlude in the midst of the novel, that episode breaks sharply from established conventions of prosody with its histrionic depiction of a trial scene in which several Dublin women come forward to accuse Bloom of sexual indecency. Because of the episode's hallucinogenic quality, it seems most probable that the "trial scene" actually only occurs in Bloom's imagination. If this is indeed the case, then the nightmarish scene sheds light on how the main character conceives of his own sexually promiscuous behavior in "Lotus-Eaters."

Bibliography

Blamires, Harry. The New Bloomsday Book (Routledge: London, 1996)
Ellman, Richard. James Joyce (Oxford University Press: New York, 1960)
Gifford, Don. Ulysses Annotated(University of California Press: Berkeley, Calif., 2008)
Homer. The Odyssey trans. Fitzgerald (Farrar, Straus and Giroux: New York, 1998)
Joyce, James. Ulyssesed. Gabler (Vintage: New York, 1984)
Lewis, Pericles. The Cambridge Introduction to Modernism(Cambridge University Press: New York, 2007)
----------------. “Churchgoing in the Modern Novel,” Modernism/modernity, 11:4 (2004): 667-94.