Simply Joyce by Margot Norris

Author:Margot Norris [Norris, Margot]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO007000, BIO000000
ISBN: 9781943657056
Publisher: Simply Charly
Published: 2016-08-12T04:00:00+00:00

5. Lotus Eaters

Most of the Odyssey describes the varied and startling adventures of Odysseus during his 10-year journey home to Ithaca after the ending of the Trojan War. Leopold Bloom’s own odyssey, as it were, is compacted into a single day.

He leaves his home after breakfast and visit to the outhouse, and spends the rest of the day in Dublin, encountering his own varied adventures along the way. It begins innocuously enough in the next chapter, with a stop at the post office, where he picks up a letter addressed, curiously, to a “Henry Flower Esq” (59). He then stops at a church where Mass is being said, drops by the chemist’s to order some lotion for his wife and pick up a bar of soap, before he heads to the Turkish baths. The Homeric parallel gives the chapter the title “Lotus-Eaters” in reference to a visit Odysseus and his men make to an island where the friendly inhabitants offer them lotus-blossoms to eat, which make the men drowsy and forgetful. This chapter focuses on Leopold Bloom’s passivity, his attendance at a religious service Karl Marx might have considered an “opiate,” his visit to a chemist whose fragrant lotions might remind us of the palliative lotus-blossoms, and that mysterious letter to a man named “Flower.”

Why is Bloom getting a letter at a post office, when he has just had mail delivered to his home? The letter turns out to be from a woman named Martha who tries to mimic the pornographic chiding of a brothel Madam who calls him a “naughty boy” and tells him “I am awfully angry with you. I do wish I could punish you for that” (63). If his wife Molly entertains a suitor, Bloom has apparently initiated his own epistolary affair of sorts with a woman he has never met, and to whom he sends stamps and money to encourage provocative missives that appeal to his masochistic fantasies.

These initial signals of infidelity on both parts suggest that there is something wrong with the Bloom marriage, although we begin to learn what it is only in the next chapter, “Hades,” when Bloom is in a carriage with Stephen’s father and another friend to attend a funeral. Hearing Simon Dedalus talk about his son Stephen makes Bloom feel envious and think regretfully about his own lost son, “If little Rudy had lived” (73). But now we learn something quite startling. According to Bloom, little Rudy was conceived when Molly looked out the window one morning and saw two dogs copulating, a sight that sexually aroused her to want to make love with her husband—“Give us a touch, Poldy. God, I’m dying for it. How life begins” (74). It is not until a later chapter that the final piece of the puzzle falls into place, when Bloom thinks about sex with his wife Molly and admits “Could never like it again after Rudy” (137). He appears to blame a sex act stimulated by animalistic lust for the death of little Rudy, as well as the subsequent impairment of his sex life with Molly.

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