Lestrygonians (original) (raw)

After the interruptions and miscommunications of ‘Aeolus’, the eighth episode of Ulysses appears refreshingly unified. Starting with Homer’s man-eating Lestrygonians, this essay links the chapter’s mythic parallelism to its other traditional critical unities: plot (a hungry Bloom looks for lunch), naturalistic characterization (he is increasingly ‘dejected’ by scenes of carnality and rapacity), and language (the continual food puns and imagery). However, the Homeric parallel also directs attention to consumption in its broader, social sense. Taking Bloom through the heart of Dublin’s burgeoning consumer center, Joyce foregrounds branded products and other finished commodities, and these lead out from the seemingly self-contained text towards its material, historical context: a colonial consumer economy in which Irish industry is stifled by British dominance in manufacture and trade. I argue that chapter 8 of Ulysses presents Joyce’s so-called ‘initial style’ in its finished form. Consisting in the interplay between Bloom’s inner world and the outer world of 1904 Dublin, and conditioned by the greater social, ideological and discursive contexts in which Joyce wrote and situated his work, the style of ‘Lestrygonians’ encourages the reader to clinch interpretive strategies ready for the trickier straits that follow.