Lestrygonians (original) (raw)
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In literary history, food and eating are central themes to the work of certain writers; to others, they are metaphors or motifs associated with some other larger themes. Among those of the latter writing perspective is James Joyce, in whose fiction food and its consumption receive a complex and subtle significance. Joyce’s work being itself extremely complex and with multiple connotations, this study focuses just on one section of his work, namely on the episode known as the ‘Lestrygonians’ from the novel Ulysses. Actually, Joyce’s preoccupation with food in this section is so obvious that one might consider it to be this episode’s central theme. It may be so, but it is also true, as we attempt to argue, that Joyce makes connections between food and both the private and the public aspects of the character’s life in order to embrace again a wide range of issues, central to his entire work, including the questions of self-identity, individual frustration and alienation, family, love, ...
In literary history, food and eating are central themes to the work of certain writers; to others, they are metaphors or motifs associated with some other larger themes. Among those of the latter writing perspective is James Joyce, in whose fiction food and its consumption receive a complex and subtle significance. Joyce’s work being itself extremely complex and with multiple connotations, this study focuses just on one section of his work, namely on the episode known as the ‘Lestrygonians’ from the novel Ulysses. Actually, Joyce’s preoccupation with food in this section is so obvious that one might consider it to be this episode’s central theme. It may be so, but it is also true, as we attempt to argue, that Joyce makes connections between food and both the private and the public aspects of the character’s life in order to embrace again a wide range of issues, central to his entire work, including the questions of self-identity, individual frustration and alienation, family, love, sexuality, social status and behaviour, nationalism and religion. To reveal the literary significance of food and the ways in which Joyce employs food, hunger and eating as a means of engaging with these issues represents the main aim of the present study.
The Commodification of James Joyce
Crossroads. A Journal of English Studies
Since its publication in 1922, James Joyceʼs Ulysses has been mined by critics more than it has been read by the general public. For several decades academic work on the novel was largely carried out by American scholars, much to the chagrin of Irish academics, and lambasted by everyone from the Irish press and politicians to Joyce family members, and perhaps most of all by the Roman Catholic establishment, which in the years after the formation of the Irish Free State operated almost as an arm of the government. John McCourtʼs highly readable monograph study describes, decade by decade, the reception not only of Ulysses, but also of Joyceʼs other works in Ireland, and analyses the growing commodification of Joyce, charting the growth of the ʻJoyce industryʼ from the early Bloomsday celebrations held by half a dozen enthusiasts to the modern day festivities attended by thousands of revellers, most of whom are happy to admit that they have barely opened Joyceʼs magnum opus. McCourt focuses on three aspects of the consumption of Ulysses: book sales and the early difficulty of obtaining copies of the book; scholarly exploration and critical reception at home and abroad; the use and abuse of Joyce and his work by vested interests, including the Irish government, private businesses, and the Irish tourist industry. A fourth and hitherto under-researched thesis is that Joyceʼs self-imposed exile is central to any interpretation of Ulysses. McCourt argues that Joyce was influenced by his life away from Ireland, especially in Trieste, much more than is acknowledged by most Joyceans.
‘Plumtree’s Potted Meat: The Productive Error of the Commodity in Ulysses’
Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 2017
This article identifies a peculiarity in Joyce’s representation of perhaps the most prominent commodity in Ulysses, Plumtree’s Potted Meat. Numerous symbolic interpretations of the product have been proposed, for the most part elaborating the sexual and mortuary connotations already made explicit in the novel. But while earlier critics sought Biblical and Classical parallels, and later critics drew political analogies, Plumtree’s has scarcely been considered as a historical fact, a commodity sold in turn-of-the-century Dublin. Returning to Fredric Jameson’s radical intervention “Ulysses in History”, this article eschews the symbolic approach, and shows that while Joyce undoubtedly drew the commodity into complex symbolic networks, these do not exhaust its significatory function: Plumtree’s Potted Meat turns out to be just as suggestive as a pot of meat as it does a symbol of sexual intercourse. However, detailed analysis of this particular commodity also shows that Jameson’s historicisation remains incomplete. Approaching the product with what Andrew Gibson has defined as methodological “particularism”, this article demonstrates the central importance of the Irish situation to understanding Joyce’s representation. Against earlier symbolic readings, this article builds upon Jameson and Gibson to identify Joyce’s treatment of this particular commodity as part of his broader engagement with imperial discourses in the “Ithaca” episode—a stylistic engagement, which exposes the exploitative motivations behind British ideologies of progress and universal improvement. Connecting Plumtree’s Potted Meat to other comparable commodities in Ulysses, notably Bovril, it sheds new light on the political dimensions of Joyce’s complex representation of Irish consumer culture, moving away from the decontextualised and sometimes anachronistic speculations that have up to now dominated critical discussion.
Eating With Bloom on the Sixteenth of June: Food in Ulysses
ABEI Journal
Food is not only a biological need but also a socio-cultural phenomenon. Though food is a vital need for people to survive, it does not only contain taste and ingredients, but contains other things like emotions, symbols of identity, power relations, gender roles, economy and social rules. Food choices affect lots of areas in the society and the life of individuals. This article will analyze the use of food in James Joyce’s Ulysses through its ordinary hero Leopold Bloom. The novel, as the epic of the body, uses food as a reflection of everyday life and grotesque realism. Moreover, food is used throughout the novel to exemplify Bloom’s personal and social identity. Bloom is a pacifist, nontraditionally masculine man, half Irish, half Jewish and also feels like an outsider in Dublin. All these aspects are narrated in Ulysses through the food he chooses to eat. Joyce has created a novel about life with all its aspects, including food.
In this essay, I posit an approach to eliciting the relationship between style and ideology in Ulysses that reads the stylistic strategies of the text in relation to Joyce's Irish experience of the English language. This essay will assert that Joyce's linguistic and stylistic experimentation can be read as an expression of the colonial experience of Imperial language. The sequence of stylistic variation that constitutes the structural pattern of the whole in Ulysses undermines the notion that art mirrors 'reality' and questions the notion that language can even represent experience. My thesis will aim to demonstrate how this deconstruction of representation is not transhistorical, but rather specifically conditioned by the cultural politics of colonial experience. If we can read the sequence of heterogeneous styles as functioning to undermine the veracity of an 'extant' reality that art mirrors through representation, this textual strategy necessitates an unstable narrative discourse throughout the entire text. Therefore I propose an approach to the broadly synonymous style of the first six episodes of Ulysses that focalises a linguistic instability more commonly associated with the later sections of the text. Both of these components of the texts stylistic structure, the deceptive instability of the ‘initial style’ and the later succession of stylistic variation, are determined by the political and discursive conditions of Joyce’s colonial experience.
Food on the Move: Peristalsis in James Joyce's Ulysses
Dublin Gastronomy Symposium , 2022
Small chapter. The corporality of the clergy, Bloom's aversion to men and meat, his recourse to a cheese sandwich, and his erotic memories of shared seedcake on Howth Hill, are all in this food-laden episode. The interlude of "Wandering Rocks" draws together some extra-circumstantial events that are necessary to appreciate preceding and proceeding events, such as Boylan's seduction food hamper, and thus to "Sirens". Here, at last, in the Ormond Hotel, Bloom has a good square meal in the loneliness of company, subsiding into melancholia at the thought of his lost infant son, his father taken by suicide, his faltering marriage and an unconsummated love-affair, all represented and embodied in the last sardine, left languishing under the sandwich dome. Although "Cyclops" begins with a description of the recently built Corporation vegetable market in Mary Street, this episode is very much about orality and the barflies in Barney Kiernan's public house, the main consumption being words and bile, bringing Bloom into conflict with the Citizen. The latter prompts Bloom to espouse his Jewishness, and cultural identification with Christ, Mendelssohn and Marx, leading to his eventual evacuation from the pub by an assault with an empty biscuit tin. In "Nausicaa" he is excited by a titillating glimpse of Gerty MacDowell's knickers. In "Circe", all the foods of the day come back to haunt and assault him, beginning with a barrage of cabbage stalks (545). He arrives at the brothel breathless, with a stitch in his side, his pockets crammed with a lukewarm pig's crubeen and a cold sheep's trotter (413). Exhausted and spent, he rescues Stephen and they repair to a temperance coffee hut provided for the sustenance of late-night cabmen, where they buy stale buns and drink inedible coffee, later rescinded by cocoa and a secular communion in Bloom's actual home in Eccles Street. Alongside the remains of the lovers' feast, the pantry items on the dresser are itemised by Bloom, testifying to a distillation of his material life amongst the dishes of sour milk and fresh steak. As Bloom climbs into bed he compares Molly's buttocks to melons, and her breasts to pears. Molly, teetering on the edge of sleep from post-coital drowsiness is reminded of past events in her life that link sex to food, and food to Bloom. She reimagines many of her sexual encounters through the language of food, and circuitously returns to Bloom, with her reminiscence of the shared seedcake, and her present feigned outrage at Bloom's request for breakfast in bed on the morrow. This shared seedcake is of symbolic importance throughout the book. Bloom has already remembered the occasion earlier in the day as he drinks a glass of Burgundy, and it is here that we can see how Joyce understood the Abstract: James Joyce had an exceptional interest in the physiological or normal functions of the body. This is a gastro-critical reading of the journey that food takes from tongue to gut and beyond in Ulysses, Joyce's modernist novel written and published in Paris, 100 years ago this year, on February 2, 1922 (1998).