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Katerina Stojcevska

Analysis of the fifth episode of Ulysses- The Lotus Eaters


This episode is full of various elements such as tranquillity, lazyness, mindlessness and escapism, which have a narcotic effect on the readers. The idea of a kind of a sleepy, drugged, absence of reality runs through this episode. Bloom intends to forget Molly's infidelity but it comes back to him like a boomerang. The title of this episode is borrowed from Homer's Oddysseus and of all of the adventures of Oddysseus, the story of the lotus eaters is the most retold, relived and redreamed. The mythological elements in this episode are the Lotus eaters who are people who live on an island where Odysseus and his men are stranded by a storm. The lotus eaters offer the men food(flowers)that somehow causes them to forget their journey they are on and they long to stay on the island forever. By forgetting their homes they forget their identities, their origin, race and gender. Home is the beggining of everything in everyone's life, it stands for all the bonds to a place, to the persons, to the past, that determine our identity within society. Ironically in "Lotus Eaters" Bloom intentionally wants to forget the everydayness, but it is impossible. It is interesting that this episode in Joyce's Ulysses is marked by movement whereas in Homer's Oddysseus the lotus eaters with their hospitality try to stop the journey of Oddysseuss' men and although Bloom is moving in this episode it feels like he is on the same spot. The sweetness of the fruits of the accomplished life and of the release that comes after the solution of the unsolved problems that occupy us and keep us in life is priceless, but here in this episode the accent is not on the values of life in reality, but on the escapism(conscious and subconscious) of the problems of reality. Bloom forgets a recipe for Molly's lotion, and his latchkeys - a parapraxis according to Freud because Bloom unconsciously feels that his home is usurped by his wife and her lover and he is just their servant, he doesn't feel that he belongs to his home. By unconsciously forgetting the recipe for Molly's lotion he objects against his servitude, his submissiveness, towards her and he unconsciously wants to punish her for her infidelity. Bloom consciously tries to escape from his identity by adopting a pseudonym of Henry Flower and that is one of the main transformations of Bloom's name,which undertakes an independent journey through Ulysses. Flower is a kind of a synonym to Bloom and ironically neither Bloom is in his sexual bloom - he is sexually passive with an active sexual unconsciousness nor Henry Flower is a real flower, it associates the hero with the lotus flower and suggests that Bloom is himself a foreign substance. The other flower that appears in this episode is the flower that Martha Clifford sends him "a yellow flower with flattend petals" - the flower that doesn't have any scent- a flower without a scent is so incomplete because

it lacks the main characteristic by which the other flowers are recognised, so Martha has got an incomplete personality like her flower, and ironically at the end of her letter she asks Bloom about the perfume that Molly uses. Both,Bloom and Martha fail to have a real connection to the world, their language of flowers although silent is so painful: "Language of flowers,they like it because no one can hear." This language reveals the unspoken truth about their unsatisfied and incomplete lifes. In a direct interior monologue at the church, Bloom compares religion to the lotus of all people:
"Shut your eyes and open your mouth. What? Body. Corpse. Good idea of Latin Stupifies them first. Hospice for the dying. They don't seem to chew it; only swallow it down."

He expresses his ideas on the effect that Latin has got on the people, people are impressed by the language they don't understand and they believe in the religion without any questions, unconditionally, it makes them forget their problems, crises, it gives them a sweet escape from the reality just like the lotus, it provides a perfect state of happiness that doesn't include reality.At the end of this chapter Bloom imagines his penis as a floating flower:
" He forsaw reclined in it at full,naked,in a womb of warmth,oiled by scented melting soap,softly laved.He saw his trunk and limps riprippled over and sustained,buoyed lightly upward,lemonyellow:his navel,bud of flesh:and saw the dark tangled curles of his bush floating,floating hair of the stream around the limp father of thousands,a languid floating father."

In this excerpt Bloom compares his penis to the lotus flower but ironically that flower prohibts his escape from reality and it is not the cure for his problems it is the source of his problems, because he is sexually passive, he doesn't have an active sexual life. On the surface, this seems to have sense but after rereading of this part I realized that it is not the sexual organ which is in the centre of his problems, there is a competition between the navel and the penis and the winner is probably the navel because the navel is a symbol of the separation of the child from the mother. The child is very happy when he is in the mother's womb but the problems begin when he is facing the real world, so Bloom wants to be reunited, reborn again, that's the symbolism of the navel. In Oddesseus the navel is associated with the home that lotus eaters are so prone to forget so Bloom's navel gazing testifies his anxieties. Fears and phobias extending over the entire body can not be connected so much with the penis as with the navel. In dreams analysed by Freud,flowers often stand for "an exchange of sexual gifts"for example carnations symbolize the "carnal"transaction of the marriage bed,in which the dreamer receives the flower of her husband's penis in exchange for her defloweration. Flowers may transform gender rather then differentiate them.Bloom encounters gelded horses,"a stamp of guttapercha wagging between their hunches and he ruminates about castration in church choirs."suppose they wouldn't feel anything afer kind of a placid.No worry.Fall into flesh.Don't they?Gluttons,tall,long legs.Who knows?Eunuh:One way out of it."If men in lotus eaters are castrated,then women

have the phallic roles. Martha Clifford sends Bloom a flower and we know that traditionally it is the man who gives a flower to a woman, she also writes in her letter that she is going to punish him it is also a traditional men's role:
"I am awfully angry with you. I do wish I could punish you for that. I called you naughty boy because I do not like that other world......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, if you do not write."

Martha addresses Bloom as naughty boy so as to awake his sexuality and she threatens to punish him, all of this just for Bloom's amusement, his fetish is probably to be punished by somebody for his passive sexual performance:
"Naughty boy:punish:afraid of-words,of course.Brutal,why not?Try it anyhow.A bit at a time."

The actress Mrs Bandman Palmer, who played Hamlet in Dublin on the evening of June 15, 1904 is described by Bloom as "Male impersonator". Her tranvestism provokes him to wonder whether Hamlet was himself a woman and if it is true that's the reason for Ophelia's suicide. Also Bloom's imaging of his penis at the end of this episode is not as masculine because he mentions the navel which is the symbol of the maternal rather than on paternal origin so sexes are intermingling in this chapter. When Bloom sees the adverstisment for the play Leah, he remembers not only the actress Mrs Palmer but also his father's impression on a play where the same actress played a part and the most touching scene, according to his father's saying, was the scene where the old blind Abraham recognised his son's voice, who left him long time ago and at the end Abraham puts his son's fingers around his face. This is the uncanny according to Freud,familiar and yet strange. Bloom has a strange feeling when he thinks about this, it is the connection between the old Abraham's destiny and his own destiny. Both of them are abandoned prematurely by their sons, (Bloom's son also died), and Bloom is also abandoned by his father who commited suicide:
"Poor papa! Poor man! I'm glad I didn't go into that room to look at his face. That day! O dear! O dear! Ffoo! Well, perhaps it was the best for him."

Bloom didn't dare to see his father for the last time,not from fear but perhaps from anger because his father intentionally decided to take his life and to left him prematurely. At the chemist's shop when Bloom tries to remember the ingredients of his wife's lotion he remembers her exotic beauty, her dark eyes and her beautiful skin:
"-Sweet almond oil and tincture of benzoin, Mr Bloom said and then orange flower water, it certainly did make her skin so delicate like white wax. Brings out the darkness of her eyes. Looking at me the sheet up to her eyes, Spanish, smelling herself, when I was fixing the links of my cuffs."

When Bloom imagines Molly he associates her with the Far East.The East is something that is unknown, exciting and new to Bloom. He compares the East with Molly's childhood in Gibraltar. He recalls her, unwillingly, many times in this chapter. By recalling her he mixes his temporal thinking (about Molly) with the spatial thinking about the Far East. This ends with a mixture of space and time as a

result of Bloom's free thinking. Bloom first starts to think about the Far East when at the beginnig of this episode he stops to read packet labels on the window of Belfast and Oriental Tea company. Inspired by the tea labels, Bloom imagines the atmosphere of the East:
"The far east. Lovely spot it must be: the garden of the world, big lazy leaves to float about on, cactuses, flowery meads, snaky lianas they call them. Wonder it is like that. Those Cinghalese lobbing around in the sun, in dolce far niente. Not doing a hand's turn all day. Sleep six months out of twelve. Too hot to quarrel. influence of the climate. Lethargy. Flowers of idleness. The air feeds most. Azotes. Hothouse in Botanic gardens. Sensitive plants. Waterlilies. Petals too tired to. Sleeping sickness in the air. Walk on roseleaves. Imagine trying to eat tripe and cowheel. Where was that chap I saw in that picture somewhere? Ah, in the dead sea, floating on his back, reading a book with his parasol open. Couldn't sink if you tried: so thick with salt. Because the weight of the water, no, the weight of the body in the water is equal to the weight of the. Or is the volume equal of the weight? It's a law something like that."

The atmosphere of the East is so appealing, so real, so attractive. Bloom longs to stay in that state of tranquillity, peacefulness,worriless atmosphere where his identity is unidentifed and he lives trough the images of that land not through his duties and problems. Bloom contemplates on the Catholic church as a kind of a drug to the people and he also introduces a new perspective on Catholicism -that of the outsider , of the Jewish man. Because of the fact that Bloom is an outsider, his relation to his service is largely aesthetic one. He can enjoy the music and admire the priest's frocks without any religious struggling , the way that Stephen Deadalus does. While Bloom's thoughts are as heretical as Stephen's, his intentions are different he is just incredibly curious. He is affected by the church atmosphere where he tries to understand the rituals, the people's faith, the drink(wine) that is given to the believers and his thoughts make his perception so unique and exraordinary. He wonders why the priest doesn't drink beer instead of wine, and thinks because probably the wine is more aristocratic :
"The priest was rinsing out the chalice: then he tossed off the dregs smartly. Wine. Makes it more aritocartic than for example if he drank what they are used to Guinness's porter or some temperance bevarage Wheatley's Dublin hop bitters or Cantrell and Cochrane's ginger ale(aromatic)."

He thinks about the bread that the believers eat and the idea that it represents:
"Something like those mazoth: it's the sort of a bread: unleavened shew bread. Look at them. Now I bet it makes them feel happy. Lollipop. It does. Yes, bread of angels is called. There is a big idea behind it, kind of kingdom of God is within you feel. First communicants. Hokypoky penny a lump. Then feel all like one family party, same in the theatre, same in the same swim. They do. I'm sure of that. Not so lonely. In our confraternity."

He thinks that the believers eat the bread because it symbollically presents a part of God,we know that the bread represents Christ's body, and by eating the bread the people have a feeling that they are not alone, they share their problems with the other people. He also misreads the inscription on the back of the priest's frock instead of

I.N.R.I that means - Iron nails ran in, that symbolizes Jesus's crusification because Jesuss' hands were nailed on the cross and he suffered unendurable pains on the cross untill he died, Bloom is led by the memory of Molly's explanation of that meaning and unconsciously recreates it into I.H.S- "I have sinned"- he unconsciously considers this as Molly's confession not as an explanation because he longs to hear those words from her, he wants her repentance for her infidelity.The other misreadng that occurs to him is: "I have suffered", so through parapraxis again he refers to his sufffering from his wife's infidelity. He compares himself, his sufferings to the sufferings of Jesus Christ, unintentionally, with this misreading. As an outsider who is into the aesthetic he appreciates the sacred music which according to him is splendid. He wants to enjoy in the sensuallity and visuallity of the church's atmosphere. This episode launch us into the world of sensual beauty, smells, visual perception, music, but also the everyday problems, our losses, the unrealised sex drive as a source for unhappiness, the fragments of our thoughts , that can not be avoided because they present life. Joyce's complex language is so rich in meanings and interpretations but even in this episode he exhibits different subjects that can be read differently, but it is impossible not to find anything that won't arise the reader's curiousity and attention. Bloom's dizzy, lazy, drugged, escapism that marks this episode is a kind of reminder that people can not escape their problems no matter how hard they try to force this escape, there is always something that brings back their problems and burdens, so their coping with the everyday's difficulties is something that shapes their characters and lifes. After all, what is life without worries, fears and problems?

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