To briefly switch to a biographical note, it is not surprising that the food discourse of “Lestrygonians” sharpens into the finer point of politics. Joyce was fond of restaurants, of ordering food, of spending extravagant sums on food. He spent so much time and energy in his restaurant-going that he fooled Rollo Myers into saying, “Joyce was something of a gourmet.” ²   But as Sylvia Beach points out, “Joyce pretended to take an interest in fine dishes, but food meant nothing to him, unless it was something to do with his work.” ³   Of course the writing of the “Lestrygonians” chapter was “his work”, but it is hard to imagine the man to whom “food meant nothing” spending so much of his time to get the language of food exactly correct unless it meant something more than simply describing Bloom’s lunch. Ms. Beach goes on: “He urged his family and the friends who might be dining with him to choose the best food on the menu. He liked to have them eat a hearty meal. [...] He himself ate scarcely anything.” Louis Gillet records that “Joyce ate obviously without appetite, he always toyed with his food as if searching for something, and would then push back his plate with a disgusted look: he could put up with almost no food.” ⁴   So Joyce was fascinated by food, but did not enjoy eating, and could not eat much. There is clearly more to the food in “Lestrygonians” than mere description: Joyce is interested in what it means to the Irish and how it helps define their position in 1904. For the connection must be made, as Lindsey Tucker points out, between “the food a nation ate and the culture it produced.” ⁵  

That “Lestrygonians” is about the politics and economics of the Irish diet as much as it is about food is clearly demonstrable from the beginning of the chapter. The opening sentence begins with thoughts of food, “pineapple rock, lemon platt, butter scotch”, yet often neglected is the following revelation that the candy is purchased by a “christian brother” as “some school treat” ⁶   (8:1-2). Bloom notices it must be “Bad for their tummies,” (8:3), and it is, of course, nutritionally inadequate. This is just the first of many references to the Irish diet, specifically its appalling unhealthiness. The fact that the sweet shop is advertised as “Lozenge and comfit manufacturer to His Majesty the King” only reminds the reader of the Imperial Presence lurking behind the unhealthy, colonized Dubliners. Bloom then begins to think of the other of the “two masters” to which Stephen earlier found himself servant. Seeing Dilly Dedalus, Bloom muses on her large family: “Birth every year almost. That’s in their theology [...] Increase and multiply. Did you ever hear such an idea? Eat you out of house and home” (8:32-35). Bloom considers the Catholic church to be partly responsible for Irish poverty. The priests, he points out, have no extra mouths to feed—“Living on the fat of the land.” In the first page of “Lestrygonians” alone, Joyce has called attention to the economic and political problems caused by Ireland’s service to both the English and Italian masters—all through the channel of food discourse.

The correspondence between food and economic factors of the Irish political climate of 1904 continue throughout the chapter. Contrasting Bloom’s thoughts on the priests’ full “butteries and larders”, he notices Dilly Dedalus’ poverty: “Good Lord, that poor child’s dress is in flitters. Underfed she looks too. Potatoes and marge, marge and potatoes. It’s after they feel it. Proof of the pudding. Undermines the constitution” ⁷   (8:41-43). If Joyce is writing a novel about the Irish middle classes, it is just the sort of people the Dedaluses are at least pretending to be that form his subject. Of course the Dedalus family should not be considered “typical” of the Irish middle class—yet how, Joyce seems to ask, can a people be so poor and in ill-health while being under the care and protection of the well-fed priesthood of the Catholic church and the King of England, “sucking red jujubes white”? There is a certain perplexity felt by Bloom in seeing Dilly half-starved, the daughter of a man with whom he shared a carriage only hours before, a part of what should be a respectable family of Dublin.

But it also must be remembered that Bloom himself does not suffer from poverty or ill health. The reminders of Bloom’s household providence are ubiquitous in this chapter alone. His happy memories always seem to lead to what food they were eating: “Rabbitpie we had that day” (8:168), the day Molly wore the “elephantgrey dress” which made him so proud and happy. Another fond memory was getting home on a windy night: “Remember when we got home raking up the fire and frying up those pieces of lap mutton for her supper with the Chutney sauce she liked” (8:194-195). Bloom, it seems, will spare no expense for Molly since, as Joyce recognized, food has enough power over people to make them happy or unhappy. When Bloom has already had his lunch and is out of the room, Nosey Flynn tells Davy Byrne about Bloom’s home life, describing how he met him the day before yesterday:

with a jar of cream in his hand taking it home to his better half. She’s well nourished, I tell you. Plovers on toast.

—And is he doing for the Freeman? Davy Byrne said.

Nosey Flynn pursed his lips.

—He doesn’t buy cream on the ads he picks up. You can make bacon of that. (8:951-56)

The fact that Molly is “well nourished”, that she is seen by Bloom as “just beginning to plump [the elephantgrey dress] out well,” reveals the emphasis placed on eating heartily. Nosey Flynn’s comment about affording food through help from “the craft” is of course possible, but it is more likely that the Blooms merely give food priority in their budget. As Davy Byrne points out, Bloom never drinks too much—an obvious financial advantage. But Nosey Flynn instead shifts responsibility to something outside his control: the mysterious freemasons.

Throughout “Lestrygonians”, Bloom notices those who eat well and those who do not. He notices the “barefoot arab [standing] over the grating, breathing in the fumes. Deaden the gnaw of hunger that way” (8:236-37). His pity for Dilly Dedalus is heightened by his observations of those people who eat well. He notices the evidence of Mrs. Breen’s recent fare: “Flakes of pastry on the gusset of her dress: daub of sugary flour stuck to her cheek. Rhubarb tart with liberal fillings, rich fruit interior” (8:271-73). Not only does this passage reveal Bloom’s astonishing powers of conjecture, recognizing the tart from the tidbits she left behind, but the language reveals something more: the tart is liberally filled; the interior is “rich” in fruit. Yet even Mrs. Breen’s “rich” rhubarb tart contrasts, in terms of nutrition, with Mrs. Purefoy’s husband’s meal. Theodore Purefoy, the Methodist, eats “Saffron bun and milk and soda lunch in the educational dairy,” (8:358-59) which, as Gifford’s Ulysses Annotated points out, sells “health foods.” ⁸   This continues the theme throughout the chapter of Catholic, middle-class Dubliners eating less healthily than those of some other distinction. Theodore Purefoy is a Methodist, he is “well connected” and has a cousin in Dublin Castle. It is the schoolchildren who are treated to candy, Dilly Dedalus who is half starved and Mrs. Breen who lunches on a decadent but undernourishing rhubarb tart.

The theme of Dublin Castle continues with Bloom’s sighting of the constables. It should be remembered that Joyce listed the constable in the schema as the symbol for the chapter. Bloom’s thoughts are curious, as he promptly thinks that the “best moment to attack one [is] in pudding time” (8:410-411). He notices they are well-fed: “Foodheated faces [...] with a good load of fat soup under their belts.” Bloom changes, as Gifford notes, the line from the Gilbert and Sullivan song, suggesting that a “Policeman’s lot is oft a happy one.” (8:407-09). ⁹   Bloom sways between antagonism and sympathy for the constables, later saying, “Can’t blame them after all with the job they have especially the young hornies” (8:421-22). The issue is complex. The Royal Irish Constabulary formed, of course, a large portion of England’s forceful rule, being responsible to subjugate anyone opposing the Imperial rule. Yet they were not Englishmen. G.C. Duggan describes the constables: “Without exception they were Irish-born, their wives were Irish, at least 90 per cent. of them were Catholics, [...] poor gentry, spoilt priests, frustrated schoolteachers, shop assistants and sons of former policemen.” ¹⁰   The general attitude of the Dubliners towards the constables in 1904 would have been a confused mixture of understanding and hostility: these were men who had taken pay from the colonizing government for the express purpose of suppressing those who resisted the oppressive rule. These were Irishmen who were, in the words of one 1903 writer, “ready to pounce upon the most unoffending persons who may have the temerity to advise the people to resist the arbitrary powers of the landlords.”¹¹   But Bloom seems to forgive them their turncoat duties, even when he has had the experience of their pursuit and felt a hint of their royally-granted power. It is their “happy” condition he notices, and that they are some of the few who receive “fat soup” from the colonizing power. ¹²   The constable is a symbol of the Irish who are willing to bow to the King in order to receive their daily bread.

But the economic problem for the remaining Dubliners cannot be solved by English providence. In fact much of the problem seems to stem from Irish economic dependence on England. Ireland had a largely agricultural economy. “In no other country in the world is the raising of all forms of live stock so much the great national occupation as it is in Ireland,” ¹³   which largely put the country at the mercy of its large colonizing market. F.S.L. Lyons points out that at the turn of the century (as at other times) “the argument about whether or not to retain the union was, in economic terms, almost irrelevant. [..] For Ireland the British market would be indispensable.” ¹⁴   Capitalist England economically dominated agricultural Ireland, and would not release its grip. Raymond Crotty, in an analysis of capitalist colonialism, says:

An alien, individualistic, capitalist culture was, in every case of capitalist colonization, superimposed forcefully on an indigenous, collectivist, non-capitalist society of food producers. “The concomitant of cultural contact is social strain.” That social strain [...] manifests itself in every case in the persistent undevelopment of these former capitalist colonies. ¹⁵  

This undevelopment is illustrated in “Lestrygonians” not only in the poor diet but in the architecture, Joyce’s chosen “art” for the chapter. Bloom, when imagining the “cityful” passing away and coming anew, sees, “Houses, lines of houses, streets, miles of pavements, piledup bricks, stones” (8:485-86). He thinks of the landlords never dying and the “Pyramids in sand. Built on bread and onions. Slaves.” The ancient monuments are testimonies to great architecture, the slaves building them for their taskmasters. But in Ireland, only “Big stones left. Round towers. Rest rubble, sprawling suburbs, jerrybuilt. Kerwan’s mushroom houses, built of breeze” (8:490-92). Bloom laments that nothing lasts anymore. If the Irish are slaves to an undying landlord, the best they can hope to build is new suburbs and slums: “Shelter, for the night.” In the Dublin of 1905, the Committee on the Housing Question found that it was better to build new houses outside the city than to begin buying up “unsanitary areas and rebuilding them.” ¹⁶   Thus, the slums were left intact in the city center, and new sprawling suburbs were created cheaply. Bloom laments the Irish slavery and wishes for an end to it, but more than that, he laments that, while slaves, they do not engage in work which will lead to something admirable and permanent, that their houses are “built of breeze” rather than something lasting, like the stone pyramids.

The general Irish attitude of slovenliness and slipshod workmanship was addressed by several authors writing just prior to 1904. One of these, a Dublin historian, compares the Irish people unfavorably with the American: “We must get business habits and methods into their minds, and not alone into the minds of the poorer, but also of the wealthier classes in the community, who still largely lack initiative and business instinct.” ¹⁷   These didactic writers saw part of Ireland’s problem to be laziness. Yet to the patrons of the Burton Restaurant Bloom has attached the phraseology of their capitalist masters. “Every fellow for his own, tooth and nail. [..] Eat or be eaten” (8:701, 703). The very next thought for Bloom is of a socialist “communal kitchen”, particularly how it would not work in greedy and lazy Ireland: “All for number one” (8:714). Mark Osteen, discussing the economics of the chapter, recognizes this as capitalism gone wrong: “Everything eats everything else, but nothing is nourished, and nothing is saved.”¹⁸   Bloom recognizes that the Irish have adopted the capitalist ideology from colonizing England without adopting the necessary enterprise and work-ethic.

Another author contemporary to the setting of Ulysses, simply writing under the initials H—B—, sends letters to America about Ireland, reporting problems of ill-health and poor hygiene, of sub-standard buildings and abhorrent sanitation, and especially of poor work ethics and lazy attitudes. The problem, the author suggests, is not the poverty alone but the inability of the people to improve their own condition.

Does anyone think that Home Rule, or Independence or whatever else is most dear to Irish hearts, will automatically abolish such habits and modes of life, unless individuals are taught to correct them and mend their ways? [...] Why should Ireland wait for Home Rule or anything else to initiate improvements? ¹⁹  

Some of the passages referring to health and hygiene in this 1902 book are strangely similar to the description of the Burton Restaurant. It is hard to find any pride of being Irish in the depiction of the Burton patrons in their “swilling, wolfing gobfuls of sloppy food, their eyes bulging, wiping wetted moustaches [...] A man spitting back on his plate halfmasticated gristle [...] Scoffing up stewgravy with sopping sippets of bread. Lick it off the plate, man!” (8:655-56, 659-60, 676-77). Joyce seems to be asking, along with the author of Letters from Ireland, how the Irish can hope to find independence until they command some semblance of decent living and hygienic standards. The economic problem is partly one of lack of pride. As Radcliffe Salaman brings forward in The History and Social Influence of the Potato, the Irish diet was doomed from the start to have a depressive effect on the people. He quotes Ludwig Feuerbach, the philosopher who first said, “Man is what he eats,”²⁰   speaking on the Irish problem: “You [the Irish] cannot conquer, for your sustenance can only arouse a paralysing despair not a fiery enthusiasm. And only enthusiasm will be able to fight off the giant in whose veins flow the rich, powerful, deed-producing blood.” ²¹   This paralyzing diet, reminiscent of the “centre of paralysis” comment Joyce applied to Dublin, leads to lack of pride and initiative. The economic problems of Ireland, impoverished and oppressed by a colonizing nation, cannot be solved until the Irish are taught to respect their health and hygiene. Yet until poverty is overcome, poor nutrition and poor hygiene are bound to continue. It is an unending cycle: wealth is required for health, and good health is required for there to be wealth.

It is a person like John Howard Parnell, sitting in the Dublin Bakery Company playing chess, which leads Bloom to question the priorities of his countrymen. “That the language question should take precedence of the economic question. [...] Stuff them up with meat and drink. Michaelmas goose” (8:466-68) But it is the “Halffed enthusiasts. Penny roll and a walk with the band,” which concern Bloom. It is when he thinks about “the not far distant day. Homerule sun rising up in the northwest,” that his smile fades and the clouds roll in. For he sees the Irish insistent future-gazing as the biggest problem for Ireland: the fact that no one does anything. Again, the author of Letters from Ireland parallels this idea: “A stranger in Ireland is often struck by the curious waiting aspect of the people. They seem like men about to move into a new house, and unwilling, meantime, to expend time or labour in improving their present surroundings.”²²   This perfectly describes Bloom’s vision of John Howard Parnell playing chess in the D.B.C., of the men in the filthy Burton Restaurant and all the Dubliners who put up with the problem in return for the dream of the “not far distant day.”

From out of the food discourse of “Lestrygonians”, however, come two examples of people who are attempting to address the problem of the Irish servility, two groups on opposite ends of the spectrum of action. The first is the members of the Anglo-Irish literary revival. As Bloom walks towards his lunch, he sees AE, George Russell, coming from what he supposes to be the vegetarian restaurant. In a chapter about food, this cannot be neglected, and the language used to describe the vegetarian diet is significant as a contrast to the description of the meat-eating in the Burton. Russell, writing frequently in the Irish Homestead both at the time Ulysses is set and when it was being written, often commented on the Irish diet, writing for his “Notes of the Week” on 6 January 1906:

We give it as our opinion after a decade spent in investigating the inside of rural Ireland that half its lethargy, laziness, and incapacity for hard work comes from an insufficient diet. We have observed household after household where white bread, tea, American bacon [having been labeled a paragraph earlier: “as unhealthy a food as one could well eat”], potatoes, and cabbage seem to be the main food. ²³  

But Joyce, I would argue, does not place Russell at this point in “Lestrygonians” only to add one more layer to his criticism of the Dubliners’ diet. Rather, Russell’s vegetarianism might represent his more etherial writings or his role within Anglo-Irish literary mysticism of the time. In his early poem “The Holy Office”, Joyce represents Yeats, Russell and their mystical colleagues as fanciful idealists:

But all these men of whom I speak
Make me the sewer of their clique.
That they may dream their dreamy dreams
I carry off their filthy streams ²⁴  

The lack of meat in George Russell’s diet might be seen as an avoidance of reality or an insubstantial quality about the work of the great mystic and poet. Bloom’s description of a vegetarian diet, “windandwatery”, perhaps best gives the hint of this “dreamy” quality. Joyce saw the mystics of the Anglo-Irish literary revival as posers, avoiding the reality of the true Irish situation—just as Bloom sees the vegetarians eating nutsteak, “To give you the idea you are eating rumpsteak. Absurd” (8:539-40). For Bloom, nutsteak is no real alternative to the nutritionless diet of his fellow Dubliners. If one can divide Russell’s writings into economic and occult “voices”, as Hugh Kenner has suggested,²⁵   it is interesting to note that many of the pamphlets on vegetarianism around the turn of the century take on this more mystical rhetoric:

Vegetarianism harmonizes very sweetly with Truth, Love, Beauty, Goodness, and Happiness—And is in true accordance with Nature’s Loveliest Aspects, Love for Animal Life, Brotherhood, and Sympathy, Justice, and Progress, Bodily and Mental Health, Ideal and High-toned Thought, Spiritual Development.²⁶  

Bloom decides that the diet leads to the poetry: “Dreamy, cloudy, symbolistic. Esthetes they are. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was that kind of food you see produces the like waves of the brain the poetical. For example one of those policemen sweating Irish stew into their shirts you couldn’t squeeze a line of poetry out of him” (8:543-47). This is the ultimate comparison, placing the properly fed local representative of the colonizing state next to the mystic poet. The vegetarian diet leads to high-minded, idealistic, windandwatery poetry: but the Irish stew is meat and sweat and real work.

The disparity between AE’s writings and Joyce’s own preference for honest, “filthy streams” is revealed in a letter to Stanislaus, dated 4 October 1906:

AE ought now to write some little immortal dreamy thing about a Trombonist or, better, a Triangle-Player. I wish some unkind person would publish a book about the venereal condition of the Irish [...] I know very little of the subject but it seems to me to be a disease like any other disease, caused by anti-hygienic conditions. [...] Am I the only honest person that has come out of Ireland in our time? ²⁷  

The anti-hygienic conditions, because they are very present and real, is the subject matter Joyce prefers to the “immortal” mystical writings. He makes the ultimate connection between vegetarianism and the mystic writers’ philosophies in an earlier letter to his brother, dated 8 February 1903: “Words cannot measure my contempt for AE at present [...] So damn Russell, damn Yeats, [...] damn vegetable verse and double damn vegetable philosophy!” ²⁸  

But something makes Bloom less critical of vegetarians after the Burton Restaurant, relating that there is “a lot in that vegetarian fine flavour of things from the earth. [...] Pain to the animal too” (8:720-22). Again the clue is in the language used to describe the diners: for unlike AE, the restaurant patrons are all carnivores. Beef seems to be the entree of choice, and throughout the chapter—one with a Homeric correspondence to cannibals—there are a strikingly large amount of references to Dubliners themselves as cows. The constables are “let out to graze,” (8:410) and Milly’s comment about “All the beef to the heels were in” (8:617-18) is remembered in connection to Lizzie Twig’s stockings. Even one of the carnivores in the Burton is “chewing the cud” (8:675) as he masticates his roast beef. Finally, Bloom graphically pictures the slaughter of cattle at the cattlemarket. The description ends with, “Hot fresh blood they prescribe for decline. Blood always needed. Insidious” (8:729). This chapter was being written in 1918, two years after the Easter Rising, and shortly after the “rhetoric of blood” of Patrick Pearse. ²⁹   Pearse was, of course, doing something about the Irish problem, but in a very different method to the Anglo-Irish literary revival. He was the cannibal to AE’s vegetarian. In a 1913 piece, Pearse writes:

We may make mistakes in the beginning and shoot the wrong people; but bloodshed is a cleansing and satisfying thing, and the nation which regards it as the final horror has lost its manhood. There are many things more horrible than bloodshed; and slavery is one of them.³⁰  

The rhetoric of blood riddles the pages of Pearse’s polemic. To Joyce (who recognized the slavery of the Irish but was disgusted by violent means of gaining freedom)³¹   Pearse’s rhetoric would appear dangerous but alluring, “Insidious” as Bloom says (rather inexplicably without this context). He finishes the paragraph with, “Famished ghosts.” Gifford points out the Homeric link ³²   but since this allusion is to the Hades episode instead of Lestrygonians, it seems likely that Joyce includes the phrase here as a further allusion to Pearse, whose pamphlet “Ghosts” played a role in the lead-up to the blood of Easter 1916.

Bloom is on a tight-rope walk between the Scylla and Charybdis of AE and Pearse: both of them are attractive options, but neither quite right. Not unlike Odysseus, Bloom faces many challenges in “Lestrygonians”. In his lunchtime wanderings, Bloom leads the reader past the likes of the middle-class starving, the middle-class cake-eaters and the well-fed priesthood and constables, respective representatives of church and (colonizing) state. We are shown John Howard Parnell playing chess over his coffee, the civil City Marshall contrasting with the incivility in the Burton—the filthy eating habits of the all-for-themselves Dublin middle-class patrons. We are shown the failed capitalism of the slovenly Irish and the careless architecture raised in the suburbs. Finally we are led down a path between the dreamy vegetarian, George Russell, and the blood-thirsty, cannibalistic Pearse towards the “moral” pub and the cheese sandwich, which “digests all but itself” (8:755). This is where Joyce wanted Bloom, taking in all the facets of Dublin life and digesting them, and somehow never self-destructing. The major themes of the rest of the novel are carried out in “Lestrygonians”, the Catholic church and the English Imperial presence, the daily life of the Irish middle classes, fraught with oppression and limitations. But Bloom escapes their fate, remaining above and beyond the turbulence, digesting Irish life with his keen eye, not succumbing to the “fine flavour” of the vegetarians or the “insidious” and “sugary” blood of the cannibals, but sitting in the “moral pub” with his Burgundy and Gorgonzola, remaining outside and—as the chapter ends—“Safe!”