On first encountering the potato in Calypso,
perhaps the only plausible inference to draw is that, given
the Irish context, it may have something to do with the Great Hunger. Bloom does think
of the "potato blight" in Lestrygonians,
and at the end of that chapter he notices his personal potato
again as he searches for his lemon soap: "Try all pockets.
Handker. Freeman.Where did I? Ah, yes. Trousers.
Potato. Purse. Where?" But when the object next surfaces at
the end of Oxen of the Sun, some well-educated
medical student has somehow notices Bloom's possession, infers
that he carries it as a prophylactic, and scorns such ignorant
beliefs of common people: "Sir? Spud again the
rheumatiz? All poppycock, you'll scuse me saying. For the
hoi polloi." When the potato reappears early in the
next chapter, Circe, the impression that it guards
against disease is confirmed. After Bloom is nearly run down
by a tram, he reaches instinctively for the potato: "(He
feels his trouser pocket.) Poor mamma's
panacea."
So the potato is a talisman or home remedy, and Bloom's
mother, Ellen Higgins Bloom, gave it to him. Not long later,
she shows up to save him from danger and reenacts the
donation: "O blessed Redeemer, what have they done to him! My
smelling salts! (She hauls up a reef of skirt and
ransacks the pouch of her striped blay petticoat. A phial,
an Agnus Dei, a shrivelled potato and a
celluloid doll fall out.) Sacred Heart of Mary, where
were you at all, at all?" As Bloom says to Zoe later in the
chapter, the potato is "A talisman. Heirloom."
He tells her, "Sir Walter
Raleigh brought from the new world that potato and
that weed [tobacco], the one a
killer of pestilence by absorption, the other a
poisoner of the ear, eye, heart, memory, will, understanding,
all." Asking her to return it to him, he says, "(With
feeling.) It is nothing, but still, a
relic of poor mamma." At the end of the long
hallucinatory passage introduced by the mention of Sir Walter
Raleigh and tobacco, when Bloom is burned at the stake, the
Daughters of Erin invoke the "Potato Preservative
against Plague and Pestilence."
In "Faith and Betrayal: The Potato in Ulysses" (JJQ
28.1 [1990]: 269-76), Robert Merritt cites several
relevant findings from Redcliffe N. Salaman's The History
and Social Influence of the Potato (Cambridge UP, 1949,
rpt. 1985). For many peasants in Ireland and other countries,
Salaman writes, "A dried tuber carried in the pocket, or
suspended from the neck, is a sure protection against
rheumatism. / A 'pealed' potato, if carried in the
pocket of the same side as an aching tooth, will cure the
latter as soon as it itself is reduced to crumbs" (118).
Salaman also observes that the Spanish conquistadores called
the potato a turma de tierra or earth-testicle,
perhaps prompted by "the Aymara name choque which it
is claimed stood equally for a potato tuber or a testicle"
(129). While Joyce clearly knows something of the history of
the potato's importation from the New World, it seems
incredible to suppose that he would have known of this
etymological link with testicles. Nevertheless, Circe
unmistakably makes the association. Zoe discovers the potato
when she passes her hand over Bloom's pants to caress his
cock: "Has little mousey any tickles tonight?... How's
the nuts?" As Bloom blathers about which side his
boys hang toward, she feels something hard and, concerned that
it is a syphilitic "chancre," reaches "into his left
trouser pocket and brings out a hard black
shrivelled potato," and "puts the potato
greedily into a pocket."
When Bloom eventually persuades Zoe to return what she has
taken, "She hauls up a reef of her slip,
revealing her bare thigh, and unrolls the potato from the
top of her stocking." As Merritt observes, "The potato
as a surrogate for Bloom has passed from his groin to hers and
back again, symbolically performing the rite of sexual
intercourse" (273). This sexual exchange with Zoe clearly
extends a circle of connections that began with Bloom's
mother, because she too, like Zoe, "hauls up a reef of
skirt" to give Bloom the potato. And Zoe's last
name is...Higgins! The strong linguistic links between Ellen
and Zoe, and their mutual circulation of the potato through
Bloom, may say something about the Oedipal origins of his
sexual desires. Alternatively, one might suppose that Ellen's
gift protects him from the Circean allure of the prostitutes.
Many Joyceans have observed that the potato in Circe
seems to stand in for the sprig of moly that enables Odysseus
to resist Circe's spells. Although Bloom differs from his epic
prototype in temporarily losing his protective plant, the
analogy does seem relevant, because he regains the potato just
as he regains his manhood: he breaks the spell of the Nymph,
rebukes Bella, takes the potato back from Zoe, and then makes
sure that Stephen is not cheated of his money, earning Bella's
admiration. This Homeric association adds to the many
suggestions that the potato holds some kind of power to ward
off evil or disease.
Finally, Joyce curiously tucked into a distant chapter of his
novel a reference to Jewish religious ritual that, if a reader
should ever spot the connection, would make the initial
mention of the potato in Calypso more suggestive of
talismanic potency. In Nausicaa Bloom is pondering
the dangers of seafaring (as befits his Odyssean role in that
chapter), and thinks of lucky charms: "Off he sails with a scapular or a medal on him
for luck. Well. And the tephilim no what's this they
call it poor papa's father had on his door to touch."
As happens so often with his attempts to recall past learning,
Bloom gets the word tephilim wrong, and knows it,
though he is thinking of something very similar. A mezuzah
is a decorated case containing verses from Deuteronomy
that is affixed to the right-hand front doorpost of a Jewish
home (and sometimes to the frame of every room in a house).
The mezuzah functions as an amulet to ward off evil. And where
did Bloom touch his potato in Calypso? "On
the doorstep" of his house, before reaching back to
pull the door shut behind him. Molly is probably recalling
such a performance of remembered Jewish ritual when she
thinks, "didnt he kiss our halldoor yes he did what a
madman nobody understands his cracked ideas but me."
Of such incredibly fine, endlessly involuted patterning, Hugh
Kenner says: "this, assuming even that we possess the lore and
have the luck to make the connection, is not something we
might hope to think of when we first read of how Bloom crossed
his threshold and said 'Potato I have,'
because at that time we have some hundreds of pages to
traverse before the meaning of 'potato' will have been
disclosed. Nor, when we know the meaning, does it work
retroactively, since by then we have surely forgotten the
doorframe adjacent to the initial 'Potato I have'...Joyce's
strange book has no stranger aspect than this, that no one
comprehensive reading is thinkable....Ulysses is so
designed that new readers, given, even, what cannot be
postulated, ideal immunity to attention overload, cannot
possibly grasp certain elements because of a warp in the order
of presentation, and veteran readers will perceive after
twenty years new lights going on as a consequence of a
question they have only just thought to ask. Such a question
would be: Why is Bloom made to advert to the potato just when
he does, on a page where there seems no earthly reason for him
to remember the potato or for us to be apprised of it? And
when we think to ask something happens" (Ulysses,
80).
