The disappearance of the sun in Calypso sends
Bloom's reveries into a very dark place. Where the Near East
had inspired pleasant thoughts, first of wandering through the
streets of an Islamic city, then of owning shares in a
Palestinian plantation, and finally of enjoying the fruits of
that region with Jewish friends, it now centers on the "dead
sea," a "Vulcanic lake" that makes him think of the biblical
story of the destruction of the "cities of the plain: Sodom,
Gomorrah, Edom." The story of Lot's family seems emblematic to
Bloom of the fate of the entire Jewish people. Soon it will be
clear that he is thinking also of his own life.
Of "Vulcanic lake, the dead sea," Gifford
observes that "In the mid-nineteenth century, the Dead Sea was
assumed to occupy the giant crater of a dead or inactive
volcano, but by 1903 the New International Encyclopedia
could announce: "The region is not, as has been supposed,
volcanic." Bloom's slightly outdated science allows him to
connect the Dead Sea to the fire and brimstone that the Bible
often associates with divine wrath: "Brimstone they
called it raining down." Brimstone is the biblical
name for sulphur, whose strongly unpleasant odor often
accompanies volcanic eruptions. Elemental sulphur is highly
flammable.
Numerous passages in the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament
threaten the wicked with fire and brimstone, e.g. Genesis
19:24, Deuteronomy 29:23, Psalm 11:6, Isaiah 30:33 and 34:9,
Ezekiel 38:22, Revelation 19:20, 20:10, and 21:8. Bloom seems
to be thinking mainly of the first of these, the chapter of
Genesis in which YHWH's angels direct Lot and his family
members to leave their city of Sodom: "Then the Lord
rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from
the Lord out of heaven; and he overthrew those cities, and
all the plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and
that which grew upon the ground" (19:24-25).
This chapter does not list all the "cities of the
plain" (29), but in an earlier chapter of Genesis
Sodom and Gomorrah are grouped with Admah, Zeboiim, and Zoar
as cities that "were joined together in the vale of Siddim,
which is the salt sea" (14:2-3). The Valley of Siddim is
usually understood to be on the southern shores of the Dead
Sea, and Zoar was almost certainly located just south of that
salt-laden lake. Bloom mistakenly remembers "Edom,"
a desert region slightly farther south, as having been one of
the five cities.
This "barren land, bare waste"—sunk deep in
the earth, blasted by volcanic ash, sterilized of life,
reeking of sulphur, bordering the "poisonous foggy
waters" of a weedless, fishless sea—returns in Oxen
of the Sun, where the biblical "waste land"
is now "a home of screechowls and the sandblind upupa." In
this passage of Oxen, huge animals "come
trooping to the sunken sea, Lacus Mortis.
. . . Onward to the dead sea they tramp to
drink, unslaked and with horrible gulpings, the salt somnolent
inexhaustible flood."
In Calypso the blasted condition of the land images
the fate of the Jewish people. For Bloom they are "the
oldest, the first race," "The oldest
people." The polar antithesis to Zionist dreams of
making the desert bloom, in his imagination, is the thought
that Jews have "Wandered far away over all the earth,
captivity to captivity, multiplying, dying, being born
everywhere," and now have no home to return to. The
land that gave their lives meaning has no more life to give: "It
lay there now. Now it could bear no more. Dead: an old
woman's: the grey sunken cunt of the world." The
focus on childbearing in these sentences makes clear that
Bloom is thinking not only of the Jewish people, but also of
his own life as a husband, a father, a bearer of family
lineage.
