Bloom's nightmarish vision of a blasted Palestine in Calypso
afflicts him viscerally: "Grey horror seared his
flesh.... Cold oils slid
along his veins, chilling his blood: age crusting him with a
salt cloak." The allusion to Lot's wife, a continuation of his
earlier contemplation of the Lot
story, casts Bloom as an aging man looking back
on his best years, feeling that life has passed him by. Later
chapters confirm this destructive fixation on lost happiness:
the trauma of losing a child has crippled his sexual life,
and he cannot move beyond it.
In Genesis 19 one of the angels tells Lot, "Escape
for thy life; look not behind thee, neither
stay thou in all the plain; escape to the mountain, lest thou
be consumed" (17). Lot argues with the divine command and is
allowed to escape to Zoar rather than climbing into the
mountains. As he and his family enter the town, fiery
destruction rains down on the other cities of the plain. "But
his wife looked back from behind him, and she became a
pillar of salt" (26). Various explanations have
been advanced for this odd punishment. One allegorical
reading, relevant to Bloom, holds that Lot's wife was blasted
because, by looking back, she showed her continuing attachment
to her old life in Sodom.
§ Bloom's
salt-encrusted paralysis suggests the peril inherent in
dwelling sorrowfully on the failures in one's past. Throughout
this day he will dwell on the infant death of his second
child, a tragedy that has blighted the sexual bloom of his
marriage and made him feel like an evolutionary dead end.
Although the loss is not mentioned in Calypso, his
preoccupation with sterility clearly shows how much it
occupies his thoughts: "A barren land, bare waste. . . . It
bore the oldest, the first race. . . . The oldest people.
. . . multiplying, dying, being born everywhere. It lay there
now. Now it could bear no more. Dead: an old woman's: the grey
sunken cunt of the world."
In Hades Bloom thinks of Rudy's death not only as a
trauma but as a personal failing: "If it's healthy it's from
the mother. If not from the man. Better luck next time." In Lestrygonians
he recognizes that grief has undermined his sexual
relationship with Molly: "I was happier then. . . . When we
left Lombard street west
something changed. Could never like it again after Rudy. Can't
bring back time." In Sirens he thinks that his
procreative days have probably ended with the loss of his one
male heir: "Last of my race. Milly young
student. Well, my fault perhaps. No son. Rudy. Too
late now. Or if not? If not? If still?"
There is an immense personal component, then, to Bloom's
fantasy of Palestine as a dead land and the Jews as a
geriatric race. Looking at the facts of his personal life—a
dead son, an arrested sex life, a wife looking elsewhere for
satisfaction, a maturing daughter, an age past the midpoint of
the biblically allotted threescore and ten—Bloom sees himself
on a downward slope. Looking back in this way is deadly.
Several paragraphs later in Calypso, the motif of a
backward glance will
return. The context and the literary allusion are different,
but they imply the same need not to substitute regret for
forward motion.