Bloom's dream of a
tropical Asian Eden is prompted by the mention of "the finest
Ceylon brands" on a tea label, and he thinks of the
"Cinghalese," the majority ethnic group of that country: "
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 is it like that. Those
Cinghalese lobbing about 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."
Needless to say, Ceylon is not "like that." The travelogue that
feeds many of Bloom's thoughts of the east,
In the Track of the Sun,
does mention the oppressive heat of the island, but the other
details are fanciful.
Many western Europeans were indulging orientalist fantasies in
Joyce's time, and this is one of many to fill Bloom's mind on
June 16. Later moments in
Lotus Eaters will find him
pondering the meeting of the Palestinian
Mary, Martha, and Jesus from a
painting, and the look of
the
recumbent Buddha in a Burmese statue. The common element
in these three fantasies is "Lethargy," "idleness," "lobbing" or
"loll"ing about, being "lazy," "Taking it easy," "No more
wandering about," finding a "Long long long rest," sleeping for
months at a time. Such thoughts sit strangely with the fact that
it is morning and Bloom has been out of his house for less than
an hour. They make sense, though, as efforts to escape the
anxiety aroused by Boylan's impending visit. The parallel with
Homer's lotus-eaters, whose drugged state makes them lose their
thoughts of home, is quite close.
Bloom doesn't simply dream as the lotus-eaters do; his daydream
features something like lotus leaves. The best-known of the
plants called lotuses are
closely related to "Waterlilies," which come up in his thoughts
three sentences later, though no lotus or water-lily plants have
leaves big enough "
to float about on." Probably no plant
does. Bloom imagines people lounging on top of the leaves, in an
image that one could imagine adorning a psychedelic album cover
of the 1960s. At the end of
Lotus Eaters he will imagine
a more realistic way of being "buoyed lightly upward," in the
warm water of a bathtub, and his penis will become the "languid
floating flower." This revision of an escapist image from the
beginning of the chapter may perhaps be seen as redemptive—the
translation of an idle dream into something more achievable.
The inclusion of "
cactuses" in Bloom's mental picture is
a mystery, as it inserts a desert plant into a tropical jungle.
Joyce added this detail after publishing a version of
Lotus
Eaters in
The Little Review: "the garden of the
world, big lazy leaves, shaky lianas they call them" in that
1918 text became "the garden of the world, big lazy leaves
to
float about on, cactuses, flowery meads, s
naky
lianas they call them" in 1922. A cactus is mentioned in another
such passage that Joyce inserted into later page proofs of
Lotus
Eaters, Bloom's
language of
flowers monologue. There it appears to carry phallic
overtones. Clearly cacti were on his mind, but what they meant
to him may never be fully known.
The "
snaky lianas" are less odd, and the adjective
"shaky" in
The Little Review must have been simply an
erratum, because lianas are inherently snaky. The name does not
refer to a species or genus or family (there are hundreds of
liana species spread across multiple families), but to a growth
habit. Lianas are woody vines, mostly found in moist tropical
forests, that grow up the trunks of trees and often form bridges
from one tree to another in the canopy.
Glossing "
Sleep six months out of twelve" with
information gleaned from Denys Page's
Folktales in Homer's
'Odyssey', Slote comments that "Stephanus of Byzantium
(sixth century), wrote in his geographic dictionary
Ethnika
that Aristotle had claimed, in
On Wonderful Things, that
the Lotus-Eaters sleep for six months (he also claimed that the
Lotus-Eaters were a Celtic race). This is inaccurate; Aristotle
never wrote a work with this title, and Stephanus was the first
writer since Homer to say anything new about the
Lotus-Eaters."
"
Flowers of idleness" sounds like an echo of Lord Byron's
first volume of verse,
Hours of Idleness (1807). Joyce
was clearly thinking of this book when he wrote
Ulysses,
because one of its poems, "
The
First Kiss of Love," echoes throughout the novel.
It may well be the book that Bloom gave to Molly during their
courtship: "he made me the present of Byrons poems," she thinks
in
Penelope. If Bloom is punning on the title of the
book, it would seem to be an idle reference, not expressive of
any particular perceived connection between Byron and the flora
of Ceylon.
"
Azote" is a French word for nitrogen, though Bloom (or
Joyce) strangely adds an "s" to the end. This element, now known
to be one of the three most essential nutrients for plants along
with phosphorus and potassium, was called "azote" by the French
chemist Antoine Lavoisier (1743-94) after the Greek
azoos,
"no life," because it could asphyxiate animals. The discoverer
of the substance, Scotsman Daniel Rutherford (1749-1819), called
it "noxious air." By the early 20th century scientists knew that
plants depended on it, and fertilizers rich in nitrogen,
especially bird guano, were being intensively mined and applied
to croplands.
In
Calypso Bloom has thought about how valuable animal
waste is for growing crops: "
Want to manure the whole place
over, scabby soil. A coat of liver of sulphur. All soil like
that without dung. Household slops. Loam, what is this that
is? The hens in the next garden: their droppings are very good
top dressing. Best of all though are the cattle, especially
when they are fed on those oilcakes. Mulch of dung."
Manure is an effective fertilizer because most of the nitrogen,
phosphorus, and potassium in farm animals' feed is excreted.
Until chemists learned how to synthesize nitrogen fertilizers in
1909, the abundant nitrogen in the earth's atmosphere was
useless for crops. It is unavailable for plant cells until it is
"fixed" by certain bacteria that break its tight chemical bond
with itself and form compounds like ammonium and nitrates. Bloom
is therefore a bit right, but more wrong, to think that "
The
air feeds most."
This reflection on nitrogen, and indeed all of Bloom's
thoughts about Ceylon, have a fragmentary, undeveloped, fuzzy
quality, suggestive of a mind too painfully distracted even to
concentrate on weaving a coherent fantasy. A moment later,
when he turns to the physical principles responsible for
bodies floating in water and falling through space, he
struggles to remember details learned in high school classes
but gets the gets the essential concepts largely right.
Natural science seems to offer Bloom a means of grounding
himself in the real world.
