As Bloom sits in Davy Byrne's
in Lestrygonians, trying to decide what to eat for
lunch, he thinks, "Sandwich? Ham and his descendants mustered
and bred there." In these sentences four different puns (ham,
mustard, bread, sandwich) are laid atop a slice of biblical
history—the story of Noah and his son Ham, also alluded to in
Circe. The witticism is not Bloom's, though he may be
commended for having read and remembered it. It appears to put
him in the mood for a sandwich with gorgonzola and mustard.
Pun number one is "
Ham."
Genesis reports that after surviving the flood Noah took up
grape-growing, drank some wine, and fell asleep naked in his
tent. "And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his
father, and told his two brethren without. / And Shem and
Japheth took a garment, and laid it upon both their shoulders,
and went backward, and they saw not their father's nakedness"
(9:22-23). Stephen later recalls this episode: "
And Noah was
drunk with wine. And his ark was open."
When Noah wakes up from his stupor and learns that Ham has
beheld the paternal phallus, he curses Canaan to be "a servant
of servants," visiting the sin of the father upon the son. The
story may have been intended to justify the subjugation of the
Canaanite people to the Israelites. In some later
interpretations Ham was arbitrarily held to represent the origin
of the dark-skinned people, despised by God, who lived to the
south. He is associated with the Egyptians in Psalms 78, 105,
and 106, and perhaps in other traditions he became linked to the
Arabian peninsula, because a bit of whimsical 19th century
writing asserts paradoxically that the deserts there are well
stocked with food:
Why should no man starve on the deserts of Arabia?
Because of the sand which is there.
How came the sandwiches there?
The tribe of Ham was bred there and mustered.
The puns on ham, bread, and mustard have stuck in Bloom's
memory, and it appears that he also recalls the wonderfully
delivered pun (worthy of Groucho Marx) on "sand which is." The
whole production seems perfectly suited to Bloom's goofy
affection for cute double meanings.
Fritz Senn was the first commentator to discover the source
of Bloom's puns. In "Trivia Ulysseana I," JJQ 12.4
(1975): 443-50, he remarks that "Bloom is not original but
remembers some current joke, one version of which is recorded
in C. C. Bombaugh, 'A Pun-Gent Chapter' in Oddities and Curiosities of Words and
Literature, ed. Martin Gardner (New York: Dover, 1961),
p. 158 (this is a republication of the first 310 pages of Gleanings
for the Curious from the Harvest-Fields of Literature,
3rd ed., J. B. Lippincott, 1890)." In defense of the pun on
punning, Senn references several details in Lestrygonians:
"Pungent mockturtle oxtail mulligatawny," "pungent meatjuice,
slop of greens," and "pungent mustard, the feety savour of
green cheese."
