Eating the Dead

James Joyce evocatively referred to his modernist masterpiece Ulysses (1922) as an “epic of the human body” as it catalogues the peripatetic itinerary of Leopold Bloom, a “wandering Jew,” through 1904 Dublin. Bloom’s emphatic physicality in Ulysses situates him as an embodied site of corporeal lack, appetitive desire, and epicurean pleasure. Throughout its index of hunger and consumption – and with particular emphasis on the sections of “Calypso,” “Hades,” and “Lestrygonians,” in which the protagonist devours a morning kidney and a midday Gorgonzola sandwich – Leopold Bloom’s self-surpassing hunger signifies more than itself, expanding to incorporate sexual desire, human waste and death, theology and ritual, and to complete the chain of consumption, cannibalism; his insistent and anxious corporeality signifies at once desire and lack, ingestion and waste, sacrality and profanity, life and death. Bloom’s unruly hunger offers a lens into the material and corporeal logic of Ulysses – all thoughts, ideologies, identities, and abstractions, including language, originate in and return to the grotesque consumption of the individual and collective body politic, and Joyce imagines Bloom’s corporeality to undermine the ideological foundations of modern selfhood, culture, nation, and empire. At the same time, Bloom’s status as a Jewish Other questions whether his own body is always already represented as indigestible waste unable to be incorporated into the body politic of Catholic Dublin. In another way, Bloom’s material body might also become a corporeal signifier for the linguistic and textual corpus of Ulysses itself – the transgressive body engendering a surplus of signification while resisting static and stable representation. However, while Joyce’s Ulysses imagines the desiring body as a site and source of radical critique, Joyce’s epistemologies of pleasure also suggest that the corporeal body might offer some sanctuary and renewal from the all-consuming anxieties of modernity.