And Moses went up from the plains of Moab unto the mountain of Nebo, to the top of Pisgah, that is over against Jericho. And the Lord shewed him all the land of Gilead, unto Dan, and all Naphtali, and the land of Ephraim, and Manasseh, and all the land of Judah, unto the utmost sea, and the south, and the plain of the valley of Jericho, the city of palm trees, unto Zoar. And the Lord said unto him, This is the land which I sware unto Abraham, unto Isaac, and unto Jacob, saying, I will give it unto thy seed: I have caused thee to see it with thine eyes, but thou shalt not go over thither.

The fate of Moses, as described there in Deuteronomy, is one with which many readers of Ulysses will be familiar; we have been caused to see the novel with our eyes but are barred from going over thither. Just when we have a sense we’re about to get our heads around the essence of Ulysses its meaning suddenly recedes. It’s as if we’ve been denied the experience of fully entering the text – almost certainly because of some failing in ourselves. Every sight of Ulysses is a Pisgah sight, characterized by a sense of things being provisional, partial, unfulfilled, perhaps even unfulfillable. I want to suggest that this is not necessarily a lack in us as readers but precisely what Joyce as writer has quite deliberately set out to have us experience. Ulysses proceeds by glimpses and whispers, hints and nods in the direction of a wholeness it never quite grants us. It offers a suggestion of totality, but tantalizingly so. That is certainly the case with the complex thicket of imagery associated with plums, sloes, blackthorns, kidneys, cudgels, Erinautics, erotics, exotics, exile and notions of homecomings literal and figurative.

As others have attested, the theme of homecoming in the political sense is announced in the very first word of the very first sentence of the novel:

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.

While the Irish Free State was not established until December 1922, 10 months after the publication of Ulysses, the notion of Home Rule was one that had exercised Joyce for many a year. Indeed, in 1907 he had published “Home Rule Maggiorenne” in Il Piccolo della Sera, a newspaper in Trieste. His brother, Stanislaus Joyce, would translate the article as “Home Rule Comes of Age”:

Twenty-one years ago, on the evening of April 9, 1886, the streets that led to the office of the Nationalist newspaper in Dublin were jammed with people. From time to time, a bulletin printed in four-inch letters would appear on the wall, and in this way the crowd was able to participate in the scene unfolding at Westminster, where the galleries had been crammed full since dawn. The Prime Minister’s speech which had begun at four o’clock lasted until eight. A few minutes later the final bulletin appeared on the wall: “Gladstone concluded with a magnificent peroration declaring that the English Liberal party would refuse to legislate for England until she granted a measure of autonomy to Ireland.” At this news, the crowd in the street burst into enthusiastic cries. On all sides was heard, “Long live Gladstone”, “Long live Ireland”. People who were complete strangers shook hands to ratify the new national pact, and old men wept for sheer joy.

In a brilliant piece of expository writing, Joyce dramatizes the ensuing paralysis of English-Irish relations with numerous references to units of time that, in their being multiples of seven, might be described as “biblical”:

Seven years pass, and we are at the second Home Rule Act. Gladstone, having in the meantime completed the moral assassination of Parnell with the help of the Irish bishops, reads his measure to the House for a third time. This speech is shorter than the other; it lasts hardly an hour and a half. Then the Home Rule Bill is passed. The happy news traverses the wires to the Irish capital, where it arouses a new burst of enthusiasm. In the main room of the Catholic Club, it is the subject of joyous conversations, discussions, toasts and prophecies.

Fourteen more years pass and we are at 1907. Twenty-one years have passed since 1886; therefore the Gladstonian measure has come of age, according to English custom. But in the interval Gladstone himself has died and his measure is not yet born.

In the “Circe” chapter of Ulysses, Joyce alludes to the mollifying role Gladstone had played in the Home Rule movement:

Grave Gladstone sees him level, Bloom for Bloom.

It’s worth looking at the larger context in which Gladstone appears. It’s a landscape of deadlock and inertia reminiscent of the opening of Our Mutual Friend:

Snakes of river fog creep slowly. From drains, clefts, cesspools, middens arise on all sides stagnant fumes. A glow leaps in the south beyond the seaward reaches of the river. The navvy staggering forward cleaves the crowd and lurches towards the tramsiding. On the farther side under the railway bridge Bloom appears, flushed, panting, cramming bread and chocolate into a sidepocket. From Gillen’s hairdresser’s window a composite portrait shows him gallant Nelson’s image. A concave mirror at the side presents to him lovelorn longlost lugubru Booloohoom.

We’ll see more of “gallant Nelson” in due course. For the moment, the mournful face of Bloom is elongated there into a version of George Boole, the English mathematician who spent so many years in Cork. Boole is described as having “attempted a general method in probabilities, which would make it possible from the given probabilities of any system of events to determine the consequent probability of any other event logically connected with the given events”. His name also includes the phrase boo-hoo, an imitative construction meaning to weep loudly.

Grave Gladstone sees him level, Bloom for Bloom. He passes, struck by the stare of truculent Wellington, but in the convex mirror grin unstruck the bonham eyes and fatchuck cheekchops of jollypoldy the rixdix doldy.

Although there will seem to be a dismissal, in “Oxen of the Sun”, of the “preposterous surmise about him being in some description of a doldrums or other”, the fact is that Leopold Bloom, or Poldy, is indeed a sailor becalmed in a stultifying zone. The notions of being “polled” or a “pollard” refer to a hornless cow or a branchless tree, and would seem to support Stanley Sultan’s contention that the template for Ulysses is not so much Homer’s Odyssey as Immram Curaig Maíl Dúin, “The Voyage of Mael Duin’s Currach”, given that the “mael” element in that name refers specifically to being bald or hornless, as in the case of a “moiled” cow. One text of “The Voyage of Mael Duin’s Currach” is contained in The Yellow Book of Lecan and is held by Trinity College, Dublin. A translation of the text, by Whitley Stokes, was published in 1889-90. The “mull” component in Mulligan is another instance of baldness or a tonsure, so it’s no accident Ulysses opens with a shaving scene. One of the features of “The Voyage of Mael Duin’s Currach” that connects it to the Odyssey is an island full of pigs or, in the Hiberno-English term, bonhams. The reference to the “bonham eyes” will conjure for some readers the ghost of Francis Robert Bonham (1785–1863), the son of Francis Warren Bonham, a landowner from Kildare. Francis Robert Bonham would serve as Sir Robert Peel’s election agent. It was in April 1835 that Daniel O’Connell had helped to overthrow Peel’s Conservative ministry, and in the same year he had entered into the “Lichfield House compact”, whereby he promised the Whig Party’s leaders a period of “perfect calm” in Ireland while the government enacted reform measures. The “perfect calm” is reflected in that word “stately”, itself a prefiguring of the Viceregal Cavalcade, the British state occasion, that provides a backdrop to the “Wandering Rocks” episode. The horse-heavy element of the Viceregal Cavalcade is glimpsed in the “equine face” of Buck Mulligan in the Martello tower. That equine element also prepares the way for Mr. Deasy in the “Nestor” chapter. Like Hector, Nestor is known by the epithet “tamer of horses”. and the walls of Deasy’s schoolroom are covered with representations of famous racing horses. Nestor is also associated with the sacrifice of bulls, hornless or otherwise, in honor of the sea god Poseidon, and Mr. Deasy is greatly exercised by the state of “our cattle trade”, a significant component of the Irish economy now seriously threatened by foot and mouth disease. “You will see at the next outbreak they will put an embargo on Irish cattle”, the all-knowing Nestor warns Stephen Dedalus.

The outbreak of foot and mouth disease that did indeed beset Ireland in 1912 – reassigned by Joyce to 1904 – is connected thematically to the fifth plague, a pestilence in cattle, that was visited upon Egypt in Exodus. The relationship between the treatment of the Israelites by the Egyptians and the Irish by the English had long been established in the popular imagination. The Catholic emancipation campaign led by Daniel O’Connell had served as the precedent and model for the emancipation of British Jews, the subsequent Jews Relief Act of 1858, allowing Jewish MPs to omit the words “and I make this Declaration upon the true Faith of a Christian” when they took the Oath of Allegiance. It was Michael Davitt who had called Parnell “the Moses of the Irish race”, an idea taken up by Joyce in that celebrated letter to Carlo Linati in which he explains that Ulysses “is the epic of two races (Israel-Ireland) … as well as a little story of a day”. In his 1912 piece on “The Shade of Parnell”, Joyce had already set it down that Parnell, “like another Moses, led a turbulent and volatile people out of the house of shame to the edge of the Promised Land”.

Let me turn now to the second word in Ulysses, since it is intimately connected to one version of what Bloom might see as “homecoming” to a “promised land”. The “plump” anticipates the moment at which he will be reunited with Molly:

he kissed the plump mellow yellow smellow melons of her rump, on each plump melonous hemisphere, in their mellow yellow furrow, with obscure prolonged provocative melonsmellonous osculation.

If we accept the idea, as so many have, that the name “Homer” appears in the phrase Home Rule, it’s surely not overly a stretch to accept the idea that the word “plum” appears in “plump”. Again, Joyce sets the scene for a number of occasions on which we encounter some version of plumdom. I appeal to Frank Budgen and his firsthand account of Joyce’s method:

“Among other things,” he said, “my book is the epic of the human body … In my book the body lives in and moves through space and is the home of a full human personality. The words I write are adapted to express first one of its functions then another. In Lestrygonians the stomach dominates and the rhythm of the episode is that of the peristaltic movement.”

“But the minds, the thoughts of the characters,” I began.

“If they had no body they would have no mind,” said Joyce. “It’s all one. Walking towards his lunch my hero, Leopold Bloom, thinks of his wife, and says to himself, ‘Molly’s legs are out of plumb.’ At another time of day he might have expressed the same thought without any underthought of food. But I want the reader to understand always through suggestion rather than direct statement.”

I quote at length from Budgen because I’m trying, as a reader, to take Joyce at his word and “understand always through suggestion rather than direct statement”, including my reading of the phrase “out of plumb” as “out of true”. Bloom’s deep awareness of Blazes Boylan’s likely attempt to compromise Molly’s virtue will coincide with the compromising of her verticality. The image that derives from a navigator’s use of a lead weight (plumbum) to sound the depth of water reminds us of the maritime provenance of Ulysses, be it “The Voyage of Mael Duin’s Currach” orthe Odyssey, or a combination of the two – what one might describe as a Mulligan stew. The pun on “plumb” and “plum” reminds me of the fact that the name Nestor includes the idea of nostos, and may be rendered as “one who makes it home”, which is Bloom’s main ambition in his “little story of a day”, Which brings us to the advertising jingle that comes to Bloom’s mind in “Lotus-Eaters” and “Lestrygonians”:

What is home without Plumtree’s Potted Meat? Incomplete.

This approximation of a deal-clinching couplet may send some readers back to Shakespeare, as in “The play’s the thing/wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king”. Since the first component of his name is echoed in Poldy, some readers may already have gone specifically to the character of Polonius, the father of Ophelia and one of Shakespeare’s most complex and rounded-out characters. The core themes of Ulysses – fathers and sons, fidelity, even the nation as a sick body – are also the core themes of Hamlet. On the one occasion Hamlet addresses Polonius directly he states:

Slanders, sir; for the satirical rogue says here that old men
have grey beards; that their faces are wrinkled: their eyes purging
thick amber and plum-tree gum.

For many in the audience the idea of “plum-tree gum” would have meant something quite specific, that’s to say a “vaginal discharge”. As is attested in Shakespeare’s Bawdy by Eric Partridge, the word “plum” on a “tree”, as it appears in Henry VI Part 2, refers to the female pudenda; in his notes to Partridge, Stanley Wells points out that the French term hoche-prunier or “plum-tree shaker” refers to “a man’s yard”. That there was indeed a company called Plumtree, based in Southport, Merseyside, must have seemed like a godsend to Joyce. The sexual inuendoes hovering around the words “potted” and “meat” would have been blissful in themselves. Joyce was able to “complete” the advertising jingle with his “incomplete”, allowing the idea to extend the sense of unfinished business associated with Irish Home Rule and “The Pisgah Sight of Palestine” presented by Stephen in his “Parable of the Plums”. That “Parable of the Plums” occurs in the “Aeolus” chapter, in which there has already been a reference to John F. Taylor’s speech to the TCD Law Students’ Debating Society in 1901, wherein he rails against the autocratic British position espoused by his opponent, Gerald Fitzgibbon:

But, ladies and gentlemen, had the youthful Moses listened to and accepted that view of life, had he bowed his head and bowed his will and bowed his spirit before that arrogant admonition he would never have brought the chosen people out of their house of bondage, nor followed the pillar of the cloud by day. He would never have spoken with the Eternal amid lightnings on Sinai’s mountaintop nor ever have come down with the light of inspiration shining in his countenance and bearing in his arms the tables of the law, graven in the language of the outlaw.

There are two other likely sources for Joyce’s engagement with the idea of Pisgah. One is Robert Browning’s “Pisgah Sights”:

Over the ball of it,
Peering and prying,
Now I see all of it,
Life there, outlying!
Roughness and smoothness,
Shine and defilement,
Grace and uncouthness,
One reconcilement.

Browning’s poem might serve as a precis of Joyce’s method in Ulysses, with its aspiration to “see all of it”. It combines not only Joyce’s procedure in, but the plot of, the novel. Another source for the Pisgah system of imagery may be John Henry Newman’s “Day Labourers”:

One only, of God’s messengers to man,
Finish’d the work of grace, which He began;
E’en Moses wearied upon Nebo’s height,
Though loth to leave the fight
With the doom’d foe, and yield the sun-bright land
To Joshua’s armèd hand.

The “pillar of cloud” mentioned by John F. Taylor has been bodied out as Nelson’s Pillar, the monument on Sackville Street that towered over Dublin. Nelson’s Pillar also functions as Mount Pisgah itself. In “The Parable of the Plums” Stephen presents a story remarkable for its inconsequentiality, unlike “The Parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins” to which it glancingly alludes:

Two Dublin vestals, elderly and pious, have lived fifty and fiftythree years in Fumbally’s lane. They want to see the views of Dublin from the top of Nelson’s pillar …

They buy one and fourpenceworth of brawn and four slices of panloaf at the north city diningrooms in Marlborough street from Miss Kate Collins, proprietress. They purchase four and twenty ripe plums from a girl at the foot of Nelson’s pillar to take off the thirst of the brawn. They give two threepenny bits to the gentleman at the turnstile and begin to waddle slowly up the winding staircase, grunting, encouraging each other, afraid of the dark, panting, one asking the other have you the brawn, praising God and the Blessed Virgin, threatening to come down, peeping at the airslits. Glory be to God. They had no idea it was that high …

But it makes them giddy to look so they pull up their skirts and settle down on their striped petticoats, peering up at the statue of the onehandled adulterer. It gives them a crick in their necks, and they are too tired to look up or down or to speak. They put the bag of plums between them and eat the plums out of it, one after another, wiping off with their handkerchiefs the plumjuice that dribbles out of their mouths and spitting the plumstones slowly out between the railings.

If this is a parable, it is a parable with no obvious lesson unlike, say, that of the sower in Mark 4.3:

A sower went out to sow. And as he sowed, some seed fell along the path, and the birds came and devoured it. Other seed fell on rocky ground, where it did not have much soil, and immediately it sprang up, since it had no depth of soil. And when the sun rose, it was scorched, and since it had no root, it withered away. Other seed fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked it, and it yielded no grain.

And that reference to “thorns” brings us rather neatly to the third word in the first sentence of Ulysses. The etymology of “buck” relates it to “pick”, “poke”, “peak”, not to speak of the “pike” we find in Molly Bloom’s “methimpikehoses”. It introduces a component of spikiness we will come to associate with thorns, particularly the blackthorn. On February 5, 1938, Joyce thanked Peggy Guggenheim for her birthday gift of a blackthorn stick. Though Stephen Dedalus is more often associated with an ashplant, Joyce is keenly aware of the many ways the blackthorn is even more emblematic of Irish life. In “Eveline”, his great musing on home and exile, he has described how:

The children of the avenue used to play together in that field — the Devines, the Waters, the Dunns, little Keogh the cripple, she and her brothers and sisters. Ernest, however, never played: he was too grown up. Her father used often to hunt them in out of the field with his blackthorn stick; but usually little Keogh used to keep nix and call out when he saw her father coming.

As far back as 1840 Mrs. S.C. Hall had remarked that “the shillelagh – the chief weapon of the faction fights – derives its name from a famous wood near Arklow, in the county of Wicklow, where the best oaks and blackthorns are grown”. In The Wild Irishman, published in 1905, T. W. H. Crosland opined:

As the Yorkshireman is said to sport on his escutcheon a flea, a fly, and a flitch of bacon, so in the popular imagination an Irishman of the real old sort is usually conceived in association with a pig, a pipe, and a shillelagh. Rightly considered, one supposes that the shillelagh is a survival of the pre-historic club. In any case, it is a weapon of some character, chiefly notable for its handiness in the matter of skull cracking, and believed to be the pride and joy of every Paddy worth his salt. The shillelagh has undoubtedly earned for the Irish a reputation for roguish and heroic delight in battle. “Tread on the tail of my coat, now,” is supposed to be forever on Irish lips, with immediate results in the article of broken heads. And when we English wish the use of a metaphor for rows and scuffles, free fights and so forth, we have a habit of remarking that the affair amounted to “a regular Donnybrook”– Donnybrook, of course, being a sort of feast of shillelaghs to which all Ireland was wont annually to repair.

There is a theory, which may strike some as being far-fetched, that the shillelagh is a hangover of an ancient Irish martial art, one that may even derive from an Egyptian practice, and which accounts for such organized ructions as Donnybrook Fair:

Who has e’er had the luck to see Donnybrook Fair?
An Irishman, all in his glory, is there,
With his sprig of shillelagh and shamrock so green!
His clothes spick and span new, without e’er a speck,
A neat Barcelona tied round his neat neck;
He goes to a tent, and he spends half a crown,
He meets with a friend, and for love knocks him down
With his sprig of shillelagh and shamrock so green!

So intertwined are the shillelagh and the shamrock that only a few weeks ago, on April 25, 2022, I myself addressed a group in Belmar, New Jersey, in a clubhouse owned by the Friendly Sons of the Shillelagh. In the “Cyclops” episode the denizens of Barney Kiernan’s pub have fun with the singleminded hyperbole of parliamentary discourse:

Mr Cowe Conacre (Multifarnham. Nat): Arising out of the question of my honourable friend, the member for Shillelagh, may I ask the right honourable gentleman whether the Government has issued orders that these animals shall be slaughtered though no medical evidence is forthcoming as to their pathological condition?

Joyce is here cunningly bringing together foot and mouth disease and the shillelagh, which is less a fashion accessory than a defining characteristic of the run of the mill cattle dealer. In Hail and Farewell, George Moore refers to a fair day with “cattle dealers in great overcoats reaching to their heels, wearing broadbrimmed hats, everybody with a broad Irish grin on his face, and everyone with his blackthorn”. The image of the blackthorn-twirling drover in a time of plague brings us right back to the image of Moses with his stick. Indeed, we might remind ourselves that it was Moses striking a rock with his stick, rather than following God’s instruction to speak to the rock, that was responsible for his not reaching the Promised Land. And that brings us to Daniel O’Connell, who, according to a piece published in 1902 in a forum as far-flung as the Adelaide Register had “led Ireland to the British House of Commons as Moses led the children of Israel to Mount Sinai”. The correspondent in the Register does, moreover, comment:

The sight of his promised land was not given to his longing eyes, but as a prophet of the coming time he fulfilled his mission.

No less than Parnell, then, O’Connell is associated both with Moses and a Pisgah sight of Palestine. There’s also a famous photograph of O’Connell carrying a trademark shillelagh. In one political cartoon, published in Puck, he is represented as a pig with a shillelagh – no doubt a pig leading an island filled with pigs. O’Connell’s blackthorn was cut from the same hedge as the one carried by Michael Cusack, the founder of the Gaelic Athletic Association, on whom the windbag Citizen and his shillelagh are most immediately based.

Let’s go back for a moment to that description of the two vestals spitting the stones “slowly” down onto what would eventually be known as O’Connell Street, since that pun on the word “sloe” so efficiently connects the blackthorn with its fruit. We recall that Blazes Boylan has drunk sloe gin in the “Sirens” episode, that in “Penelope” Molly remarks on the smell of sloe gin on his breath. Boylan has, in a profound sense, been made complete by the essence of the plum tree since, the blackthorn is properly known as prunus spinosa, the spiny plum. That subcutaneous reference to the seventeenth-century Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza might seem outlandish were it not for the fact that Thoughts from Spinoza has pride of place on Bloom’s bookcase. The fact that Spinoza’s family, Sephardic Jews of Portuguese provenance, were themselves dried fruit importers in the Hague no doubt tickled Joyce’s imagination. My own sense is that Spinoza is a presence even in that first sentence of the novel, in that Mulligan’s nickname, Buck, is a contraction of Baruch. In the sentence “‘The blessings of God on you,’ Buck Mulligan cried”, Joyce translates the Hebrew name Baruch, meaning “blessed”, into English. For a connection between “A Pisgah Sight of Palestine” and Spinoza we need look no further than this musing, in his Ethics, upon common misunderstandings about miracles and how they’re viewed by opportunistic preachers:

If a stone has fallen from a room onto someone’s head and killed him, they will show, in the following way, that the stone fell in order to kill the man. For if it did not fall to that end, God willing it, how could so many circumstances have concurred by chance (for often many circumstances do concur at once)? Perhaps you will answer that it happened because the wind was blowing hard and the man was walking that way. But they will persist: why was the wind blowing hard at that time? why was the man walking that way at that time? If you answer again that the wind arose then because on the preceding day, while the weather was still calm, the sea began to toss, and that the man had been invited by a friend, they will press on – for there is no end to the questions which can be asked: but why was the sea tossing? why was the man invited at just that time? And so they will not stop asking for the causes of causes until you take refuge in the will of God, i.e., the sanctuary of ignorance.

It’s in a famous letter where Spinoza holds forth most forcibly on the subject of our lack of free will that he returns to the stone image:

Further conceive, I beg, that a stone, while continuing in motion, should be capable of thinking and knowing, that it is endeavouring, as far as it can, to continue to move. Such a stone, being conscious merely of its own endeavour and not at all indifferent, would believe itself to be completely free, and would think that it continued in motion solely because of its own wish. This is that human freedom, which all boast that they possess, and which consists solely in the fact, that men are conscious of their own desire, but are ignorant of the causes whereby that desire has been determined.

I find it hard to separate the image of the (plum)stones that fall from Nelson’s Pillar from Spinoza’s use of that very image in his own “parable”. Spinoza’s celebrated monism could hardly be expressed more succinctly than Joyce’s remark to Frank Budgen vis-à-vis the phrase “out of plumb” that if his characters “had no body they would have no mind”. Molly has repurposed Bloom’s asserting “you have no soul inside only grey matter” to her fleeting theory that, with regard to a soul, Bloom “doesn’t know what it is to have one”. It’s possible, mind you, that Joyce is combining Spinoza’s denial of free will with Boole’s idea of “consequent probability” when it comes to the fate of the stones falling “slowly”. Joyce often appeals to imagery based on the sloe. In Giacomo Joyce we have:

Belluomo rises from the bed of his wife’s lover’s wife: the busy housewife is astir, sloe-eyed, a saucer of acetic acid in her hand.

In the version of this sentence that makes it into Ulysses there’s a telling shift when Stephen imagines a postcoital scene:

Belluomo rises from the bed of his wife’s lover’s wife, the kerchiefed housewife is astir, a saucer of acetic acid in her hands.

The direct reference to the sloe has been removed, most likely because Joyce associates the sloe/plum exclusively with Molly rather than this other character of “his wife’s lover’s wife” and wants to be consistent in his system of imagery. When, at the end of the novel, Bloom and Molly fade into the “heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit”, the “heaventree” is a remake of the “plum-tree”. The blueness of the sloe is also associated with the “blue door of home” at 7 Eccles Street, while “the usylessly unreadable Blue Book of Eccles” to which Joyce refers in Finnegans Wake gives a sidelong glance to The Yellow Book of Lecan. That’s the manuscript containing the all-important template of “The Voyage of Mael Duin’s Currach”, a tale with a moralizing take on the inappropriateness of vengeance and the merits of forgiveness. When Stephen tells Bloom a version of “The Parable of the Plums”, Bloom draws his own moral, remembering that as far as Boylan and himself are concerned, “he gets the plums I the plumstones”. That idea is somewhat contradicted by the fact that Bloom “kissed the plump mellow yellow smellow melons of her rump, on each plump melonous hemisphere, in their mellow yellow furrow, with obscure prolonged provocative melonsmellonous osculation”. The “melon” is an anagram of that other fruit, the lemon, so firmly planted in Bloom’s mind as the “sweet lemony wax” of a bar of soap and the exotic citron from Palestine.

So intimately is Bloom associated with the plum that his name refers to the waxy, whitish coating that is, it seems, “a natural secretion from the fruit and serves to protect it from absorbing excess water as well as losing water”. Usually the presence of “bloom” means a plum is fresh. As for the sloe, the Gaelic word for it is airne. It derives from the Old Irish áirne, a word cognate with the Welsh eirin, the Catalan aranyó (“sloe”) and the Basque aran (“plum”). The place name Cill Airne, better known as Killarney, is probably the most familiar example of the word in everyday use. It’s hardly a coincidence, then, that Joyce goes to town on the fact that The Lily of Killarney is being performed on the night of June 16, 1904, in the Queen’s Royal Theatre, courtesy of the “Elster Grimes Opera Company”. Written by the German Jewish Julius Benedict, it is an opera with a complex story line involving a secret marriage, a moonlight horse race, blackmail, a murder plot, kidnapping, a fake death and, of course, a miraculous return from the dead. When Bloom first sees the announcement of The Lily of Killarney, he connects it with Molly’s singing and the fact that Blazes Boylan will be calling on her that afternoon. The idea that true love will prevail, with which the opera ends, suggests strongly that, despite everything, Bloom and Molly still have a lot going for them. The conceit that a character comes back to life suggests that Bloom is partly a Christ figure, one who has been betrayed but who will ultimately triumph in that “heaventree of stars”. In “Home Rule Comes of Age” Joyce lamented the fact that:

the Irish parliamentary party has gone bankrupt. For twenty-seven years it has talked and agitated. In that time it has collected 35 million francs from its supporters, and the fruit of its agitation is that Irish taxes have gone up 88 million francs and the Irish population has decreased a million. The representatives themselves have improved their own lot, aside from small discomforts like a few months in prison and some lengthy sittings. From the sons of ordinary citizens, pedlars, and lawyers without clients they have become well-paid syndics, directors of factories and commercial houses, newspaper owners, and large landholders. They have given proof of their altruism only in 1891, when they sold their leader, Parnell, to the pharisaical conscience of the English Dissenters without exacting the thirty pieces of silver.

Joyce’s appeal to the Pharisees selling him out suggests that, in addition to being a Moses, Parnell is a Christ figure. The Christian iconography in Ulysses is apparent from the outset, given how Mulligan is “bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed”. The association of Bloom with the fruit of a thorn also associates him with one of the key images associated with the crucifixion. Getting back to the Gaelic word airne, I was initially taken aback to find that it refers not only to the sloe but to the kidney. It’s cognate with the Latin ren (plural renes) and is seen in the Old Irish aru, “kidney, gland”, as well as the Welsh arenn, “kidney, testicle”. So comprehensive is Joyce’s command of the etymological hinterland of this word that our first glimpse of Bloom has been of his cooking the “moist tender gland” of a kidney for Molly. In addition to referring to an “inner organ” in the renal realm, the word airne also means “wake” in Gaelic. Joyce has fun with this multiplicity of meanings when he writes, in the context of Finnegans Wake, of being “behind a damson of a sloe cooch”, reviving the erotics of the plum in that vulgar term for the female genitalia. We remember that this is a text in which Earwicker brandishes a blackthorn stick in a style reminiscent of Eveline’s father. He also uses it as a writing implement:

These ruled barriers along which the traced words, run, march, halt, walk, stumble at doubtful points, stumble up again in comparative safety seem to have been drawn first of all in a pretty checker with lampblack and blackthorn. Such crossing is antechristian of course, but the use of the homeborn shillelagh as an aid to calligraphy shows a distinct advance from savagery to barbarism.

Here Joyce picks up on Oscar Wilde’s bon mot about America being the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between to underscore the centrality of the “homeborn” shillelagh – and the mindboggling system of images and symbols that comes with it – not only to the Irish enterprise but his own:

His friends assembled at the wake, and Mrs Finnegan called for lunch
First she brought in tay and cake, then pipes, tobacco and whiskey punch
Biddy O’Brien began to cry, “Such a nice clean corpse, did you ever see,
Tim avourneen, why did you die?”, “Will ye hould your gob?” said Paddy McGee
Whack fol the dah now dance to yer partner around the flure yer trotters shake
Wasn’t it the truth I told you? Lots of fun at Finnegan’s Wake
Then Maggie O’Connor took up the job, “Biddy” says she “you’re wrong, I’m sure”
Biddy gave her a belt in the gob and left her sprawling on the floor
Then the war did soon engage, t’was woman to woman and man to man
Shillelagh law was all the rage and a row and a ruction soon began.

Paul Muldoon’s most recent book of poems is Howdie-Skelp (2021). This lecture was given on June 16 at MoLI (Museum of Literature Ireland)