Leopold Bloom and William Ellis's Three Visits to Madagascar: Photography, Botany, and Race

The true symbol of the British conquest is Robinson Crusoe who, shipwrecked on a lonely island, with a knife and a pipe in his pocket, becomes an architect, carpenter, knife grinder, astronomer, baker, shipwright, potter, saddler, farmer, tailor, umbrella-maker, and cleric. He is the true prototype of the British colonist just as Friday … is the symbol of the subject race.

—James Joyce, lecture on Daniel Defoe

History is "refracted light"; through its aid we see an image of past days.

—Charles Groom Napier, The Book of Nature and the Book of Man

James Joyce's fascination with travelogues, islands and shipwrecked characters has often been explored in the well-navigated Homeric domain. However, allusions to adventurers other than Odysseus also enter Joyce's epic, beginning with Captain Frederick Marryat, the famous naval officer and prolific author, whose Japhet in Search of a Father is mentioned in the opening chapter of Ulysses.¹ The master trope of Joyce's text is the displaced voyager, returning time and again to real and imagined places of origin, a quest often marked by an ambivalent desire to reconcile past and present dwellings. In the book's restless finale, Molly alternates between Ireland and Gibraltar, her closing "yeses" managing a fleeting synthesis of lovers if not islands. Between Marryat and Molly, we encounter other voyagers, some fictional, others historical figures. Among the latter is William Ellis, the British Protestant missionary, who spent his life living on and writing about islands, including Madagascar, to which he returned four times.

Ellis's travelogue is both invoked and erased in Ulysses: It is among the volumes Molly "invert[s]" (U 17.1358) in her hasty rearrangement of Bloom's books, but besides being inverted, Ellis's title is obliterated, as exhibited in the catalogue—"Ellis's Three Trips to Madagascar (brown cloth, title obliterated)" (U 17.1374)—and misquoted, the published title being Three Visits to Madagascar (1858).² What does this redaction of the book's title indicate? What purpose does the book serve, included in Bloom's library and yet subjected to Joyce's "obliteration" of its title—an obliteration which, on the one hand, is an act of censure, but on the other, can be seen as the physical mark of a much handled, popular book?

To answer these questions, I will first explore Ellis's travelogue, in particular his use of ethnographic photography to elevate his position, aspiring as he does, to be seen not only as a Christian missionary but also as an accomplished British diplomat/broker, an anthropologist and a botanist. I will then discuss Joyce's—and Bloom's—nuanced responses to Ellis. Here, too, one main focus will be on the role of pictorial imagery in the inscription of cultural identity.

Reading Ellis against Joyce highlights the latter's achievement: the use of a verbal grammar that resists, for the most part, the aesthetics of conventional visual representation—with photography as its ally—to reveal a rich, complex, multivalent racial identity in his main character. Bloom carries the burden of this heritage during the day's journey; the ordeal is one main subject of his travelogue.³ In dealing with the contradictions and uncertainties of an ambiguous, often despised racial history, Bloom at times seeks psychological comfort in perusing those family daguerreotypes that allow a fragile connection with his past. And yet, as we shall see, he varies in his responses to the kind of pictorial representation found in Ellis, a vacillation that is part of Joyce's strategy for complicating our sense of Bloom's cultural identity.

I

Any discussion of Madagascar begins with Diego Dias, the Portuguese navigator whose "discovery" of the island in 1500 led to successive waves of colonization: the Portuguese, followed by the Dutch, but primarily the French and the British, whose rivalry for colonial domination of the island continued well into the late nineteenth century. Advancing these imperial projects and reporting back to their home countries were the missionaries: the French Jesuits and the British Protestants, particularly members of the...