'Famished Ghosts': Bloom, Bible Wars, and 'U.P. Up' In Joyce's Dublin

Soup, joint and sweet. Never know whose thoughts you're chewing. [...] Famished ghosts.

Ah, I'm hungry (U 8.717-8 and 730-1).

One of the traumatic aspects of the 'nightmare of history' in Ulysses is that the past is not confined to dream but may visit its terrors again on the present. 'Coming events cast their shadow before' (U 8.526): in recapitulating what has already happened, dreams may also cast a dark shadow on the future. One such nightmare wakes up Denis Breen in a panic attack in the 'Lestrygonians' episode, as reported by his wife to Bloom on Westmoreland Street:

-Woke me up in the night, she said. Dream he had, a nightmare. Indiges.

-Said the ace of spades was walking up the stairs.

-The ace of spades! Mr Bloom said.

She took a folded postcard from her handbag.

-Read that, she said. He got it this morning.

-What is it? Mr Bloom asked, taking the card. U. P.?

-U. p: up, she said. Someone taking a rise out of him. It's a great shame for them whoever he is.

-Indeed it is, Mr Bloom said.

She took back the card, sighing.

-And now he's going round to Mr Menton's office. He's going to take an action for ten thousand pounds, he says.

She folded the card into her untidy bag and snapped the catch

(U 8.251-64).

Bloom's exchange with Mrs Breen (and the bare stirrings of indigestion) is preceded by an encounter with a Y.M.C.A. evangelical outside Graham Lemon's in Lower O'Connell Street, dispensing throwaways announcing that salvation is nigh: 'Elijah is coming. Dr John Alexander Dowie restorer of the Church of Zion is coming' (U 8.13-14). Crossing O'Connell bridge, Bloom notices seagulls foraging for scraps of food in the Liffey - 'The hungry famished gull / Flaps o'er the waters dull.' (U 8.62-3) - and throws the leaflet into the water to see if they would rise to the bait: 'He threw down among them a crumpled paper ball. Elijah thirtytwo feet per sec is com. Not a bit. The ball bobbed unheeded on the wake of swells, floated under by the bridgepiers. Not such damn fools' (U 8.57-9). The presentation of spiritual salvation in the guise of food signals one of the abiding themes of 'Lestrygonians': the spectres of famine and 'souperism' that followed the linking of food relief with proselytism during the Great Famine. As a result, Bloom's thoughts revolve around hunger and poverty as much as food: 'Good Lord, that poor child's dress in flitters. Underfed she looks too. Potatoes and marge, marge and potatoes. It's after they feel it' (U 8.41-2). On Bachelor's Walk, Bloom spots one of the destitute Dedalus sisters hovering around Dillon's auction rooms: 'Must be selling off some furniture' (U 8.29-30). When the starving Dedalus sisters, Katey, Boody, and Maggy reappear in the 'Wandering Rocks' episode, they are living off pea soup provided by the Sisters of Charity home in Gardiner Street (U 10.276-80).¹

Bloom's intermittent memories of the Famine and its ghoulish legacy in Ireland are touched off, literally, by the potato he carries around with him all day as a talisman of sorts, and which he confirms is in his pocket as he leaves his house for the butcher's shop at the beginning of 'Calypso'. As he approaches Davy Byrne's pub for a midday lunch, Bloom turns to thoughts of religious conversion, food and disease, prompted by memories of the emaciation associated with Soyer's infamous soup kitchen in the Phoenix Park during the Great Famine:

Suppose that communal kitchen years to come perhaps. All trotting down with porringers and tommycans to be filled. Devour contents in the street. [...] My plate's empty. After you with our incorporated drinkingcup. Like sir Philip Crampton's fountain. Rub off the microbes with your handkerchief. Next chap rubs on a new bunch with his. Father O...