Corpse-Chewers: The Vampire in Ulysses

Stephen's elliptical cries "Chewer of corpses!" and "The corpsechewer!" in "Telemachus" and "Circe" have yet to receive a satisfactory gloss. This article proposes that Stephen is referring to the late-seventeenth-/early-eighteenth-century debate, in both clerical and popular circles, over corpses that chewed in their graves. These undead, which supposedly chewed their shrouds, their own bodies, and other corpses, were the original vampires, only later transformed by the Romantics into the more familiar, popular version of the myth. Two major treatises on chewing corpses are proposed as likely source material, followed by a suggestion about where Joyce may have run across them. If correct, this link open up new possibilities of understanding such diverse but linked topics as Stephen's relationship to vampirism, his mother, and Buck Mulligan.