An Abode of Bliss: Plumtree’s Potted Meat and the Allegory of the Theologians

This essay argues that, late in the process of composing Ulysses, Joyce expanded the Plumtree’s Potted Meat motif (a fairly simple sexual double entendre marking Bloom as a cuckold) first by introducing the image of a tree into the motif and using that image to link it to “A Pisgah Sight of Palestine,” and then, later, by recognizing or emphasizing the plumtree-like quality of the image of “[t]he heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.” It also proposes that Joyce saw in this late, expanded version of the motif an analog to the four-fold allegory of the theologians as set forth by Dante in his letter to Can Grande Della Scala. The essay offers a reading of the motif according to the four-fold method of exegesis and examines the manuscript evidence that shows the stages of the motif’s development.