Epiphanic Ulysses: Joyce’s Trail of Breadcrumbs

As he shepherds the unsteady Stephen Dedalus to the cabman’s shelter early in the “Eumaeus” episode of Ulysses, Leopold Bloom inhales “with internal satisfaction the smell of James Rourke’s city bakery” (U 16.55–56).¹ Inspired by the “very palatable odour indeed of our daily bread,” he coins another of his many advertising slogans: “Bread, the staff of life, earn your bread, O tell me where is fancy bread, at Rourke’s the baker’s it is said” (16.56–59). The whiff of fancy bread certainly tickles Bloom’s appetite, and because the narration here is closely allied with his point of view, it also tickles his fancy, as the slogan puns on a song from The Merchant of Venice, beginning “Tell me where is fancy bred,/Or in the heart or in the head” (III.ii.63–64).² In an instant, the evanescent scent, which might have wafted by in passing, suddenly leaps to the forefront of Bloom’s consciousness and is transformed by his particular creative sense into something new and memorable. In short, while trying his hand at Joyce’s game of making something artful out of the everyday, Bloom demonstrates the ad-man’s correlative of the artist’s bread and butter.

Joyce himself understood the aesthetic transformation of daily life metaphorically, through rather fancier terms borrowed from Catholic dogma: transubstantiation and epiphany. Although Bloom’s advertisement for James Rourke’s bakery does not rise to the level of his creator’s art—kneaded more in heart than in head, perhaps—this essay takes seriously his contention that the daily bread that inspires him is “of all commodities of the public the primary and most indispensable” (16.57–58). In what follows, I trace Joyce’s transmutation of the stuff of life across a subtle pattern of internal allusions to the staff of life. This indispensible pattern emerges throughout Ulysses according to the logic of the epiphany, constituting a trail of breadcrumbs dispensed throughout the novel, left to alleviate our wandering. We find these crumbs in various guises—teacakes, Banbury buns, rolls, the daily bread invoked in the Paternoster are just a few—and in each instance their presence is highlighted by variable clusters of other details, such as the racehorse Throwaway, the crumpled throwaway that proclaims “Elijah is coming,” and secondary characters such as John Howard Parnell, Lizzie Twigg, and the sailor D. B. Murphy of the Rosevean, among much else (8.13).³ Where past critics have shown how Joyce appropriated religious concepts such as transubstantiation and epiphany to fashion a transcendent and lasting art out of everyday life, my reading suggests an unacknowledged manner through which he exercises this transformative power in Ulysses by revising these concepts into a performative aesthetic strategy.⁴ I argue that in leaving these morsels scattered about for readers combing the novel for so many crumbs, Joyce offers an aesthetic Eucharist. His daily bread reimagines the presence of the pseudo-priestly artist within his work and questions the manner in which his purportedly divine purpose is manifest, rejecting dogmatic structures of truth in favor of contingent performativity. Joyce imagines and crafts a surrogate salvation, forging his art through religious forms.

Two early moments in Joyce’s life and work reveal how his aesthetics were inflected by what Roy Gottfried calls his “misbelief,” the idiosyncratic skepticism that led him to secularize religious concepts.⁵ The first is Stan-islaus Joyce’s account of how James suggested that his art is a metaphorical transubstantiation of everyday life. Before Joyce first left Dublin, Stan-islaus told his older brother that he planned to refuse his Easter duty, insisting that he did not believe in it. Joyce replied, “You mean that you don’t believe in transubstantiation.” Stanislaus’s account continues:

Don’t you think, said he [James] reflectively, choosing his words without haste, there is a certain resemblance between the mystery of the Mass and what I am trying to do? I mean that I am trying in my poems to give people some kind of intellectual pleasure or spiritual enjoyment by converting...