{"id":543,"date":"2016-11-15T02:45:44","date_gmt":"2016-11-15T02:45:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/eriksimpson.sites.grinnell.edu\/Ulysses16\/?p=543"},"modified":"2016-11-15T02:45:44","modified_gmt":"2016-11-15T02:45:44","slug":"blog-consolidation-food-and-cooking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/eriksimpson.sites.grinnell.edu\/Ulysses16\/uncategorized\/blog-consolidation-food-and-cooking\/","title":{"rendered":"Blog Consolidation: Food and Cooking"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ulysses captures the events of one day, June 16th<\/sup> 1904, and does well to fully observe even the simplest of everyday functions. Joyce includes all aspects of eating, digestion, and defecation in Ulysses to provide an honest portrayal of life in Dublin. In his effort to describe the essence of the human experience, Joyce identifies the importance of these processes to the human experience. Food is an aspect of life that is shared by all- eating is necessary for survival. However, food is not only sustenance, food is also taste, preference, or potentially governable. In this sense, food is uniquely diverse in its ability to both create and level distinctions between people. Groups of people eat differently and one can use food to identify characteristics about a person based on what they eat. There are foods which can be designated as belonging to different groups- poor, wealthy, Irish, Jewish, etc. This makes food a useful tool in the construction of identity. Despite the infrequency in appearance, food plays a prominent role in Ulysses through its ability to serve as a marker for the identity of characters while simultaneously making these characters\u2019 identities prominent through their individual relationships with food.<\/p>\n

Joyce\u2019s inclusion of food provides a mode to discuss Ireland\u2019s colonial relationship to England through a system of exportation and tariffs levied on Irish-cultivated food. Throughout the Irish famine of 1846-1851, England continued to export food from Ireland which left the Irish people without food for themselves. Food was literally being taken from a country in a time of famine to feed the more powerful and wealthy English state while the Irish peasant starved. This relationship is realized in Episode 16 and facilitated by Skin-the-Goat\u2019s comments on Ireland\u2019s exportation of, \u201ccoal in large quantities, six million pounds of pork exported every year, ten millions between butter and eggs,\u201d (16, 989-991). Food is used as a marker of natural prosperity. However, this prosperity is lost to the British who levy taxes on the poor. In this instance food serves as a symbol of British colonial rule and the pillaging of the poor by way of taxes. Joyce uses food to undermine geo-political and colonial relationships between colonized and colonizer.<\/p>\n

The implications of England\u2019s colonial pillaging of Irish food sources are seen in the descriptions of the Dedalus family. The Dedalus family is poor and are described on multiple occasions by what they eat or are presumed to eat. In this instance, like many others in Ulysses, food is a marker of identity. The Dedalus family are relegated to certain foods by way of economic necessity. They are not afforded the luxury of choice. In fact, their food is defined by its cost and by its cultural relevancy. Whereas a character like Leopold Bloom eats Kosher foods, the Dedalus family are strictly Irish-Catholic and eat as such. Stephen Dedalus muses on the memory of his family eating various foods including “cocoa that was in the sootcoated kettle,” oatmeal water, herring, an egg, and eggshells and charred fish heads for the cat, (16, 271-276). The food described is all very cheap and native to Ireland. This description therefore illustrates the Dedalus’ state of poverty and Catholic identity.<\/p>\n

Bloom is perhaps the most interesting character in terms of relating to food. Bloom is initially introduced to the reader while he is eating, \u201cMr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls,\u201d (4, 1-2). Leopold Bloom is distinctly different from the other characters in the book, oftentimes holding an \u201cothered\u201d identity. Bloom is not accepted as truly Irish because of his Jewishness and is not fully Jewish because he does not strictly observe Kosher laws, thereby leaving him in a state in which he lacks a firm identity. We are confronted with Bloom\u2019s distance from Judaism and devotion to Kosher as he thinks of kidneys while often alluding to pork, both of which are not kosher. Bloom\u2019s choice of food aids the reader in locating Bloom\u2019s identity or in this case, his lack of identity.<\/p>\n

Joyce\u2019s deployment of food as a marker of identity is not only self-defined but is also ascribed to groups of people, revealing assumptions made on that group by the individual ascribing. In Episode 16, the sailor brings up a fictitious story about Peruvians that he claims to have encountered who eat “corpses and the liver of horses,” (16, 470-471). Since the sailor has already been labeled as a fraud by Stephen and Leopold, his story should not be taken seriously. Regardless, the sailor’s choice of food to pair with the Peruvians reveals a sort of xenophobia. Clearly, ascribing cannibalism and the consumption of horse meat to a group as broad as \u201cPeruvians\u201d is derogatory and meant to express a mysterious disgust with the alleged backwardness of the act of human consumption. The sailor\u2019s claim about the food of the Peruvians reveals the sailor\u2019s identity as xenophobic and untruthful. Joyce allows the reader to extract more from his characters based on their relationships to food.<\/p>\n

Joyce attempts to capture the mundane and the bodily to accurately represent the human experience in all forms. The general ubiquity of food provides an interesting point of departure for Joyce. Despite foods necessity to life, food is incredibly diverse and unique, allowing it to serve as a marker of identity for characters. Joyce\u2019s use of food has enabled him to an alternative way of developing character and bringing his character\u2019s identities into prominence by way of the character\u2019s relationships with food.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ulysses captures the events of one day, June 16th 1904, and does well to fully observe even the simplest of everyday functions. Joyce includes all aspects of eating, digestion, and defecation in Ulysses to provide an honest portrayal of life in Dublin. In his effort to describe the essence of the human experience, Joyce identifies […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-543","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/eriksimpson.sites.grinnell.edu\/Ulysses16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/543","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/eriksimpson.sites.grinnell.edu\/Ulysses16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/eriksimpson.sites.grinnell.edu\/Ulysses16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eriksimpson.sites.grinnell.edu\/Ulysses16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eriksimpson.sites.grinnell.edu\/Ulysses16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=543"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/eriksimpson.sites.grinnell.edu\/Ulysses16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/543\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":545,"href":"https:\/\/eriksimpson.sites.grinnell.edu\/Ulysses16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/543\/revisions\/545"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/eriksimpson.sites.grinnell.edu\/Ulysses16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=543"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eriksimpson.sites.grinnell.edu\/Ulysses16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=543"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eriksimpson.sites.grinnell.edu\/Ulysses16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=543"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}