Elijah is coming! Is Coming!! IS COMING!!!
“This is the age of patent medicine.” - Stephen Dedalus
As “Lestrygonians,” the eighth episode of Ulysses opens, Leopold Bloom’s tummy is rumbly. He’s on his way to a late lunch as the sights and sounds of Dublin stir his appetite either directly or symbolically. This foody-focus in James Joyce’s mind is a characteristic of the episode’s peristaltic technic. You might think that Peristaltic, or Peristalsis, is yet another ancient Greek demigod encountered by Odysseus on his misadventures through the Mediterranean, but peristalsis is underway in your body at this very moment, as the rhythmic ripple of muscle tissue guiding your most recent meal or snack through your digestive tract.
Joyce insinuates Peristaltic flow in “Lestrygonians” by the way Bloom is pushed through the streets of Dublin’s city center, described by Anthony Burgess as “coiling like intestines.” Bloom enters Dublin’s large scale, metaphoric esophagus (the correspondent organ of “Lestrygonians”) around Bachelor’s Walk at the south end of O’Connell St, not too far from the Freeman’s Journal offices. Readers can feel peristaltic rhythm in the way that Bloom starts and stops his progress through the streets, with the stops often taking place in front of establishments offering some kind of tasty treat. In the opening pages, he pauses before Graham Lemon’s sweet shop, then carries on, stopping again to buy two Banbury cakes from the old applewoman to feed to the gulls over the Liffey.
The halting narration of Bloom’s stream of consciousness also acts as a literary peristalsis. As Bloom is observing the Christian Brother ordering up some too-sweet creams, his thoughts are suddenly interrupted and then once more give way to free-flowing association:
“A sombre Y. M. C. A. young man, watchful among the warm sweet fumes of Graham Lemon’s, placed a throwaway in a hand of Mr Bloom.
Heart to heart talks.
Bloo... Me? No.
Blood of the Lamb.
His slow feet walked him riverward, reading. Are you saved? All are washed in the blood of the lamb. God wants blood victim. Birth, hymen, martyr, war, foundation of a building, sacrifice, kidney burntoffering, druids’ altars. Elijah is coming. Dr John Alexander Dowie restorer of the church in Zion is coming.
Is coming! Is coming!! Is coming!!!
All heartily welcome.”
The advent of evangelist Dr. John Alexander Dowie, a preacher who has styled himself a restorer, suddenly confronts Bloom, who frankly does not give a damn. Bloom’s BS meter has already been triggered before he gets to the meat of the throwaway. He’s initially thrown by seeing what he thought was his name (“Bloo… Me?”) transform into “Blood.” Peristaltic power is a transformative power, afterall. The peristalsis of our digestive tract allows our bodies to absorb nutrients, but it also turns the leftovers into poo, a theme that has already arisen from the depths in Ulysses. The image of being “washed in the blood of the lamb,” perhaps a comfort to devout Christians, conjures to mind the bloodthirsty side of religion for Bloom:
“God wants blood victim. Birth, hymen, martyr, war, foundation of a building, sacrifice, kidney burntoffering, druids’ altars.”
Bloom imagines a series of images of how religion demands blood sacrifice. “God wants blood victim,” he thinks. It’s less King of Kings and more Stephen King. There is no nourishment in this message for Bloom. Even the greedy seagulls swooping over the Liffey won’t chance a nibble.
Mark Osteen, author of The Economy of Ulysses, writes that all preachers are really just admen for Judgment Day and that the exhortations of the Elijah throwaway evoke cheap advertising and a gambling mentality more than the salvation of one’s soul. Like advertising or gambling, the Elijah throwaway promises bliss without the hard work, not at all unlike winning a bunch of money through sheer luck on a horse. It may as well be Plumtree’s Potted Meat. This ad is making promises that it never has to make good on. Oh? You didn’t achieve salvation (or an abode of bliss)? Well, maybe you didn’t use the product according to the manufacturer's recommendations. It’s no wonder that Dowie reappears as a snake oil salesman in “Oxen of the Sun.”
It’s also no surprise that Bloom isn’t taken in by the promises of the Elijah throwaway. He is an ad man, afterall, and this type of text-based proselytizing isn’t all that different from the copy on ad. The Elijah throwaway employs the same techniques as an ad, with its repetition of “is coming!” and its aggressive use of exclamation marks. Any advertiser worth their salt knows that sex sells, so the “it’s coming” refrain adds a coy bit of innuendo, as well. Personally, I imagine it having the energy of those old TV ads for monster truck rallies on Sunday! Sunday!! SUNDAY!!! The Prophet Elijah and Truckasaurus at the Tri-State Arena!!!!
The arrival of Elijah is worthy of such excitement, though, as it points to a possible redeemer for Ireland. Through the power of metempsychosis, Bloom has already taken on the guise of redemptive figures like Parnell and Moses. Now, through his rejection of all this blood-washed, cannibalistic moralizing, he takes on the guise of Elijah. In Stephen’s Parable of the Plums at the end of “Aeolus”, the two Dublin Vestals glimpsed only barren, empty promises atop Ireland’s Mt. Pisgah. Ireland, symbolized by the Vestals, must look now to the coming of a new redeemer to bring them out of the house of bondage. Immediately on the heels of the disappointment of Pisgah, Bloom re-enters the story and is greeted with the good news that Elijah is coming. Initially, he thinks he’s reading his own name on the throwaway, as we’ve discussed, but we’d be hasty to assume that he was mistaken.
In the Old Testament, the prophet Malachi foretold:
“Elijah Fed by the Raven,” Giovanni Girolamo Savoldo, 1510
Christians tend to see Jesus Christ as the fulfillment of this prophecy, but Jews are still holding out for the OG Elijah’s return. Bloom, not quite Christian or Jew, is the perfect candidate for a modern, humanistic Elijah for Ireland. The first hint is Bloom feeding the gulls. In the Old Testament, Elijah is fed by birds in the wilderness. Elijah-Bloom feeds the birds instead, though he feels unappreciated when they don’t screech a thank you in exchange for those miraculous, heavenly Banbury cakes:
“Aware of their greed and cunning he shook the powdery crumb from his hands. They never expected that. Manna…. I’m not going to throw any more. Penny quite enough. Lot of thanks I get. Not even a caw.”
Elijah is renowned for his generosity, and we see Bloom’s on display throughout Ulysses. His heart aches for Dilly Dedalus selling her family’s furniture at Dillon’s auction house. He will spend much of his afternoon trying to gather donations for the late Paddy Dignam’s family. In “Circe”, he rescues Stephen Dedalus from certain doom. In the Old Testament, many of Elijah’s acts of charity are performed by God through Elijah, but Bloom, our secular prophet, does good deeds of his own volition and without divine intervention. Much like with the gulls, however, it is thankless work.
While Dowie’s Elijah throwaway is a dead letter joining the rest of the flotsam and filth flowing down the Liffey, Elijah-Bloom is able to easily circulate through the city, though Bloom’s outsider status can make him feel a bit disposable, despite his charity. His peers are happy to touch him for a loan or a tip on the horses, but they tend to hold him at an arm’s length otherwise. Some are merely indifferent (like in “Hades” or “Aeolus”) while others are openly hostile (like in “Cyclops”). Later in the day, the anonymous narrator of “Cyclops” will say of Bloom:
“It’d be an act of God to take a hold of a fellow like that and throw him in the bloody sea.”
The bloodthirsty cits of Dublin might target Elijah-Bloom, but unlike the Elijah throwaway, Bloom floats but never sinks. He recalls the deadly cycle of “Chad Gadya” (“Eat or be eaten. Kill! Kill!”) and rejects it as he rejects the Burton in favor of the moral pub Davy Byrne’s and a vegetarian lunch. The Passover symbolism is apt, as it is part of the tradition of the Seder to leave an open chair and glass of wine for Elijah, should he show up. As far as I’m aware, he hasn’t shown up to anyone’s Seder yet, but his arrival would mark the end of human suffering. In “Lestrygonians,” Bloom finds an open chair and a friendly glass of burgundy awaiting him at Davy Byrne’s, which he gladly quaffs. Bloom has an important connection to one other symbolic cup - the Ascot Gold Cup, the outcome of which he accurately prophesied.
In his book Reading Joyce’s Ulysses, Daniel Schwarz notices that simply being in Bloom’s presence affects other Dubliners in this episode. When Bloom steps away, Davy Byrne and Nosey Flynn speak warmly of him rather than ridiculing or dismissing him like the newsmen back in “Aeolus.” Something has shifted. Of course Bloom is met with antisemitic hostility once he steps into Barney Kiernan’s in “Cyclops,” but some folks are beyond saving. Bloom argues passionately in defense of the Other in opposition to the Citizen’s persistent focus on sinn fein amhain, “ourselves alone.” As Bloom flees the wrath of the Citizen, he seems to receive divine intervention:
“And there came a voice out of heaven, calling: Elijah! Elijah! And He answered with a main cry: Abba! Adonai! And they beheld Him even Him, ben Bloom Elijah, amid clouds of angels ascend to the glory of the brightness at an angle of fortyfive degrees over Donohoe’s in Little Green street like a shot off a shovel.”
Schwarz likens Bloom’s encounter with the patrons of Barney Kiernan’s to Elijah slaying the idolaters. Bloom’s weapon is his clear, righteous speech rather than a sword, but his ironic ascent to heaven is pulled straight from the Old Testament. Following the battle, Elijah sits under a broomtree to die (Schwarz is sure that Joyce would love the rhyme with “Bloom”). As Elijah ascends in a whirlwind on his chariot, he passes his mantle to Elisha, which Schwarz feels brings Stephen into the allegory as the successor to Bloom. Furthermore, it is necessary to integrate Stephen’s Shakespeare theory in order to fully appreciate Bloom’s ascent. The name “ben Bloom Elijah” means that Elijah is Bloom’s son. Since Bloom is a metempsychotic descendent of Elijah, that would make Bloom his father’s father, just like Shakespeare.
Though Bloom is seemingly hinted at as Dublin’s throwaway-savior by the flier he receives from the YMCA man, he is not without rival. In “Circe”, as Bloom tries to usher in his new Bloomusalem, one of his detractors is none other than ol’ “Elijah is coming” himself, Alexander J Dowie (whose name keeps shifting slightly throughout the novel). Bloom is unsuccessful in his utopian project, but as they say, Bloomusalem wasn’t built in a day.
John Alexander Dowie
That throwaway is a misdirect, anyway. It is easy to mistake its bold proclamation of “Elijah is coming” as an announcement of the actual prophet Elijah, or “Blood of the Lamb” announcing Jesus Christ. The truth is, it’s announcing the arrival of a comically false prophet called John Alexander Dowie who, by 1904, had styled himself as the third coming of Elijah. As noted above, he will pop up twice more in Ulysses to annoy Stephen and humiliate Bloom, so we should know a bit about this phantom’s biography.
Though Dowie is obscure now, he was world famous in 1904. He had a gift for leveraging the media for attention by making inflammatory statements that the press couldn’t resist printing. Dowie was anti-tobacco and alcohol and, after a time, pro-polygamy. He collected enough money through his ministry to buy a tract of land north of Chicago and establish Zion City, a community for his followers where he could establish his own bank and city government in addition to his church. In 1900 he proclaimed himself Elijah III, Restorer of the Church in Zion. He took to wearing white, silken robes and was protected by his equally stylish Zion guards. The Daily Express called him “Profit Elijah,” and of course Bloom is aware that Dowie is in a “paying game.”
Dowie’s visit to Dublin in 1904 is totally anachronistic. As far I can tell, he never visited Ireland and, during the week of Bloomsday, was in the process of being chased out of England. Dowie was a faith healer who railed against the medical profession every chance he got. At this stage, Dowie’s prayer meetings were regularly disrupted by mobs of incensed medical students who would hurl any object not nailed down in his direction. Joyce identified him as “Dr. John Alexander Dowie,” but as far as I’m aware, Dowie didn’t use this title himself. I think Joyce was lampooning him here, titling him after the thing he hated most. Joe Voelker and Thomas Arner wrote that this is also likely why Dowie targets the drunken medical students during his ol’ time medicine show at the conclusion of “Oxen of the Sun”:
“Come on you winefizzling, ginsizzling, booseguzzling existences! Come on, you dog-gone, bullnecked, beetlebrowed, hogjowled, peanutbrained, weaseleyed fourflushers, false alarms and excess baggage! Come on, you triple extract of infamy!”
Voelker and Arner go on to speculate that it was Joyce’s intention that the Irish medical students don’t react with quite the same fervor as their British counterparts as by this stage in “Oxen,” they are just “too drunk to heckle.”
Around 14 June 1904, Dowie got into hot water in Britain with more than just med students. He described Charles II and George IV as “a mass of muck and dirt” and Edward VII as “not much better.” As a result, the hotels he was scheduled to stay in all suddenly lost his reservations. Without so much as a roof over his head, he had to flee the country in disguise and under police protection. He headed back to the United States without making a Dublin pitstop.
A political cartoon of Dowie fleeing Chicago with carpetbags full of money; Bob Satterfield, The Tacoma Times, 1904
Zion City eventually collapsed under financial stress, though it lives on today as just Zion, IL. Dowie had been running the town as a Ponzi scheme. He had raised the initial capital to buy the land by fundraising amongst his followers and then profited by selling the land back to those same followers. To continue making money, he needed to continually find new followers to fleece. As his infamy grew, this became more and more difficult until his failing health finally caught up with him, and he died of a stroke in 1907. In his final year, he tried to establish a polygamous colony in Mexico, but as Bloom astutely notes, “His wife … put the stopper on that.”
Elijah-Dowie, unlike Elijah-Bloom, never endeavored to be a redeemer for Ireland. He never so much as set foot on the island and never looked to redeem anyone but himself. Bloom has correctly assessed this throwaway as nothing more than trash, materially and spiritually, not worthy even as food for gulls. Bloom, once more proven to be Ireland’s redeemer, crushes Dowie in his palm and throws him upon the mercy of the tides of the Liffey. God sent Elijah to teach the Jews that they had strayed from the Ten Commandments and worshiped foreign gods. Bloom easily excises a false idol like Dowie, but Ireland is held in bondage by other foreign masters as well - one Italian and one English, as Stephen would say. Through Bloom’s humanistic values of generosity and open-mindedness, perhaps Ireland can one day be free.
Further Reading & Listening:
BOYSEN, B. (2008). I Call That Patriotism: Leopold Bloom and Cosmopolitan Caritas. The Comparatist, 32, 140–156. http://www.jstor.org/stable/26237182
Burgess, A. (1968). ReJoyce. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.
Cox, P. & Porzucki, N. (2017, Mar 29). How Christianese became a thing. The World in Words. Retrieved from https://audioboom.com/posts/5761447-how-christianese-became-a-thing
Ellmann, R. (1972). Ulysses on the Liffey. Oxford University Press. Retrieved from https://archive.org/stream/in.ernet.dli.2015.65767/2015.65767.Ulysses-On-The-Liffey_djvu.txt
Janusko, R. (1992). More on J.A. Dowie (& Son). James Joyce Quarterly, 29(3), 607–613. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25485296
Morse, J. (2015). The Picture Odyssey of Ben Bloom Elijah. James Joyce Quarterly, 52(3/4), 669–681. http://www.jstor.org/stable/45172702
Osteen, M. (1995). The economy of Ulysses: making both ends meet. New York: Syracuse University Press. Retrieved from https://tinyurl.com/yycf2ar5
Romanoff, A. Lestrygonians-Modernism Lab. Retrieved from https://campuspress.yale.edu/modernismlab/lestrygonians/
Schwarz, D. (2004). Reading Joyce’s Ulysses. Palgrave Macmillan.
Voelker, J., & Arner, T. (1990). Bloomian Pantomime: J.A. Dowie and the “Messianic Scene.” James Joyce Quarterly, 27(2), 283–291. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25485035