Leopold Bloom’s Gorgonzola

“He entered Davy Byrne’s. Moral pub. He doesn’t chat. Stands a drink now and then. But in leapyear once in four. Cashed a cheque for me once.”

Following a long, restless journey across Dublin’s city centre in “Lestrygonians”, Ulysses’ eighth episode, Leopold Bloom finally sits down to his lunch. After a close encounter in the Burton restaurant in Duke St., Bloom opts instead for the nearby Davy Byrne’s, which he deems a “moral pub” on the grounds that the laconic proprietor occasionally stands a drink and cashes checks. Davy Byrne’s stands in stark contrast to the pandemonium of the Burton - tranquilly populated by Byrne and Nosey Flynn. As Bloom settles in, the flurry of anxieties and analyses that have cluttered his mind on his walk from the Freeman’s Journal office suddenly dissipate in these salubrious confines. With a clear head, Bloom’s mind alights on silly puns, bad adverts, religion, and a racist nursery rhyme.

In this scene, Leopold Bloom famously eats a gorgonzola cheese sandwich. On the road to Davy Byrne’s, he perilously navigated a culinary Scylla and Charybdis in the form of Æ’s “etherial” veggie people and the mad carnivores of the Burton. Floundering under the weight of political implication, both proved unsatisfactory to our modernist Odysseus. Like any wise chieftain, Bloom rejected an unwieldy duality and chose a third path: stinky cheese. Neither vegetable nor flesh, cheese allows Bloom to slice through the Gordian knot of Irish politics and forge his own path. This choice allows Bloom some spiritual clarity and introduces a religious motif to this sequence. Bloom reveals some degree of Enlightenment in choosing the Middle Way of cheese. He rejects the extreme austerity of salty nutsteak on one hand, and the no-holds-barred sausage party of the Burton on the other. In Buddhist thought, the point between two such dualist extremes is called sunyata, or emptiness. Within sunyata lies the potential for the revelation of wisdom and creativity. Since this is all being filtered through Bloom’s mind, it takes a less than perfect form, but he is able to find something approaching peace on the other side, however temporarily.

Before tucking into his cheese feast, Bloom first muses about Ham:

“Sandwich? Ham and his descendants musterred and bred there.”

Maintaining the religious motif, Bloom reaches all the way back to Genesis for this particular pun. Biblical patriarch Noah, like Bloom, was fond of the odd glass of burgundy. On the night in question, eschewing the Middle Way, Noah overimbibed and wound up naked and blacked out on the floor. Who among us hasn’t been there, honestly? In any case, Noah’s son Ham discovered him in this state of shame. Ham’s first unforgivable sin was seeing his father naked. His second unforgivable sin was bringing his brothers in to gawk at their drunken father. In retaliation, Noah cursed Ham and his descendents to have dark skin. This is the biblical explanation for where dark-skinned people come from: “Ham and his descendents.”

Yikes.

Bloom recalls an ill-placed Plumtree’s Potted Meat ad, which naturally propels his mind to thoughts of cannibalism:

“Dignam’s potted meat. Cannibals would with lemon and rice. White missionary too salty. Like pickled pork.”

Bloom’s thoughts in this passage echo his irreverent jokes back in “Lotus Eaters” about the cannibalistic undertones of the Eucharist. Cannibalism and religion are inextricably interlocked in Bloom’s imagination, and not just because of the literal consumption of Christ’s body during Catholic Mass. Cannibal lore of the era centers on the experiences of colonizers, often missionaries, who wound up being the main course at a lurid cannibal banquet. While many such stories are likely straight-up fabrications, missionaries did sometimes get eaten, particularly in the South Pacific. Human cannibalism is a more complicated topic than I can cover satisfactorily here but was generally practiced for non-culinary purposes. No matter to Bloom, who imagines the dressings that might accompany his deceased pal Paddy at a cannibals’ feast. The idea that white missionaries tasted salty is not Bloom’s idea. Writing in James Joyce Online Notes, Harald Beck notes accounts as far back as the 18th century detailing the culinary concerns of cannibals. One such account from 1859 describes the preferences of alleged cannibals in Australia:

“This is the first time I could ever get a confession of cannibalism out of a native. I have been told that the blacks cannot endure a white man's flesh. They say that it tastes very salty, and is highly flavoured with tobacco.”

An earlier account from the 1780’s also references adding a splash of lemon to improve the flavor of human meat. Bloom’s mention of “pickled pork” may be a reference to “long pig,” rumored to be a term among cannibals for human meat, which dates to the mid-nineteenth century according to An A to Z of Food and Drink published by Oxford. These often sensationalized accounts, packed with grisly and tantalizing details, were printed in newspapers throughout the late nineteenth century, a period encompassing Bloom’s (and Joyce’s) childhood and young adulthood. He is luxuriating in the disgustingness of his own ideas here, like a pre-teen kid. Bloom half-remembers a crude, racist poem about the reverend Mr MacTrigger, a low-brow continuation of the religious motif:

“His wives in a row to watch the effect. There was a right royal old n****r. Who ate or something the somethings of the reverend Mr MacTrigger. With it an abode of bliss. Lord knows what concoction.”

“*Rum idea: eating bits of a corpse. Why the cannibals cotton to it.”*

Cannibalism is closely linked with colonialist missionaries in Bloom’s mind. The casual racist language is shocking coming from Bloom who, as an outsider himself, is so often empathetic to other outsider groups. In “Calypso,” after he conjured a fantastical image of the Middle East, replete with dangerous cutthroats and sexy women, he quickly admonished himself, “Probably not a bit like it really. Kind of stuff you read….” When he imagined the “heathen Chinee” being plied with opium and religion in “Lotus Eaters”, he allows his imaginary Chinese people agency in rejecting the Jesuits’ advances: “Rank heresy for them,” a sentiment that Bloom surely relates to as a secular lapsed-Jew immersed in an intensely Christian society. Bloom’s imaginary African people receive no such nuance. In the same passage in “Lotus Eaters,” Bloom scoffs at imaginary African converts:

“Like to see them sitting round in a ring with blub lips, entranced, listening. Still life. Lap it up like milk, I suppose.”

While all of these depictions are highly stereotypical, Bloom specifically portrays his imagined Africans as childlike, simpleminded and gullible. He also uniquely mocks their physical appearance, further degrading and othering them. In the larger context of Ulysses, imagined Africans (as there are no black characters who appear on the page in Ulysses) are mentioned almost always in the context of the “civilizing” mission of the Catholic Church, specifically the Jesuits, and as subjects of conversion, whether at the hands of St. Peter Claver or Fr. John Conmee. Even a depiction of minstrel performer Eugene Stratton, a white man in blackface make-up, is confronted and assessed in “Wandering Rocks” by the Jesuit Conmee, the same man whose sermon about Claver and the African mission are advertised on the door of All Hallows Church in “Lotus Eaters.”

In this passage, a fictional African king is reduced to a jolly but genital-devouring cartoon, an absurd rendering of all those breathless, harrowing tales of derring do that Bloom might have consumed in books and newspapers over the course of his life. Bloom is clever enough to reject many of the racist narratives baked into his society, but he notably does not extend his natural skepticism to depictions of African people.

In this way, Bloom has swallowed the mores of the colonialist society in which he lives. The people in Bloom’s social circles recognize the degradation of their own culture due to colonial rule, and they can even empathize with other colonized groups as evidenced by their embrace of John F. Taylor’s speech in “Aeolus.” However, though they found inspiration in Taylor’s comparison of the Irish to biblical Jews, they hold little sympathy for contemporary Jews like Bloom and are willing to turn a blind eye to blatant antisemitic violence in Barney Kiernan’s pub.

Likewise, Bloom recalls Irish nationalists taking to the streets of Dublin to support the Boers in South Africa against the British during the Boer War as the nationalists sympathized with the Boers as fellow warriors in the struggle against British imperialism. However, these same nationalists did not raise a similar defense of the indigenous people in South Africa who would be more analogous to the Irish as people whose land was stolen and had poverty imposed upon them by the British. The Boers, in reality, were simply another group of colonizers, most similar to the British in this analogy. Even the Irish Moses, Charles Stewart Parnell, expressed disgust at his brother John Howard Parnell’s choice to employ black farm workers. While Irish people, including Bloom, rightly recognize the oppression against their culture, race plays a clear role in who they sympathize with internationally. For the nationalists depicted in Ulysses, dark-skinned Africans were too Other to relate to.

And so, Bloom is able to “lap up like milk” these hateful ideas so indoctrinated in his society that he does not perceive their presence. Indeed, little snippets of the racist MacTrigger rhyme slide unquestioned through Bloom’s mind as easily as his smelly sandwich slides down his gullet. This is exactly the purpose of all the stories of the supposed habits of remote cannibal tribes that people like Bloom would have grown up with. These stories and beliefs were so common that their presence in popular culture was unremarkable, something you dash off as a joke before eating a cheese sandwich. The colonial mindset was totally uninterrogated even by those rejecting the effects of colonization. A pervasive justification for the expansion of Empire was the belief that the British, in this case, were helping the people they conquered because they were bringing them the benefits of a superior civilization. Even the Irish, who utterly rejected their British oppressors, were not immune to degrading other oppressed cultures as inferior to their own.

The Catholic Church was complicit in a similar mission, though they gutted indigenous cultures with the Bible rather than the bayonet. Whether through Reverend MacTrigger or St. Peter Claver or Fr. Conmee, Christian missionaries devalued the cultures of their converts by the very belief that they needed to be saved from themselves. Stories of bloodthirsty cannibals, even rude rhymes about happy, horny cannibals, served to reinforce in the public mind that it was fine to conquer and forcibly convert people perceived as strange because their lives as imagined by white Europeans were disgusting. These bigoted colonialist beliefs exist well into the 21st century, a dramatic example being the story of John Chau’s disastrous “mission” to the Sentinel Islands in 2018.

Bloom moves on quickly from his racist reverie, so we must move on as well. He maintains his religious motif, now transitioning into consumption as an expression of Jewish belief:

“With it an abode of bliss. Lord knows what concoction. Cauls mouldy tripes windpipes faked and minced up. Puzzle find the meat. Kosher. No meat and milk together. Hygiene that was what they call now. Yom Kippur fast spring cleaning of inside.”

Bloom likens the feast of Rev. MacTrigger’s “something something” to the non-specific nature of the “meat” potted by Plumtree’s. He presumes that potted meat, combining random bits and bobs, is likely not kosher and not especially hygienic. Given the connection of potted meat to Boylan and Molly’s tryst, this assessment their union as particularly, unkosher, unholy and unclean. Bloom then thinks of the Yom Kippur fast, though it’s odd to conceptualize it as a “spring cleaning” since Yom Kippur is in the autumn. This is the second reference to the Jewish Feast of Atonement in “Lestrygonians.” Previously, as Bloom crossed O’Connell Bridge, he thought about wealthy Catholic priests demanding poor women continue to have babies they can’t afford or face spiritual peril:

“Fifteen children he had. Birth every year almost. That’s in their theology or the priest won’t give the poor woman the confession, the absolution. Increase and multiply. Did you ever hear such an idea? Eat you out of house and home. No families themselves to feed. Living on the fat of the land. Their butteries and larders. I’d like to see them do the black fast Yom Kippur.”

Setting aside that the Black Fast is a Lenten fast practiced by Christians, Bloom thinks that affluent, out-of-touch priests couldn’t hack the deprivation of Yom Kippur, a holy day during which Jews eschew food and drink for a day. In this case, Bloom recognizes the rejection of food as an expression of faith. Theoretically, Catholic priests would also observe a yearly season of deprivation during Lent, but Bloom nonetheless has his doubts. In contrast, Bloom takes a less cynical view to Jewish tradition. I think it’s likely that his experience of Yom Kippur, is mainly through the memory of his father observing Yom Kippur, trying to instill a little bit of religion in his apathetic son. It’s unknown if Bloom sets aside his beloved organ meats for the High Holy Days.

Finally, we must explore what Bloom's choice of cheese tells us about his inner spiritual life. Gorgonzola in and of itself marks him as an oddball and an outsider. In the early 20th century, the average Irish person simply didn’t eat much cheese. In the book Ordinary Lives: Three Generations of Irish Middle Class Experience 1907, 1932, 1963, Tony Farmar wrote, “Cheese was never eaten, a prejudice the Dubliners held onto for generations.” This seems hard to swallow, considering there is a history of cheese production stretching back to prehistoric Ireland; the mythical Queen Maeve was struck dead by a flying block of cheese. If you visit any supermarket in Ireland today, you’ll find a variety of locally produced cheeses. However, between the reign of Queen Maeve and the reign of Supervalu, there stretched a bleak, cheeseless wasteland in Irish culinary history.

Ireland had a rich and varied history of indigenous cheese production through the medieval period. Cattle husbandry holds a special place in Irish culture, seeing as the theft of a bull is the inciting incident Ireland’s most famous epic, Táin Bó Cuailnge (The Cattle Raid of Cooley). One name for the Milky Way in the Irish language is Bealach na Bó Finne, the Way of the White Cow. The River Boyne’s name is an anglicized version of the Irish bó fhionn, also meaning white cow in English. However, beginning in the 17th century, the practice of exporting Irish cattle to England (as detailed by Bloom in “Hades”) meant that butter and pigs offered a better return for Irish farmers. As a result, all varieties of indigenous Irish cheese are lost to history. Cheesemaking itself was consciously revived beginning in the early 20th century, but cheese did not retake its place on the average Irish family’s table until much later in the century.

This is all to say that while cheese was not totally impossible to get, it’s really weird that Bloom would order cheese, all the more so because he chooses gorgonzola. A gorgonzola and mustard sandwich is an odd, pungent choice for the modern palate, too. This shows in part the tastes of Bloom’s creator, as Joyce once recorded a meal of gorgonzola and burgundy on a trip through the Italian countryside. It mainly reinforces Bloom’s outsider status, as his gorgonzola is clearly an imported speciality item. If you are what you eat, then he is an outsider eating an outsider’s lunch. If nothing else, I’m sure Nosey Flynn is mentally cataloging this detail for later gossip.

Further Reading:

Is Blazes Boylan really the worst man in Dublin?

Rawhead and Bloody Bones in the Burton