Plumtree’s Potted M’Coy
“This is the age of patent medicine.” - Stephen Dedalus
To listen to a discussion of this topic, check out the podcast episodes here and here.
“Lotus Eaters” is, by its nature, a sleepy section of Ulysses, full of seemingly inconsequential incidents, but there are secrets hidden around every corner. Early in the episode, Bloom window-shops in Westland Row, in Dublin’s city center and then ducks into the post office to pick up a letter. The letter is addressed to “Henry Flower. Esq.,” revealing that the unassuming Mr. Bloom is leading some sort of double life. On his way to read his clandestine correspondence, he runs into an acquaintance. Mundane on the surface, but in reality Bloom, is confronting his shadow and tangling with the demons of his subconscious mind.
Enter C. P. M’Coy.
As Bloom scurries off in search of a spot to read his saucy letter, he is intercepted by M’Coy and trapped in a stop-and-chat. Bloom has no desire to talk to M’Coy, instinctually thinking, “M’Coy. Get rid of him quickly.”
No luck. Since Bloom is not Larry David, he goes through the social ritual of exchanging small talk with M’Coy. Avid Joyce readers may recognize M’Coy from the short story “Grace,” the second to last story in Dubliners. M’Coy’s peers in “Grace'' share Bloom’s begrudging politeness when dealing with him - M’Coy is plainly the dweeb of the group. There is a scene near the end of “Grace” where M’Coy and four friends are arranged in pews in a church:
Quincunx
“M’Coy had tried unsuccessfully to find a place in the bench with the others, and, when the party had settled down in the form of a quincunx, he had tried unsuccessfully to make comic remarks. As these had not been well received he had desisted.”
His friends assure him there’s no way they could possibly accommodate him in either pew, so he sits alone despite coming with a group. He’s definitely “that guy.”
In “Grace,” we learn that M'Coy is the husband of a soprano, just like Bloom, who, in “Lotus Eaters”, describes Mrs M’Coy as a reedy, freckled, possessing a “cheeseparing nose”, and not nearly as talented as Molly (“Nice enough in its way: for a little ballad. No guts in it.”). In “Grace,” Mrs. M’Coy is described as teaching “young children to play the piano at low terms.” M’Coy works as an employee of the city coroner, the same as in Ulysses, though in “Grace” it’s stated that he was once engaged as an ad canvasser for the Freeman’s Journal, which is Bloom’s current job.
Due to these similarities, M’Coy is seen by some scholars as a proto-Bloom, an early model for James Joyce’s greatest protagonist. M’Coy and Bloom share some key biographical details as we’ve noted, and both are odd-man-out in their social circle. There’s always a pecking order, though, and Bloom seems to know he’s at least a rung or two higher than M’Coy. Molly has a more impressive resume than Mrs. M’Coy, while M’Coy is disliked by Bloom and others in part because he is a notorious borrower (and non-returner) of valises. From “Grace”:
“...Mr M’Coy had recently made a crusade in search of valises and portmanteaus to enable Mrs M’Coy to fulfil imaginary engagements in the country.”
Unbeknownst to either of them, Bloom is also the star of one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century. No one tell M’Coy.
Bloom turning his nose up at his dweeby counterpart shows Joyce’s great flair for irony. What Bloom sees in M’Coy are his own least favorite personal qualities - fears that he’s as annoying and ineffectual as M’Coy. Marvin Magalaner wrote that Blooms “strives continually to break out of his loneliness, refusing fellowship to a likeness of himself.” Oftentimes the qualities we find most distasteful in ourselves are the qualities we see most starkly reflected in others. In rejecting M’Coy, Bloom rejects himself.
Bloom is convinced he has the upper hand, though, disparaging M’Coy for his “valise tack” and cockily gloating that he’s onto M’Coy’s little scheme. However, Bloom has intended since breakfast to try his own ticket-to-Mullingar tack on M’Coy (“Might work a press pass. Or through M’Coy”). M’Coy comes out the victor in this contest of moochers as Bloom forgets to ask about the ticket, but M’Coy succeeds in asking Bloom to get his name listed as attending Paddy Dignam’s funeral. Bloom doesn’t realize his error until he’s entering All Hallows Church - “Damn it. I might have tried to work M'Coy for a pass to Mullingar.”
Beneath the surface, M’Coy stands as a symbol for Bloom’s sexual inefficacy. Passivity and impotence are an aspect of the lotus casting its spell over this episode. M’Coy appears in Joyce’s schema for the episode as a Lotus Eater, while Bloom’s disinterest in M’Coy is an example of the technic of narcissism that Joyce employs in this episode. Bloom is unable to creep around a corner and indulge in his masturbatory affair because of M’Coy’s interference.
Compounding his frustration, Bloom misses the opportunity to engage in a little morose delectation and ogle a stylish woman’s shapely leg as she boards an outsider jaunting car across the street. Phillip J. Herring interpreted this pervy microcosm as a representation of the macrocosm of Bloom’s dysfunctional marriage. He wants to experience a sexual moment (seeing the woman’s leg), but is cockblocked by a tram (Boylan). Perhaps he could have shifted position, but he is locked in place by his own impotent reflection (M’Coy). Passivity and sexual incapacity are effects of the narcotic atmosphere of “Lotus Eaters” - no bold actions are taken.
Finally, Bloom speculates that his acquaintance’s chatty exterior might mask sexual motives, just as others have speculated about him. Bloom wonders if “[M’Coy’s] that way inclined a bit,” suggesting M’Coy may be gay and that’s why he’s so amicable with Bloom. Similarly, in “Scylla and Charybdis”, Buck Mulligan speculates that Bloom is “greeker than the greeks,” implying the same of Bloom. As he considers M’Coy’s comparison between their wives, Bloom also wonders, “...is he pimping after me?” Bloom could be referring to M’Coy’s valise borrowing scheme here, but could Bloom be suspecting him of more salacious intent?
As Bloom chats with M’Coy, the conversation turns to their wives’ concert tours, causing Bloom’s sexual incapacity to float to the surface, at least subconsciously. M’Coy is the first of two characters to ask Bloom, “Who’s getting it up?” in reference to Molly’s performance in Belfast. We know (and Bloom knows) that the only one “getting it up” with Molly, both professionally and personally, is Blazes Boylan. Bloom’s eyes duck into the rolled-up copy of the Freeman’s Journal he’s carrying long enough to be confronted with an ad for Plumtree’s Potted Meat:
What is home without
Plumtree's Potted Meat?
Incomplete.
With it an abode of bliss.
It’s not a great ad, as Bloom later points out in “Lestrygonians”:
“What is home without Plumtree's potted meat? Incomplete. What a stupid ad!... With it an abode of bliss. Lord knows what concoction.”
It manages to pack a punch, nonetheless. Bloom is preoccupied with his home, which is far from an abode of bliss precisely because an interloper is coming to “pot meat” with Molly that very afternoon. As our stand-in for Odysseus, it’s fitting that Bloom’s eye should catch an ad promising a way home. Bloom’s own Ithaca at 7 Eccles St. is incomplete precisely because he isn’t “potting meat” (I swear Gifford and Seidman list this as a slang term for sex; I’m not just being gross.) The Bloom home has suffered incompleteness due to the absence of Rudy. Leopold and Molly haven’t had sex in the last decade as a result. On top of this, their daughter Milly is away in Mullingar as well, adding to the emptiness of the Blooms’ abode.
The most obvious metaphor behind Plumtree’s Potted Meat is sex, or more accurately the non-existant sex blocking the Blooms’ bliss. Potted meat can refer to a processed meat product, packed (nowadays) with delicious ingredients like “mechanically separated chicken,” but it can also be crude slang for having sex, as mentioned above. Bloom clocks the Plumtree’s ad while he’s half-listening to M’Coy, the symbol of his own dismal, sexless marriage, and distracting himself trying to leer at a fancy woman’s exposed calf. His attention is then yanked back to reality by M’Coy blathering about his wife’s concert engagement and the query as to “who’s getting it up” with Molly. The sexual connotation is front and center in Bloom’s mind. While a passive air is maintained throughout the “Lotus Eaters” episode, Bloom’s instinct when reminded of Boylan is to repress the thought as hard as he can. In this instance, Bloom struggles to put it out of his mind.
Boylan, for his part, knows the way to a lady’s heart is through a nice tub of potted meat. We see him in “Wandering Rocks” purchasing “fat pears and blushing peaches.” Before the shop girl arranges the fruit, he hands her “the bottle swathed in pink tissue paper and a small jar.” Molly recalls the port and potted meat he brought in “Penelope,” remarking in particular on the meat’s “fine salty taste”- a remark I’m assuming can refer to Plumtree’s Potted Meat as well as Boylan’s semen. Leopold finds the empty jar in the kitchen in “Ithaca.” The meat has been potted. When he finally pours himself into bed, he finds “the imprint of a human form, male, not [Bloom’s], some crumbs, some flakes of potted meat, recooked, which he removed” - a symbolic expulsion of his Penelope’s suitor.
Bloom doesn’t think the presence of the potted meat is any great coincidence. He’s well aware of his wife’s infidelity, remarking to himself in “Nausicaa'' that “I am a fool perhaps. He gets the plums, and I the plumstones.” Joyce apparently saw great possibility in “plumstones” as a sexual metaphor, both a generator for and an eventual byproduct of a plum tree. Think of Stephen’s “Parable of the Plums or a Pisgah sight of Palestine” in “Aeolus,” in which two elderly virgins toss plum stones from the top of Nelson's pillar, phallic symbol extraordinaire. When Joyce initially composed Ulysses, Stephen’s parable was entitled simply “A Pisgah Sight of Palestine,” but as Joyce developed the themes of the novel, its second title (“The Parable of the Plums”) was added.
Bloom takes on a Mosaic quality, a lonely Israelite in search of Zion, and like Moses, he may be doomed to only view the Promised Land, his personal abode of bliss™ from afar. His Zion isn’t in far away Palestine, but in his private Ithaca with Molly, keeper of the plums. It’s telling then that Joyce chose the brand Plumtree’s for Ulysses’ thematic potted meat. It represents the fertility and sensuality of a juicy piece of ripe fruit, just out of reach to Leopold. Plumtree’s is only an enticing, juicy fruit on its surface; on the inside, it’s just gross meat, reminding the reader that for Boylan, his conquests are just meat to be consumed. Quoth Bloom in “Ithaca”: “A plumtree is a meatpot, registered trade mark.” Potted meat alone is just meat (or close enough to meat) and cannot make a home all by itself. Once it’s consumed, the longing will return.
Sexism isn’t the only thing rotten about the potted meat allegory. The secrets of love and death are nestled side by side in Ulysses, so naturally Plumtree’s Potted Meat appears alongside the obituaries in the Freeman’s Journal. Bloom finds this choice a little too on the nose. From “Lestrygonians”:
“Under the obituary notices they stuck it. All up a plumtree. Dignam's potted meat.”
Plumtree’s Potted Meat is People!!!
The ad’s placement further objectifies the human body. Rather than revering the body as a temple or as the vessel of the soul come Judgment Day, the newly dead are juxtaposed with an ad for industrially-produced meat gloop - quoth Bloom, “Cauls mouldy tripes windpipes faked and minced up. Puzzle find the meat.” None too appetizing and certainly not kosher. This ad then, promising the consumer their own edenic utopia by merely bringing a pot of meat into their residence, hints at the dark side of those who peddle paradise.
The allure of an ad has a narcotic effect, pulling the consumer in with promises of fulfilled dreams. All happiness requires is a little potted meat! Bloom’s mind is a ceaseless conveyor belt of marketing and advertising schemes. One by one they are absorbed into his subconscious and intermingle with his desires and anxieties, spoken and unspoken, allowing him to filter his emotions through treacly ad-speak. In this instance, Bloom’s anxiety over his wife’s infidelity takes the form of potted meat. As the image lingers in his mind over the course of the day, it shifts into a metaphor for sex, death and faith.
From the opening paragraphs of “Lotus Eaters” until its conclusion, Bloom spends quite a bit of his time pondering various ads for consumer goods, from tea to ginger ale to potted meat to the various potions in Sweny’s chemist, all promising some kind of soothing effect to their purchasers. There’s a sedative or salve for every ailment, great or small. As Stephen Dedalus later quips, “This is the age of patent medicine.” These ads and their attendant products are the lotus blossoms that so enthrall their consumers and rob them of their freedom. “An abode of bliss,” a veritable Eden, as promised by Plumtree’s Potted Meat invites the consumer to relax in a false paradise inhabited by listless Lotus Eaters.
Embracing the abode of bliss, then, requires a leap of faith. The Plumtree’s company aren’t offering data or proof that their product will provide a balm for dysfunctional homes. We’re expected to just believe it will. You don’t even have to eat it - it just needs to exist in your home to provide the bliss. Of course, if you do eat it, I suppose the bliss will drain away and you must acquire more of this magic substance. Ritual consumption in order to achieve eternal salvation after death is a cornerstone of the Catholic faith. Ritually consuming the communion wafer during the ceremony of Eucharist is part and parcel to securing a place in a heavenly abode of bliss in the afterlife. And you can’t just do it once - you must take communion every Sunday until you die for it to be effective. Placing the Plumtree’s ad next to the obituaries seems especially fitting, in that case.
Of course, the bread and wine consumed during the Mass is not just any old bread and wine. It is transubstantiated into the literal body and blood of Christ through the ritual of the Catholic Mass. A product like potted meat goes through its own sort of transubstantiation. Potted meat is made of the leftover parts of animals slaughtered for their meat - all the bits that weren’t nice enough to wind up on Dlugacz’s counter or even in his lovely sausages. These waste parts, through the miracle of commercial food processing, are transformed from “byproduct” into more desirable “meat” and sold to consumers. You wouldn’t find yourself buying a product labeled “potted byproduct.” (Or maybe you’re more adventurous than me.) Potted “meat” is at least a bit more palatable. Through the magic of marketing, the meat is further transformed into bliss. Thus, food waste becomes bliss through transubstantiation, a process that depends heavily on faith for it to be effective. The sorcerors in the Plumtree’s marketing department cast their spell to convince us that this is true. The potency of the spell lies in how blissful you believe yourself to be. You define your own bliss and, in the process, confirm the sorcerers’ power.
Bloom, himself a low-level marketing sorcerer, sees through this ruse when he deconstructs the Plumtree's ad in “Lestrygonians.” He is taken in for a moment, lost in the swirl of Plumtree’s symbolic power, but he is able to break free. It is this clarity of mind that allows him to reclaim his home from Molly’s suitor in “Ithaca.”
To return once more briefly to the exchange between M’Coy and Bloom, there’s one more mysterious tidbit that creeps through Bloom’s inner monologue:
“Mrs Marion Bloom. Not up yet. Queen was in her bedroom eating bread and. No book. Blackened court cards laid along her thigh by sevens. Dark lady and fair man. Letter. Cat furry black ball. Torn strip of envelope.”
Joyce scholar and super sleuth Hugh Kenner noted that the details of this passage point to a missing conversation between Molly and Leopold where some key information about Leopold’s day was dispensed. There’s around an hour of unaccounted for time between the moment where we leave Leopold in the jakes at the end of “Calypso” and his walk along Sir John Rogerson’s Quay at the opening of “Lotus Eaters.” It seems unlikely that he went directly from outhouse to quay, but rather went back upstairs and had a full conversation with Molly before setting out for the day. This passage in “Lotus Eaters” is a clue as to what transpired between them.
For instance, Bloom is uncertain of the exact time of Dignam’s funeral when Molly asks about it in “Calypso”: “Eleven, I think, he answered. I didn't see the paper.” By the time he meets with M’Coy, he’s purchased a copy of the Freeman’s Journal, confirming the funeral time, which he then relays to M’Coy during the stop-and-chat. A small detail, to be sure. Why does it matter if such minutiae are omitted? It doesn’t, but in a novel where the main character consistently knows the exact location of his hat and desiccated potato, it’s worth taking a moment to consider why other minutiae aren’t so carefully considered.
When Bloom returns from the porkbutcher in “Calypso,” he is greeted by a letter addressed to “Mrs. Marion Bloom'' in a “bold hand.” It goes unspoken in the moment, but the sender is one Hugh “Blazes” Boylan, Molly’s impresario and secret lover. Bloom clocks the handwriting and the erasure of Mr. Marion Bloom from the picture. Boylan has written to say that he will make a visit to 7 Eccles St. that afternoon (bearing “potted meat,” nudge, nudge). The letter is mentioned only peripherally in “Calypso” as Molly hastily tucks it under a pillow, but its details are revealed over the course of the book. The time and nature of Boylan’s call is never discussed on-screen in “Calypso,” but Bloom knows that Boylan will arrive at 4:00 in subsequent chapters. How did he get this information from a letter squirreled under a pillow? Molly told him, of course, but off-screen.
In “Lotus Eaters,” Bloom recalls Molly looking over her court cards for a hint about the day to come:
“Blackened court cards laid along her thigh by sevens. Dark lady and fair man. Letter. Cat furry black ball. Torn strip of envelope.”
This detail is subconsciously sandwiched into the conversation between Bloom and M’Coy about their wives. The implication is that Bloom saw the cards and believes that they predict Boylan’s arrival. We learn later in “Penelope” that Molly has her own interpretation of the cards, but we see here the cards out at the same time as the letter after breakfast. The Blooms’ cat is the proof in the pudding. As Bloom heads out to the jakes in “Calypso,” his cat “went up in soft bounds. Ah, wanted to go upstairs, curl up in a ball on the bed.” And here he recalls, “Cat furry black ball.” The conversation had to have happened after he finished in the jakes and before he arrived in Westland Row.
Then there’s the matter of Leah. Leopold tells Molly that he won’t be coming home that evening until late - he’ll have dinner out and then catch a performance of Leah at the Gaiety Theatre. Bloom doesn’t want to be home when Boylan is around, so he makes an excuse to not come home, but it has to seem natural. Just after he’s able to shake M’Coy in “Lotus Eaters,” Bloom’s mind drifts to “Leah tonight: Mrs Bandman Palmer.” He’s getting his alibi straight for when he eventually returns home. In “Hades,” as the funeral procession winds its way back through Westland Row, Bloom thinks, “Could I go to see Leah tonight, I wonder. I said I.” He could just be considering checking out the performance, but the truncated, “I said I” is likely short for “I said I would,” meaning that’s where he’d told Molly he would be. Why not actually go see it if he has the time? Finally, Molly scoffs at the memory of Leopold’s alibi in “Penelope”: “...he has an idea about him and me hes not such a fool he said Im dining out and going to the Gaiety though Im not going to give him the satisfaction in any case…”
I think this is why Joyce chose to omit this conversation, apart from some deep, abiding love of unnecessary scavenger hunts. The idea of Boylan and Molly together is so abhorrent to Bloom that he wriggles and squirms in his own inner monologue any time his thoughts begin to approach this horrible betrayal. He is so rattled by a direct conversation about this topic that he refuses to think about it at all. Further proof of this psychological torture is that Bloom leaves his home twice without his latchkey. He went out without it briefly to purchase his kidney, but in “Ithaca”, he is irritated “because he had forgotten and because he remembered that he had reminded himself twice not to forget.” We only see him forget it “on-screen” once in “Calypso.” He must have forgotten it the second time, then, when he went back to the room to chat with Molly. He had intended to grab it from his everyday trousers, but when she dropped the bombshell of Boylan’s visit, he was so rattled that he left a second time without the key.
Bloom returns home, in the end, with neither key nor potted meat.
Further Reading:
Budgen, F. (1972). James Joyce and the making of Ulysses, and other writings. London: Oxford University Press. Retrieved from https://tinyurl.com/y2qpjk4g
Del Río Molina, B. (2006). From Iconophagy to Anthropophagy: Cannibalising Images in Ulysses. Papers on Joyce, 12, 25-43. Retrieved from http://www.siff.us.es/iberjoyce/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/6-PoJ12-Benigno.pdf
Ellmann, R. (1959). James Joyce. Oxford University Press.
Ellmann, R. (1972). Ulysses on the Liffey. Oxford University Press. Retrieved from https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.65767/page/n39
Gifford, D., & Seidman, R. J. (1988). Ulysses annotated: Notes for James Joyce's Ulysses. Berkeley: University of California Press. Retrieved from https://tinyurl.com/vy6j4tk
Herring, P. (1974). Lotuseaters. In C. Hart & D. Hayman (eds.), James Joyce’s Ulysses: Critical essays (71-90). Berkeley: University of California Press. Retrieved from https://tinyurl.com/yy2gpfhs
Kenner, H. (1987). Ulysses. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Retrieved from https://books.google.com/books?id=Ajlz5rzPBOkC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA19#v=onepage&q&f=false
Leland, B. (2014). An Abode of Bliss: Plumtree's Potted Meat and the Allegory of the Theologians. James Joyce Quarterly, 52(1), 37-53. Retrieved September 16, 2020, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/44162649
Magalaner, M. (1953). Leopold Bloom before 'Ulysses'. Modern Language Notes, 68(2), 110-112. doi:10.2307/2909699. Retrieved from https://www.jstor.org/stable/2909699
Osteen, M. (1995). The economy of Ulysses: making both ends meet. New York: Syracuse University Press. Retrieved from https://tinyurl.com/yycf2ar5
Wellington, F. (1977). A Missing Conversation in "Ulysses". James Joyce Quarterly, 14(4), 476-479. Retrieved February 11, 2020, from www.jstor.org/stable/25476087