Bloom’s Bum Steer to the Nolan
Does Bloom’s checking the bottoms of the gods have a higher purpose?
Post Eight
An amusing part of the book takes place in Lestrygonians where Bloom is sat in Davy Byrne’s ‘moral’ pub eating his cheese and mustard sandwich and where his glass of burgundy will provide some respite for his troubled mind. With wine kindling some fire in his veins he recalls the day some sixteen years earlier on which he proposed to and first made love with Molly on Howth Head. Molly as those with even cursory knowledge of the book will know, shall recall the same incident some hours later.
But two flies stuck in drying paint makes him ponder how far he has fallen from that romantic high and in less romantic and quite depressed mindset, Bloom considers the pointlessness of not just humanity but of all essence, even the solar system. All just digestion machines consuming, multiplying, defecating dying and re-kindling to start all over again. He wonders: are the gods any different? The food of the gods he has read is Ambrosia. Do they defecate? Bloom is a logical man and from his discourse on religion and the afterlife we do not expect he believes in Greek gods, unlike Odysseus his former self. But in his depressed state he is reaching blindly for some hope. That somewhere, somehow there is a higher purpose and we are not all just food processors en-route to being another processor’s food.
So he thinks, he’ll check the statues of Juno and Athena at the National Library to see if they have anuses. He’s got to go there anyway. It’s all a bit farfetched and just Bloom on an idle frolic but this is not just some joke about Greek god’s bums; Joyce has him frolicking for a very serious purpose.
Mesial groove is the phrase Mulligan, the medical student, uses in the next episode when he reports seeing Bloom sniffing around the backsides of the statues, staring at their mesial groove. This is a dental term meaning the indented line running through the middle of a tooth and we can imagine what he means in the context of buttocks. Its all very smutty and amusing. All a bit Frankie Howerd and ooh er Mrs. but the serious business is this; as Stephen will waiver between various choices, between Scylla and Charybdis, Bloom is his guide to the middle way. Philosophy students may note the guiding hand of Giordano Bruno of Nola and the coinciding of polar extremes. Bloom is Stephen’s medium to the medium.
So, not just a joke about bums.
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