The Promised Land is no Place Like Home

Post Three

Zion. It’s become an emotionally charged word. It’s mentioned over 150 times in the bible (I love the internet) and six times in Ulysses. Strictly it is the hill on which the City of David (Jerusalem) was first built around 900 BCE but its broader meaning has (at some point in the last three millennia) come to refer to causes and for our purposes, its first reference is in Proteus in the context of Kevin Egan in Paris.

               ‘Weak wasting hand on mine. They have forgotten Kevin Egan, not he them. Remembering thee, O Sion.’

The steady hands that once lit Fenian fuse wire now weak and wasted, shake to light his cigarette. Stranded in Paris like the beached whales we shortly encounter, he yearns to be reunited with the cause that no longer needs him. For to continue the psalm playing in Stephen’s head, how can he sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?

That Stephen thinks ‘Sion’ is in addition to whatever else it might be, one of Stephen’s many subconscious premonitions of Bloom, a man he doesn’t know. For Egan’s Zion, his Promised Land, should not be ridding Ireland of the British; at least not just that. Like Bloom, he needs to worry more about issues much closer to home. His wife has thrown him out, his son mocks him and his life is a daily crusade of failing to find a willing audience on his regular pub crawl. He doesn’t even vary the pubs.

Next chapter, Bloom’s mood undulates as he contemplates a Jewish homeland in then Turkish Palestine. But he needs to realise (and he subliminally does) that his Promised Land is not in the Levant but rather around the corner in the jingly bed in 7 Eccles Street. I succumb to temptation to mention enormous melons. Bloom and Egan need to worry more about the problems at the end of their noses and less of far flung causes, of whatever worth.

So there you have it. Stephen thinking Sion, might be as much (though he doesn’t know it) about Bloom as Egan or futile causes generally. Moreover it’s not simply semantics, he reveals that Egan has fallen into the trap that may also endanger Bloom; misreading the grid reference location of one’s Promised Land.

Well, it could be anyway. The beauty of Ulysses is that there are very few wrong answers when one allows one’s mind to expand.

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