Ulysses Essay 32 (50:38)

Chapter 4 (Calypso) No. 3

“Ikey touch that: the homerule sun rising up in the northwest”

It’s a warm late spring morning and on his way home from the butcher Dlugacz, Bloom crosses to the sunny side of the street, and consequently and typically his thoughts turn to the sun. He recalls a book that he has been reading: Frederick Thompson’s “In the Track of the Sun: Readings from the Diary of a Globe Trotter” published in 1893 and describing the author’s circumnavigation of the earth. (In the book, which is packed with fascinating photographs, Thompson tells how he set out westward by train from New York City and then continued by sea from Vancouver to the Far East. He describes at length his experiences in Japan, China and India, as well as his travels in the Near East, including Egypt where he took a boat trip up the Nile to Luxor and Aswan, and Palestine where he visited the holy sites in Jerusalem and Bethlehem, and toured Jericho and the Dead Sea). Bloom’s reverie, however, departs from the factual nature of the diary amd mainly dwells on his own rather subjective impressions the mystical, fragrant and sometimes dangerous ambience of the Orient: dark cave-like carpet shops, water scented with fennel and sherbet, shadowy mosques, cries of sellers in the streets – altogether a region where one “might meet a robber or two”. Bloom conjures up an imaginary illustration for the frontispiece of the book which he terms a “sunburst on the titlepage”, although in fact the actual title page of the book shows an Oriental girl playing a dulcimer.

But the idea of a “sunburst” is immediately and enjoyably associated in Bloom’s mind with a recent ironic comment that the Irish journalist and patriot Arthur Griffith directed at the headpiece of Dublin’s ostensibly pro Home Rule morning paper, the Freeman’s Journal and National, whose prominent logo shows the rising sun victoriously “bursting” over the Bank of Ireland building, an edifice that – significantly – had housed the Irish Parliament prior to the 1800 Act of Union. The irony stems from Griffith’s trenchant observation that, given the geographical location of the Bank of Ireland, the sun would have to arise in the northwest to match the Freeman headpiece.

Bloom is so delighted with himself for having recalled Griffith’s witty (and politically loaded) comment that he confers on the journalist a somewhat double-edged compliment: “Ikey touch that: the homerule sun rising up in the northwest.”  

“Ikey” and “Ikey-Mo” (based on the common Jewish biblical names Isaac and Moses) were derogatory appellations frequently applied to Jews in the British Isles and its colonial empire at the end of the nineteenth century and during the first half of the twentieth century, and even now the terms remain fairly pervasive. These “Ikey” epithets were generally felt to be milder and less virulently anti-Semitic than other more offensive terms for Jews (such as “sheeny”, “kike”, “Hebe” and the literary “Barabbas”) and they were commonly employed in music hall comedy to refer to Jews, especially to stress their ostensible financial craftiness and quick-wittedness, the derogatory humor being sometimes tempered by a degree of envious admiration.

Bloom is obviously using the adjective “Ikey” to stress the artfulness of Griffith’s observation, and it seems that at the time the term was occasionally used non-pejoratively to indicate shrewd or clever behavior. But later during the day Bloom is himself going to be termed an “Ikey” (as well as a “sheeny”), and he must have been well aware of the underlying anti-Jewish connotation of the word. Is this an instance of Jewish self-disparagement, or, as seems more likely, is Bloom welcoming the Irish nationalist Griffith into a camaraderie of persecuted peoples who, deprived of the basic privileges of independence and self-determination, have learned to survive by nimbly using their wits against their bullying oppressors?