Ulysses Essay 39 (55:16)

Chapter 4 (Calypso) No. 10

“Say they won’t eat pork. Kosher.”

Bloom has returned home and hears his wife Molly, who is still in bed, calling him to come upstairs to her –  “Poldy!” On the “hallfloor” he finds three items of mail that were delivered  by the postman while he was out. Two of the items – a letter to him and a postcard to her mother – are from their fifteen-year-old daughter Milly who studying photography in Mullingar, fifty miles northwest of Dublin. The third item is a letter to Molly, addressed to “Mrs. Marion Bloom”. This  somewhat over-familiar form of address irritates Bloom. who would prefer his wife to be addressed as “Mrs. Leopold Bloom”, the accepted formal mode of address used when referring to a married woman. Bloom seems to suspect that the letter is from Molly’s impresario, Hugh (“Blazes”) Boylan, who handles the business side of Molly’s operatic career and with whom Molly is having an ongoing and barely concealed sexual liaison.

Bloom goes up the stairs to their bedroom and Molly, immediately noticing the three letters, wants to know whom they are for. Bloom answers:

“A letter for me from Milly,” he said carefully, “and a card for you. And a letter for you.”

How much ironic commentary on the fragility and duplicity of marriage is implicit in this succinct reply!

He puts the postcard from Milly and the letter addressed to “Mrs. Marion Bloom” on the bedspread. With his back to Molly, he pulls up the blind, but a quick backward glance (Lot’s wife again?) catches Molly tucking the letter under her pillow and then settling down to read the postcard from their daughter.

Having finished reading the postcard Molly “curled herself back slowly with a snug sigh.” She tells Bloom to “hurry up with that tea” because she is “parched” (the Dead Sea again?)  and he assures her that “the kettle is boiling”. As he makes his way downstairs she calls out to him, “Poldy!” “What?” he shouts back. “Scald the teapot,” she reminds him.

In the kitchen Bloom busies himself with preparing Molly’s breakfast-in-bed, while at the same time getting ready to fry for himself the pork kidney which he had bought earlier that morning from Dlugacz, the Jewish and Zionist but manifestly non-kosher butcher. Joyce describes Bloom’s reflections as he deals with the kidney:

“While he unwrapped the kidney, the cat mewed hungrily against him. Give her too much meat she won’t mouse. Say they won’t eat pork. Kosher. He let the bloodstained paper fall to her and dropped the kidney among the sizzling butter sauce. Pepper. He sprinkled it through his fingers, ringwise, from the chipped eggcup.”

Bloom is again indulging in pseudo-scientific ruminations about the nature of cats. Earlier in the morning he had repeated to himself the old wives’ tale that if you cut off a cat’s whiskers ”they can’t mouse after.” Now he thinks about another piece of unfounded folk wisdom: “Give her too much meat she won’t mouse.” Perhaps Bloom dwells on this old saw in order to justify (whether consciously or unconsciously) his unwillingness to share with the cat the single kidney delicacy he is now frying – after all it is his hard-earned reward for the all the time, effort and money that he had invested in its purchase that June morning. In the same vein he also creates another (and absolutely nonsensical) theory to justify to himself his decision not to give the cat a share of his pork kidney: “Say they won’t eat pork. Kosher.” Bloom’s labelling of his cat as part of a feline moiety that observes orthodox Jewish dietary restrictions is so far out that one can only wonder what Joyce was really getting at. Still in spite of his  ostensible awareness of the kosher habits of his cat, “he let the bloodstained paper fall to her.” Although we are not told if the “kosher” cat actually was tempted to consume the “treif’” (non-kosher) blood on the wrapping paper, we understand by implication that she lapped it up hungrily. One can take the kosher motif even further by recalling the Halakhic acquiescence in allowing a pot of kosher food not to become treif if it is accidentally contaminated by less than one part in sixty of a non-kosher substance, e.g., if a tiny drop of non-kosher soup falls into a big pot of kosher meat, the meat remains kosher (according to the rule “batel be’shishim” – “one sixtieth is nullified”). Could Bloom have erroneously  decided that the miniscule amount of non-kosher meat on the paper was “batel be’shishim?” Probably not, because later, when attending to Molly’s breakfast in their bedroom and Molly smells burning from the kitchen, Bloom discovers that the frying kidney is indeed  beginning to burn and he consequently cuts off the burnt part of the kidney which he throws to the cat.

The fanciful stream of thinking that cats observe Jewish strictures actually has a  rabbinical echo, although unrelated to the kosher vs treif issue. While dogs have a bad time of it in the Talmud where they are described as being aggressive and dangerous, the sages of the Talmud are limitless in their praise of cats, as so forcibly expressed by Rabbi Yochanan: “If the Torah had not been given [to us] we could have learned the rules of modest behavior from the cat” (Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Eruvin 80b). According to Rashi (Rabbi Shlomo Yitzhaki, the eleventh century French vintner who is revered in Jewish tradition  as the foremost commentator on the Tanach and the Talmud) the reference to the cat’s modesty is drawn from the its habit of covering its feces (as opposed to dogs who have no inhibitions about leaving their excreta everywhere in order to publicize their presence to their co-canines).

As to whether Jews are supposed to feed their pets kosher food, there are Halakhic opinions both for and against, although on Passover, orthodox Jews ensure that their pet food is “Kosher for Passover” to align with the general prohibition on introducing “chametz” (products made from leavened grains) into the home during the week-long Passover holiday (Exodus 12:15). However, on one aspect of feeding one’s animals the Halakha is crystal clear – one’s animals must always be fed before one sits down to a meal. 

So after all, Bloom, in dropping the bloodstained paper that wrapped his pork kidney for the benefit of his cat while still frying his own portion, is indeed acting “kosher” by feeding her before feeding himself.