Ulysses Essay 40 (61:31)

Chapter 5 (Lotus-Eaters) No. 1

“ Bethel. El, yes: house of: Aleph, Beth.”

At the conclusion of the “Calypso” episode, we find Bloom satisfactorily emptying his bowels in his outhouse while reading a prize short story entitled “Matcham’s Masterstroke” in Tidbits, a popular weekly newsmagazine. He notes that the author, Mr. Philip Beaufoy, earned the not inconsiderable sum of three pounds thirteen and six for his effort, and wonders whether he and Molly could also write such a prize-winning story. Beaufoy’s story, however, goes the way of all flesh, when Bloom, having finished reading, tears up the magazine and uses one half of Matcham’s Masterstroke to wipe himself. My immediate association with this episode takes me back to Issy Kahanowitz’s 1958 matriculation history class at King David High School in Johannesburg. Mr Kahanowitz, a born teacher, would tend to emulate Stephen Dedalus by often wandering away from the dry stuff of history. One day he somehow got onto Ulysses and explained to us that Joyce’s book dealt with the events of a single day in the life of one Leopold Bloom, and that it especially concentrated on Bloom’s thought processes or, as he put it,  his  “stream of consciousness” during that day. To illustrate the point he told us that the book even described what Bloom was thinking about as he sat on the lavatory seat and worked his bowels. This shocked us, because South Africa in 1958 was puritanical in the extreme and any mention of excretory (or sexual) behavior was utterly taboo at school or at home (although the future Nobel prizewinner Nadime Gordimer had begun to break these shackles with the publication of “The Lying Days” in 1953). 

While making his way to the outhouse, Bloom wonders if he has enough time to indulge himself at  the public bath house before Patty Dignam’s funeral, the main item on his morning agenda, and for which he intends to meet his fellow mourners at eleven for the ride to the cemetery. Leaving his Eccles Street home at ten o’clock, he decides that indeed he has more than enough time in hand, and so he enjoyably plans a rather roundabout hour-long walk through Dublin to incorporate a stop at the Westland Row sub-branch post office to check whether a Poste Restante letter from a clandestine female correspondent named Martha Griffith and addressed to “Henry Flower” has arrived; a period of reflection while sitting in a pew at All Hallows (St. Andrew’s Church);  a call-in at Sweny’s pharmacy on Lincoln Place to order a bottle of “sweet almond oil” skin care lotion for Molly and to buy a bar of lemon soap for himself;  and finally a visit to the nearby Leinster Street Turkish and Warm Baths to enjoy a luxurious (and perhaps mastubatory) hot bath.

Pursuing his plan for his free morning hour, Bloom crosses the Liffey River on the cast iron pedestrian “Ha’penny Bridge” (so called because at the time a toll of half a penny was charged to users) and strolls eastward for a while on Sir John Rogerson’s Quay following the south bank of the Liffey. He then turns right (southward) on Lime Street and then doubles back westward on the north sidewalk of Hanover Street East which runs into Townsend Street. After one more block he crosses Townsend Street and then turns south again on Lombard Street East making for Westland Row post office. As he passes 19-20 Lombard Street he takes in the “frowning face” of the Bethel Salvation Army Hostel. Since Joyce’s time, the hostel has been replaced by a modern building, and as there does not seem to be any available photographs of the original structure, we are uncertain as to why Joyce described its façade as “frowning”: a reasonable hypothesis might be that the uncomplimentary adjective expresses Joyce’s memory of an architecturally grim portico perhaps reinforced by his innate distaste for the missionizing efforts of the Salvation Army and other such religious establishments.

The Salvation Army hostel is named Bethel in reference to the biblical town of Beth-El (Hebrew: “House of God”) which is situated in the Samarian hill country some twelve miles north of Jerusalem. Beth-El is mentioned in Genesis as the place where Jacob spent his first night away from home while fleeing from his elder twin brother Esau, who had threatened to take murderous revenge on Jacob for having diddled him out of his birthright by impersonating him when taking food to their blind father Isaac. While sleeping in the open with a stone for his pillow, Jacob dreams of a ladder stretching from heaven to earth on which angels ascend and descend. During the dream God stands next to him and promises him that his descendants will inherit the land on which he is lying. The vision startles Jacob out of his dream: “And Jacob awoke out of his sleep and said: ‘Surely the Lord is in this place and I knew it not.’ And he was afraid and said: ‘How awesome is this place. It is surely none other than the house of God and the gateway to heaven.’… And he called the name of the place Beth-El ” (Genesis 28:16-17; 19).

Throughout Ulysses, Bloom demonstrates some familiarity with the Hebrew language and also a fairly deep awareness of Jewish tradition, thanks to his upbringing by his Jewish father, Rudolph Virag (“Flower” in Hungarian), although Rudolph – after emigrating to Ireland from Hungary and changing his surname to “Bloom”– had converted to Protestantism in order to marry Bloom’s mother, Ellen Higgins. In spite of his conversion, Rudolph apparently kept up some Jewish observances, especially the Seder ritual on the first night of Passover which Bloom recalls in some detail –  if not “always accurately – in the Aeolus episode of Ulysses.  

Here too, on espying the “Bethel” Salvation Army hostel, Bloom reflects on the Hebrew  etymology of the name of the institution. First he cogitates on the meaning of the second syllable of the word Bethel )“El”( and allows himself a triumphant “yes” as he obviously decides that “El” must denote “God” (although he does not pronounce the English word “God” explicitly). He then recites to himself the first two letters of the Hebrew alphabet “Aleph, Beth” and remembers that “Beth” means “house of” – being the possessive form of the Hebrew word “bayit” (“a house”). (Indeed the shape of the Hebrew letter “Beth” “ב” resembles a house, in common with most other Hebrew letters whose forms hieroglyphically signify their meanings, e.g. “Dalet” “ד” – a door; “Vav” “ו” – a hook; and “Shin” “ש” – a tooth). In this rather convoluted fashion Bloom comes to the correct conclusion that “Bethel” means “House of God”.

The town of Beth-El (“Bethel” in most English translations of the Tanach), situated in the Samarian hills north of Jerusalem  and peopled after Joshua’s conquest by the tribe of Benjamin, has had a chequered history, both biblical and contemporary, ever since Jacob was  recorded as having had a dream there of angels going up and down a ladder linking heaven and earth climaxed by a divine promise that his descendants would inherit the land of Canaan. After being taken by Joshua in a furious battle with the indigenous Canaanites, Beth-El became an important center of Hebrew religious worship, and during the time of the Judges the ark of the Covenant was kept there, prior to its being moved to nearby Shiloh during the pre-regnal governance of Samuel, the judge and prophet who at the people’s behest unwillingly oversaw the transition to a monarchal system by anointing two successive kings over Israel: first Saul, the tall modest Benjamite who “looked for asses and found kingship” and later Saul’s Judean successor and nemesis –  the wildly popular, young, heroic and handsome David of Bethlehem. The Saul-David conflict initiated inter-tribal discord that would eventually culminate in the splitting up of the nation into two kingdoms: Judea in the south with Jerusalem as its capital and place of worship centered on Solomon’s temple; and Israel (Samaria) in the north whose religious sites were located at Bethel and nearby Gilgal. At these sites locally imbibed idolatrous and amoral religious practices often overcame the monotheistic strictures of the Torah to the unbridled anger of some of the great ethical  prophets of the Tanach, such as Amos, Micah, Hosea and Jeremiah. Thus Amos rages: “Do not seek Beth-El; do not go to Gilgal…For Gilgal will surely go into exile, and Beth-El will be reduced to nothing” (Amos 5:5).

In post-biblical times Bethel was apparently a village of little importance, although Josephus Flavius records that Vespasian captured the town during the Roman conquest of Canaan in the first century B.C.E.. It was only two millennia later, in 1977, a decade after the Six Day War during which the Jordanian-Palestinian West Bank (“Judah and Samaria”) was conquered by Israel, that Gush Emunim (“The Bloc of the Faithful”), the messianic settler arm of  the right wing National Religious Party, established the modern settlement of Beth-El, now inhabited by some 6,000 ideologically committed orthodox Jews, who are surrounded by a bevy of Palestinian villages, inevitably resulting in an endless stream of security tensions on both sides. No country has ever recognized Beth-El and its numerous sister settlements in the West Bank as being legitimate, and the Israeli Government has so far avoided annexing the territory. Beth-El is also outside the umbrella of  Jewish settlements in the West Bank that successive Israeli governments intend to keep under permanent Israeli control for security reasons when a peace settlement is finally reached with the Palestinians, in exchange for giving the Palestinians, as compensation for these areas, blocs of integral Israeli territory mainly situated south of the Gaza Strip in a more or less quid pro quo arrangement.

So if such a long-awaited but apparently still far off settlement is reached with the Palestinians, Beth El will return to Arab control. Our right wing current Prime Minster, Binyamin Netanyahu, who is ideologically averse to repatriating Jews who have settled in the West Bank (with the historical connivance of both left and the right Israeli governments, it must be said) has stated that he can foresee a situation whereby the ideological settlers of Beth El and the other Gush Emunim sites who consider holding on to the historical biblical sites of the Holy Land to be a primarily religious priority that supersedes all other practical or political considerations, might even prefer to continue to live in their settlements under Palestinian governance, while still holding Israeli citizenship. Did anybody say “messianic”?