JOURNEY #22: TO THE HOLY LAND
"Three Cheers for Israel!"
-- James Joyce, Ulysses
Last Bloomsday, I took a break from writing this blog, not knowing when I'd start again.
Big surprise. The urge to blog came in the most unusual of places: on my vacation to Israel.
En route to Israel I started reading Ari Shavit's new book "My Promised Land" about Israel's "Triumph and Tragedy." In it, Shavit writes about how, a century ago, the people of modern-day Israel farmed "dunams" of land and exported Jaffa oranges to Europe, gingerly wrapping each fruit in tissue paper and packing them in wooden crates.
Any Joyce aficionado would immediately recognize these words -- they seem to come straight out the pages of Ulysses.
In the chapter known as Calypso, Leopold Bloom journeys to the butcher shop and pockets a page from a prospectus advertising shares in an agriculture company in the Holy Land. The ad reads:
"The model farm at Kinnereth on the lakeshore of Tiberias...To purchase vast sandy tracts from Turkish government and plant with eucalyptus trees...You pay eight marks and they plant a dunam of land for you with olives, oranges, almonds or citrons."
As we travelled to Tiberius and Kinneret, we saw plenty of eucalyptus trees, orange groves and olive trees. For a guy who's never been to Israel, Joyce nailed the Golan Heights.
This illustrates one of the marvels of Ulysses: it provides a European man's view of the Holy Land in 1904 -- a time when the land was a part of the Ottoman Empire -- years before the British Mandate.
Bloom then turns his mind to the Dead Sea, which we visited a few days ago. I read this passage from Ulysses as we sat on flimsy lawn chairs by the coast of the famous salty sea:
"A barren land, bare waste. Vulcanic lake, the dead sea: no fish, weedless, sunk deep in the earth. No wind would lift those waves, grey metal, poisonous foggy waters. Brimstone they called it raining down: the cities of the plain: Sodom, Gomorrah, Edom. All dead names. A dead sea in a dead land, grey and old. Old now. It bore the oldest, the first race...The oldest people. Wandered far away over all the earth, captivity to captivity, multiplying, dying, being born everywhere."
A quick word about Joyce's other references to Israel in Ulysses.
In the Aeolus chapter, J.J. O'Molloy tells a story of an Egyptian's highpriest's speech to Moses, spelling out the reasons not to take the Israelites out of Egypt; but in the end, he makes it clear that the rewards of making it to the promised land were far greater. You can hear an actual audio recording of Joyce reading this section here.
Finally, the city of Jerusalem plays a big role in Ulysses. In his drunken stupor, Bloom imagines himself to be the leader of a utopian society he calls "new Bloomsalem" while the song "The Holy City" (about Jerusalem) spews out from a gramophone, located of all places, in the brothel.
Nobody mixes the sacred with the sinful quite like Joyce.
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