Salt bread

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The souls in Dante's afterlife can see the future. In Paradiso Cacciaguida tells Dante that he will be banished from the great city-state of his birth and forced into an itinerant existence, wandering about northern Italy in search of shelter, protection, and patronage. Florentines put little salt in their breads, so even his daily bread will discomfit him:

You will leave behind every delightful thing
You most love; and this is the arrow
That the bow of exile first shoots.

You will discover how full of salt
Is the bread of another, and how hard the way
Going down and up another’s stairs.  

(17.55-60, my translation)

Dante's response to the uncomprehending hostility directed against him, Cacciaguida says, must be to make "a party of yourself alone"––i.e., to leave behind the wars of Guelphs and Ghibellines and become a party of one.

Stephen, who has been going up and (just now) down the stairs of Mulligan’s tower, contemplates handing over the key and becoming homeless: “Give him the key too. All.” At about this time in Joyce's own life (1900-1904), he was beginning to think of himself as a writer-in-exile. Ellmann notes that Henrik Ibsen's warm acknowledgement of the essay "Ibsen's New Drama" that Joyce published in the Fortnightly Review in 1900 encouraged the young man to think of himself as standing "aloof" from his peers (74). "Before Ibsen's letter Joyce was an Irishman," Ellmann observes; "after it he was a European" (75). He read all the late nineteenth century European literature he could get his hands on, and much else besides; "He continued his study of Dante, so that it was easy for Oliver Gogarty to dub him a little later the Dante of Dublin" (75).

In December 1902 Joyce departed from Kingstown pier for his first exile on the Continent. In October 1904 he left again, with Nora, this time for good. Of the first departure Ellmann remarks, "He was not yet using the word 'exile,' but there are hints of it in his letter to Lady Gregory. Joyce needed exile as a reproach to others and a justification of himself. His feeling of ostracism from Dublin lacked, as he was well aware, the moral decisiveness of his hero Dante's exile from Florence, in that he kept the keys to the gate. He was neither bidden to leave nor forbidden to return, and after this first departure he was in fact to go back five times. But, like other revolutionaries, he fattened on opposition and grew thin and pale when treated with indulgence" (109). In part 5 of A Portrait Stephen tells Cranly that "I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use––silence, exile, and cunning." In the final pages he prepares to head off for Paris, declaring the Irish "A race of clodhoppers!"

[2022] The Stephen seen in Ulysses has returned from Paris, a failure for now, but he clings no less strongly to the cause of artistic exile inspired by Dante. The novel gives him a potential surrogate father in Leopold Bloom, who feels similarly alienated from family, religion, and nation. In Ithaca, in a passage rich in echoes of Dante, the two men leave Bloom's house conducting a mock ceremony that celebrates the ancient Hebrews' departure from Egypt to wander in exile in the Sinai peninsula.