This is my body
This is my body
In Brief
At the end of Lotus Eaters, as Bloom contemplates the
bath he is about to take, he thinks, "This is my body,"
echoing the Words of Consecration at the heart of the Mass.
Catholic priests uttering these words change bread into the
body of Christ in the mysterious process called transubstantiation. The
words of the ritual, in turn, come from those spoken by Jesus
to his disciples at the Last Supper, announcing that after his
death he would live on in his believers, redeeming them from
sin and death. The words do not mean quite this to Bloom, and
Joyce uses them to suggest a different kind of mystery.
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Matthew 26:26-28 says, "And as they were eating, Jesus took
bread, and blessed it, and brake it, and gave it to the
disciples, and said, Take, eat; this is my body. And
he took the cup, and gave thanks, and gave it to them, saying,
Drink ye all of it; For this is my blood of the new testament
which is shed for many for the remission of sins." Mark
14:22-24 and Luke 22:19-20 have similar language. John's
gospel refers to the supper but does not narrate its events.
Stephen mouths scriptural and liturgical phrases like this
with almost every breath, but it is odd to hear one tumbling
about in the thoughts of Bloom, an unbeliever. The explanation
is almost certainly that, earlier in the same chapter, he has
watched a Catholic priest placing consecrated wafers in the
mouths of the worshipers in St. Andrew's Church. In 1904
priests spoke the Words of Consecration in Latin rather than
English, but Bloom has been listening as they are repeated for
each communicant and he knows the meaning of the crucial word:
"The priest bent down to put it into her mouth, murmuring
all the time. Latin. The next one. Shut your eyes and open
your mouth. What? Corpus: body. Corpse. Good
idea the Latin. Stupefies them first." Presumably he is
familiar enough with the scriptural phrase (he was, after all,
once nominally a Catholic) to recall its English equivalent.
And here one encounters one of those questions that the book
forces on its readers at every turn. Should Bloom's strange
comparison of his body to Christ's be plumbed for symbolic
significance, or should it be seen as a matter-of-fact
deflation of a grand cliché? Both views are quite plausible,
and they are not really incompatible. On the one hand, one can
readily imagine Bloom thinking that "This is my body" is
better suited to contemplating one's nakedness. Jesus, the
supposed Son of God, was a peripatetic Palestinian Jew who
without his clothes must have looked much like other men. As
Molly would say, Who's he when he's at home? On the other
hand, Joyce (not Bloom) may be redefining what is truly
mysterious. "This is my body" introduces the final paragraph
of Lotus Eaters, a description of Bloom in the bathtub
that evokes the mystery of sexual procreation rather than
transubstantiation.
After Bloom reflects on "the stream of life"—a
succession of evanescent moments—he imagines the bath as a "gentle
tepid stream." Then the third-person narration takes
over to guide the chapter to a lyric climax in the final
paragraph, and amid the "floating hair of the stream"
Joyce places Bloom's penis, "the limp father of thousands, a
languid floating flower." The limp organ has not been doing
its job for ten years now, but it is the means by which
evanescent human organisms miraculously perpetuate themselves
in their offspring. Having lost his only son, Bloom cherishes
this link between past and
future. If Christ the Son of a heavenly Father can offer
his followers an escape from death in a piece of bread, Bloom
the earthly father may find an escape from death in the seed
of his floating flower.
