James Joyce and the Politics of Food

Abstract

In Stephen and Bloom at Life's Feast (1984), Lyndsey Tucker notes that Joyce pays close attention to food and digestion, especially in Bloom's gustatory progress through Ulysses.1 A close reading of Joyce's work also reveals characters who restrict their food intake in particular social and political situations, and in doing so, draw complicated connections between food, politics, and gender in Ireland. For instance, within both Dead and A Portrait ofthe Artist as a Young Man, women refuse food during important holiday dinner scenes; addi tionally, Stephen Dedalus displays his complex relationship with eating throughout the day in Ulysses, eventually refusing solid food completely. For Dedalus, uncertainties about identity?not just gender, but also Irishness and wholeness?become triggers to his food behaviors. Food refusal in Joyces work, which culminate in Stephen Dedalus's eventual rejection of solid food in Ulysses, builds upon an Irish historical and cultural tradition of food refusal as a form of political speech and suggests a way to rebuild fractured identity. The political implications of food in Ireland intensify because starvation, both willing and unwilling, is a recurring theme in Irish history. The long standing tactic of denial and self-starvation to protest mistreatment or impris onment adds a local significance to any analysis of ingestion in Irish literature. In The Hunger Artists, Maud Ellmann describes how Medieval Ireland, like medieval India, had a legal procedure of Tasting to distrain,' known as troscud, whereby a creditor could fast against a debtor, or a victim of injustice could fast against the person who had injured him.2 Such self-imposed starvation emerged famously in the 1920 death of Terrence McSwiney. In the 1980s, hunger strikes were used again by prisoners in Northern Ireland.