To Mulligan's charge in Telemachus that Stephen killed his mother, Stephen
replies, “Someone killed her.” This exchange initiates a
thread that runs throughout the novel: if God is to be
understood as a creator who brings life into the world, he
should also be understood as a butcher who takes it away.
Stephen is, it seems, capable
of scientific thinking. In Circe he responds
directly and reasonably to Mulligan's cruel remark: “They say
I killed you, mother. He offended your memory. Cancer
did it, not I. Destiny.” But as a metaphysician he
cannot accept the shallow Christian view of God's unalloyed
goodness. In Scylla and Charybdis he refers to a
deity “whom the most Roman of catholics call dio
boia, hangman god,” which
Gifford notes is "a common Roman expression for the force that
frustrates human hopes and destinies." This god, a redhanded "butcher,"
makes many appearances in the Hebrew Bible. Thornton cites a
passage from Blake's A Vision of the Last Judgment
that may have caught Joyce's attention: "Thinking as I do that
the Creator of this World is a very Cruel Being, & being a
Worshipper of Christ, I cannot help saying: 'the Son O how
unlike the Father!' First God Almighty comes with a Thump on
the Head. Then Jesus Christ comes with a balm to heal it'"
(28).
In Oxen of the Sun a narrative voice modeled on the
scientific writing of Thomas Henry Huxley refers to the "perverted
transcendentalism" that Stephen has conceived by
dwelling on the bloodthirsty aspects of the deity: his view
"that an omnivorous being which can
masticate, deglute, digest and apparently pass through the
ordinary channel with pluterperfect
imperturbability such multifarious aliments as
cancrenous females emaciated by parturition, corpulent
professional gentlemen, not to speak of jaundiced politicians
and chlorotic nuns, might possibly find gastric relief in an
innocent collation of staggering bob, reveals as nought else
could and in a very unsavoury light the tendency above alluded
to."
In Stephen's highly "unsavoury" view, God is an omnivore who
chews through every variety of human meat, pausing
occasionally to cleanse his palate with the delicate juices of
"staggering bob." The narrator pauses to gloss this last dish:
"For the enlightenment of those who are not so intimately
acquainted with the minutiae of the municipal abattoir as this
morbidminded esthete and embryo philosopher who for all his
overweening bumptiousness in things scientific can scarcely
distinguish an acid from an alkali prides himself on being, it
should perhaps be stated that staggering bob in the vile
parlance of our lowerclass licensed victuallers signifies the
cookable and eatable flesh of a calf newly dropped from its
mother." Yahweh here transcends his familiar aspect of
murderous senile delinquent and becomes a ravening, gluttonous
carnivore.
All of this can be dismissed as the ravings of a tortured
apostate, but Stephen's fanciful metaphysics complement the
scientific vision that pervades Ulysses: human life
is lived in bodies, bodies
are perishable meat, and no one knows what survives the grave.
Bloom thinks along these lines throughout Hades,
ignoring all the pious cant about the afterlife and focusing
on the facts of life (worth holding onto) and death (not worth
thinking about for very long). In Lestrygonians he
too, like Stephen, thinks that “God wants blood victim.”
That is, after all, the whole logic of the Incarnation, the
Last Supper, and the Crucifixion. The YMCA throwaway that he
is reading asks, "Are you saved?" and it describes the
immersion by which we can be saved: "All are washed in the
blood of the lamb."
This sanguinary view of Christianity is consistent with the
more general view of life that Bloom explores in Lestrygonians:
to survive, we must eat other creatures. It
accords also with Mulligan's medical view of human life in Telemachus:
"You saw only your mother die. I see them pop off every day in
the Mater and Richmond and
cut up into tripes in the dissectingroom. It's a
beastly thing and nothing else. It simply doesn't matter."
