Gifford glosses "To pot one's meat" as "crude slang for to
copulate," and that meaning resonates with the other
accidental sexual insinuations that assail Bloom as he stands
talking to M'Coy about Molly's upcoming singing tour.
("Who's getting it up?" "Part shares and part profits.")
Plumtree's ceramic pots proclaimed that they contained "home
potted meats." Joyce's advertising jingle removes the word
"home" from the producer and gives it to the consumer:
What is home without
Plumtree's Potted Meat?
Incomplete.
With it an abode of bliss.
Later chapters, particularly
Lestrygonians, will
suggest that Bloom's home did reasonably approximate an abode of
bliss in the years when he and Molly were enjoying satisfying
carnal relations, and their marriage certainly did become
incomplete when those relations ceased after Rudy's death, early
in 1894.
As if to ensure that the jingle's taunting insinuations will
not go unnoticed, life later imitates the art of advertising.
Ithaca notes that, next to the "oval wicker basket
bedded with fibre and containing one Jersey pear" that Boylan
has had sent ahead of him to 7 Eccles Street, there is "an
empty pot of Plumtree's potted meat," no doubt one
of the contents of the basket. When Bloom climbs into bed
beside Molly, he discovers "the imprint of a human form, male,
not his," as well as "some crumbs, some flakes of
potted meat, recooked, which he removed." In the
course of repeatedly potting his meat Boylan has unpotted some
as well, enacting the novel's recurrent association of picnics
with sexual enjoyment.
The discussion of Molly's concert tour comes just after the Freeman
ad has impressed itself on Bloom's thoughts. Just before this,
he and M'Coy have been discussing Paddy Dignam's death, and
the ad reaches backward to encompass these associations as
well. "Potted meat" perfectly captures the spirit of Bloom's
meditations on burial in Hades, and in Lestrygonians
he reflects that the ad has acquired just such a
resonance by virtue of its placement. He seems to believe that
the gruesome association may not have been accidental. It is
the kind of stunt that an advertiser named M'Glade might try:
"His ideas for ads like Plumtree's potted under the
obituaries, cold meat department."
Later in Lestrygonians Bloom allows his imagination
to play with the equivalence between dead bodies and food, in
an associative sequence that leads logically to thoughts of
cannibalism: "Potted meats. What is home without
Plumtree's potted meat? Incomplete. What a stupid ad! Under
the obituary notices they stuck it. All up a plumtree.
Dignam's potted meat. Cannibals would with
lemon and rice. White missionary
too salty. Like pickled pork."
§ In Ithaca,
as Bloom once more contemplates bad ads, Plumtree's returns to
his mind as the worst of the worst. His thoughts veer from
objective specificity to fantastic wordplay: "Manufactured
by George Plumtree, 23 Merchants' quay, Dublin, put up in 4
oz pots, and inserted by Councillor Joseph P.
Nannetti, M. P., Rotunda Ward, 19 Hardwicke street, under the
obituary notices and anniversaries of deceases. The name on
the label is Plumtree. A plumtree in a meatpot, registered
trade mark. Beware of imitations. Peatmot. Trumplee. Moutpat.
Plamtroo." Not for the first time in Ithaca, the
authoritative air of objective fact here masks a fictive
falsification, for Joyce has transformed an English business
concern into an Irish one.
In "Plumtree’s Potted Meat: The Productive Error of the
Commodity in Ulysses," published in Texas Studies in
Literature and Language 59.1 (Spring 2017): 57-75,
Matthew Hayward observes that George W. Plumtree, 49 years old
at the time of the 1901 census, was a "Manufacturer of
Preserved Provisions" in Southport, England (61). The Census
of Ireland in that year, and again in 1911, showed no people
named Plumtree. Surviving Plumtree's pots bear one of two
addresses in Southport, either 184 Portland Street or 13
Railroad Street (apparently the business moved at some point).
From these English addresses, the firm shipped its products to
a small agency in Dublin, which in turn distributed them to
retailers. In 1904 that office was located at 23 Merchants'
Quay.
Thom's Dublin Directory misleadingly identified the
Dublin wholesale operation as "Plumtree, George W. potted meat
manufacturer," so Joyce's perpetual reliance on Thom's may
have caused him to unwittingly list the wrong address. But
Hayward argues that he must also have been using other
sources, probably contemporary advertisements, because Thom's
makes no mention of the 4 oz. pots or the "Home Potted Meats"
name. Joyce might even have been looking at an actual pot: in
an endnote, Hayward records the fact that in 1905 he asked
Stanislaus "to bring a big can of tinned meat" with him when
he came to Trieste (Letters 2:121). Both the pots and
surviving early 20th century ads clearly list an address in
Southport, England.
If Joyce did deliberately move Mr. Plumtree's business to
Dublin, then the potted meat motif must be viewed in the
context of the novel's many reflections on shipping beef and
sheep to England and the loss of Irish home industry under
British imperial rule. Englishmen bought Irish livestock
tax-free. Businesses like Plumtree's created added value by
manufacturing pots of ground-up unidentified meat parts and
marketing them as home cooking, and shipped them back across
the sea to Irish consumers, once again under favorable tariff
arrangements. Specifying an address on Merchants' Quay for the
business, Hayward notes, would "seem to contain the product in
the domestic Irish economy, appearing to fulfill the terms of
the 'Buy Irish' movement that Joyce at one time endorsed as
the best hope for Irish regeneration (Joyce, Letters
2:167)" (61).
But Plumtree's was not a home industry, and if the Dublin
address is a calculated fiction then the novel is protesting
the colonial economic arrangements which resulted in Ireland
buying back its own meat, at a markup, from England. This
strategy would cohere with Joyce's invention of a catchy ad
promising improvement in people's home lives if they eat the
right kind of food. Extending the scholarly work of Anne
McClintock and Thomas Richards, Hayward describes how British
businesses used imperial patriotic fervor to sell products
like Pears' soap and Bovril beef tea through ads implying that
their consumption helped spread enlightened, scientific,
health-conscious civilization. He connects "The commodity's
promise of social improvement" to a phrase in Joyce's
fictional ad, "an abode of bliss" (70).
Hayward does not, however, make one final connection that
would enable a wholly new reading of Joyce's mock ad,
consistent with the novel's other analogies between the
misrule in Bloom's home on Eccles Street and advocacy of Home
Rule for Ireland. The entire four-line text can be read as a
comment on the atrophy of Irish economic enterprises under
British colonial rule. What is our Irish home without
industries like Plumtree's? Incomplete.
