Getting stoned is fun for a weekend, but it’s not much of an identity. Weed will make you feel happy and forget about your responsibilities, but ultimately you’re just kind of wasting your time. To put it another way, it’s fun to hang out with dedicated stoners, but only for a while. The Lotus Eaters are what Dermot would term “bliss ninnies.” They are focused on their own perceived sense of enlightenment, but their utopia is ultimately hollow, as it serves no larger purpose than their personal satisfaction. The Lotus Eaters’ evil is interfering with this lofty virtue and turning the wayward seafarers aside with their tainted fruit.
Returning home to Ithaca is not only his heart’s desire, but a duty of the highest virtue. As a heroic figure, Odysseus is loyal and dutiful, putting his home and family before all things. Doesn’t sound so bad.īut I am not Odysseus. Odysseus and his crew pretty much spend the rest of the epic being devoured by monsters, but these dudes are happy to just hang out and eat flowers. Just a bunch of chill, vegetarian stoners hanging out, when, oh no, here comes crabby, old Odysseus wrecking their vibe. Reading this passage in The Odyssey, my initial feeling was that Lotus Eaters don’t sound so bad. Joyce still has important things to tell us, even in this hour of lazy listless lingering. A reader could get lost on a literary scavenger hunt for all the subtle and not-so-subtle hints that Bloom (even his name is a flower!) has gone astray in Lotus Land. Certainly, the Homeric angle is present in the earlier scenes, but the imagery of flowers and atmosphere of general languor is particularly prominent in this episode. “Lotus Eaters” is notable for the dominance of its Homeric symbolism, at least compared to the preceding four episodes. All fairly normal ordinary activities, suffused in an airy haze. He goes to the post office, attends Mass, drops in at the chemist, and has a bath. In this episode, our modern Odysseus, Leopold Bloom, kills some time between preparing breakfast for himself, his wife and his cat, and the funeral of his friend Paddy Dignam. “Lotus Eaters,” Ulysses’ fifth episode, has a bit of a reputation for being uninteresting, sort of a stop over before we get to some of the flashier episodes, the ones where Joyce critics throw around phrases like “tour de force.” Appreciating “Lotus Eaters,” then, is an exercise in appreciating the mundane. While James Joyce gave the Lotus Eaters a full episode in Ulysses, Homer only gave them a short mention in Book 9 of The Odyssey, which is mainly about Odysseus’ misadventure with the Cyclops.
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