Joyce was immediately struck by the multiethnic and multi-religious nature of Trieste, so different from the very Catholic Dublin. He often attended the Greek Orthodox mass in the church of San Nicolò, fascinated by its unfamiliar rituals, which he observed carefully and described in great detail in a letter to his brother Stannie, dated April 1905. The amazement and curiosity that Joyce felt in Trieste in 1905 are extraordinarily similar to those that Bloom experienced in ‘Lotus Eaters’ in Ulysses, when observing the rite of communion in the church of All Hallows (St. Andrew in Westland Row). Just as the Catholic Joyce scrutinized the Greek Orthodox rite, finding it strange and vaguely comical, so the Jew Leopold Bloom observed the Catholicrite, finding it equally bizarre and funny.
“The priest went along by them, murmuring, holding the thing in his hands. He stopped at each, took out a communion, shook a drop or two (are they in water?) off it and put it neatly into her mouth. Her hat and head sank. Then the next one. Her hat sank at once. Then the next one: a small old woman. 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. Hospice for the dying. They don’t seem to chew it: only swallow it down. Rum idea: eating bits of a corpse. Why the cannibals cotton to it”.
James Joyce, Ulysses, ‘Lotus Eaters’ 344-352
