A reader's impression that D. B. Murphy may somehow be the Odysseus of Eumaeus grows when, like Odysseus regaling the Phaeacians with stories of the Lestrygonians and Cyclops, he tells the men in the shelter about monstrous cannibals in faraway lands: "And I seen maneaters in Peru that eats corpses and the livers of horses. Look here. Here they are." But the evidence he offers—a commonly available postcard of South American natives doing nothing like eating human flesh—could hardly be less convincing, and his fumbling talk quickly dispels any thoughts of heroic adventure. Instead of opening onto a broad highway of Homeric signification, this scene dives into a rabbit hole of palpably false reports.

The Odyssean echoes begin when Murphy tells the people in the shelter that he has a wife waiting for him in the south of Ireland that "I haven't seen for seven years now, sailing about." (Later he mentions a son, also a seaman, who'd "be about eighteen now, way I figure it"—a Telemachus figure to round out the household.) The story of wandering the world far from family makes Bloom think of Ben Bolt and Enoch Arden, two literary heroes who left loved ones behind to undertake long voyages at sea, as well as the landlocked but similar stories of Rip Van Winkle and Caoc O'Leary. The keeper of the shelter says, "You must have seen a fair share of the world," and Murphy mentions spots all over the globe, with very few experiential details. Prompted by another listener to recount "queer sights," he comes up with an unimpressive anecdote of a crocodile biting an anchor, and then thinks of cannibals:

And I seen maneaters in Peru that eats corpses and the livers of horses. Look here. Here they are. A friend of mine sent me.
     He fumbled out a picture postcard from his inside pocket which seemed to be in its way a species of repository and pushed it along the table. The printed matter on it stated: Choza de Indios. Beni, Bolivia.
     All focussed their attention at the scene exhibited, a group of savage women in striped loincloths, squatted, blinking, suckling, frowning, sleeping amid a swarm of infants (there must have been quite a score of them) outside some primitive shanties of osier.
     — Chews coca all day, the communicative tarpaulin added. Stomachs like breadgraters. Cuts off their diddies when they can't bear no more children. See them sitting there stark ballocknaked eating a dead horse's liver raw.

Murphy hardly makes his report more credible by adding that the Peruvian cannibals are (still more horrifyingly) ghoul-like corpse-eaters and (bathetically) consumers of horse liver. The blundering continues when he pulls out a photograph whose Spanish caption sets it in Bolivia, not Peru, and which shows only some women and children gathered outside their houses. The narrative description does not mention any chewing of coca leaf, grotesque mutilation of stomachs and breasts, or consumption of raw horse parts.

In a JJON article, Aida Yared has reproduced some contemporary postcards from South America suggesting that Joyce was thinking of real photographic originals. One of her images shows some native men standing against a backdrop of jungle vegetation, holding what may be weapons, over a caption that reads, "Indios Antropofagos of Rio Pachitea (Perú)." The men in this postcard or a similar one—Othello attests that stories of exotic "Anthropophagi" had been circulating for centuries—must be the maneaters of Peru to which Murphy refers. The other postcard shows a scene nearly identical to the one described in the novel, over the caption "Choza de Indios" ("Hut of Indians"). Its women, children, and "primitive shanties of osier" conform to the narrative description very precisely, but it lacks all the details that Murphy says can be seen in it.

Why pull out a postcard to demonstrate things it lacks? One might suppose that Murphy has two postcards in his jacket and takes out the wrong one due to drunkenness or bad eyesight. But his reference to breastless Amazons (another ancient staple of popular mythology) shows that he knows he is handing around the picture of nursing mothers. Or perhaps the answer is that he owns only the Bolivian postcard but has seen the one of Peruvian maneaters and figures that one picture will do as well as another to give a sense of Amazonian natives. But Murphy speaks as if the picture demonstrates precisely the things he has claimed: "Look here. Here they are.... See them sitting there." The best explanation may be simply that the man is an idiot doing his poor best to sound impressive—the very opposite of Homer's clever liar.

Whatever the reason for the mixup, Murphy's credibility is doubtful on other grounds. Owning a postcard is no evidence that one has seen the things captured in it, and it seems highly unlikely that an ordinary seaman's travels would have taken him into the rainforest. Beni is a remote region in northeastern Bolivia, on the other side of high mountains far from the seacoast, and the Rio Pachitea of the other postcard is one of the headwaters of the Amazon, likewise well east of the Andes. The Bolivian postcard could possibly have been purchased in that country: Yared notes that the first "Choza de Indios" shown here was produced by the Arnó Hermanos publishing house in La Paz. But Bolivia's capital is in the mountains, not the jungle, and by Murphy's own testimony someone else purchased the card: "A friend of mine sent me."

The postmark on the back side of the card indicates that it was mailed to an address in Chile, introducing one more remove from firsthand experience: from the jungle where cannibals dwell, to photographic reproductions in nearby capitals, to a remote continental capital. Murphy may never have set foot in Peru, or nearby Bolivia. Indeed, given the trade in postcards, he may never have even visited South America. Yared notes that the era before World War I experienced "a craze in postcard-sending and collecting. In 1903, it is estimated than more than 600 million postcards were handled by the postal system of Great Britain, and an estimated billion in Germany."

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John Hunt 2025