James Joyce & the perverse ideal

JAMES JOYCE

81

THE

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P E R V E R S IED E A L

edited by

William E . Cain Wellesley College

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"ALL THEWORLD'SA STAGE" Dramattc S e n s ~ b ~ l In ~ t )Mary ) Shell))? Novels Charlene E. Bunnell

WHO REIDS ULISSES? T i ~ eRi~etorlcof the J o ) ce Wars and the Common Reader Julie Sloan Brannon

"THOLIGHTS PAINFLILLY INTENSE" Hawthorne and the Invalid Aztthor James N. hlancall

,AND T H E WORLDOF N'AKED LIEERTY DESIRE Elements of Anarchism in the Work of D. H. Lawrence Simon Casey

SEXT H E O R IAE ~~ TDH E S H A P I O~FG Two A I O D E R ~ ~ Hemtngway and H.D. Delrdre Anne (McV~cker)Pettlp~ece WORDSIGHTIKGS Viszlal Apparatzls and 17erbal Reality in Stevens, Bishop and O'Hara Sarah Riggs DELICATE PURSIIIT Discretion in Henry James and Edith l'harton Jessica Levine

THEMACHIUETH-IT S I ~ G S Modernzsm, Hart Crane, and the C z h r e of the Body Gordon Tapper T. S. ELIOT'SCIVILIZED SAVAGE Rel~gtoztsErotmsm and Poet~cs L a u r ~ eJ. hlacDlarm~d T H EC,AR\,ER CHRONOTOPE Inside the Life-World of Raymond Carver's Fiction G. P. Lainsbury

GERTRUDE STEIN\TIXD WALLACE STEVEKS The Performance of Modern Consciozlsness Sara J. Ford

THISCOMPOSITE VOICE B. Yeats ~ ? zJames T i ~ eRole of Merr~lliPoetry Mark Bauer

LOST CITY Fltzgerald's New York Lauralelgh O'Aleara

PROGRESSAUD IDEVTITk In O F W. B. YE AT^ Barbara A. Seuss

SOCIAL DREA\'II~C; Dickens and the Fairy Tale Elaine Ostry

CO~RAD'S N,ARR,ATI\~ES OF DIFFERENCES NOT EXACTLY TALESFOR EOYS Elizabeth Schneider

P>ITRIARCHYAXD ITSDISCOXTENTS Sexual Politics in Selected Novels and Stories of Ti~omasHard)) Joanna Devereux

GERARD MAXLEY HOPIZINS AND VICTORIAN CATHOLICISM Jill Muller

A NEWMATRIXFOR MODERNSM A Stztdy of the Lwes and Poetry of Charlotte Mew and Anna Wlckham Nelllean AlcConeghe~iRlce

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THE

PLIYS

m~ TRADITIOY THE ARTISTRY OF TEKNYSOX'S BATTLEPOETRY J. Timothy Lovelace

&

THE

P E R V E R S IED E A L

David Cotter

ROUTLEDGE New York and London

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Published in 2003 by Routledge 29 VC7est 35th Street New York, NY 10001 www.routledge-11y.con1 Published in Great Britain by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane London EC4P 4EE ~~~~~~~~~.routledge.co.uk Copyright 0 2003 by Taylor & Francis Eooks, Inc Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper. A11 rights reserved. N o part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now kno\m or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the publishers.

Library of Congress C:atalogii~g-in-PublicationData Cotter, David, 1964James Joyce & the perverse ideal I by David Cotter. p. cm. - (Studies in major literary authors ; v. 2 9 ) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISEN 0-413-96786-4 (alk. paper) 1. Joyce, James, 1882-1941-I<noxvledge-Psycholog. 2. Psychological fiction, English-History and criticism. 3. Masochism in literature. I. Title: James Joyce and the perverse ideal. 11. Title. 111. Series. PR6019.09Z32746 2003 823' ,912-dc21 200303928

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Contents

Abbreviations Acknowledgments Introduction Chapter One: The Cracked Looking-Glass Chapter Two: Daedalus Desexualized: The Determinants of Masochism Chapter Three: Icarus Resexualized: The Consolidation of Masochism Chapter Four: A Darker Passion: The Rituals of Masochism Chapter Five: The Cuckold: A Logician of Consequences Conclusion: The Emperor's New Clothes Notes Bibliography

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Abbreviations

The Critical Writings of James Joyce. Ed. Ellsworth Mason and Richard Ellmann. London: Faber and Faber, 1959. Dub. Dubliners. Crib Street, Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions Limited, Cumberland House. This edition first published 1993, reprint 1995. P.+E. Poems and Exiles. Edited with an introduction and notes by J. C. C. Mays. London: Penguin Books, 1992. S.H. Stephen Hero: Part of the Flrst Draft of " A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man." Edited with a n introduction by Theodore Spencer, foreword by John J. Slocum and Herbert Cahoon. Hammersmith, London: First published in Britain by Jonathan Cape, 1991, Paladin, 1994. Port. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: Complete Authoritative Text with Biographical and Historical Contexts, Critical History, and Essays from Five Contemporary Critical Perspectives. Ed. R. B. IZershner, Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin's Press. 1993. G.J. Giacomo Joyce. With notes by Richard Ellmann. London: Faber, 1968. U. Ulysses: Annotated Student's Edition. Introduction and notes by Declan IZiberd. London: Penguin Books. 1992. F.W. Finnegans Wake. With an introduction by Seamus Deane. London: Penguin Books, 1992. Ltrs.1 / I1 / I11 Letters of James Joyce. Vol. I., ed. Stuart Gilbert, Vol. 2 and 3, ed. Richard Ellmann. London: Faber, 1957-1966. S.Ltrs. Selected Letters of James Joyce. Ed. Richard Ellmann. London: Faber, 1975. Richard Ellmann. James Joyce. New and revised edition. J.J. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982. C.W.

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Acknowledgments

Thank you to Declan Kiberd, Richard Stack, and Desmond Fitzgibbon for supporting my ideas, and helping me to develop them. Thank you to my friends-Dan Burgess, Greg Lainsbury, Warnock Chambers and Grace Pan Zhi Wei-for standing with me. Thank you to my family-my father, my brother and my wife, Chen Xifor their patience with me, and for giving me comfort and love unconditionally.

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lntroduction

The elements of sexual masochism in Joyce are typically either ignored or disdained: they make us feel uncomfortable. Although sexuality is recognized to be at the center of Joyce's work, criticism has addressed this topic from a safe distance, and often with overtones of voyeurism or condescension. When criticism has addressed the topic of sexuality in Joyce, it has tended to focus on the ideological significance of his sexual attitudes, rather than on the nature of the sexuality that he has presented. Although recent criticism has inched closer to this topic, there is nonetheless an abiding reluctance to concede that sexual masochism runs like a core through the center of Joyce, and is the impetus of his writing. The unwillingness to address this sexual perversity is strange, given that Ulysses is the story of a mild man who for ten years has chosen to masturbate rather than have penetrative sex with his wife, whom he finds very sexy. O n the day of Ulysses, Bloom knows that an aggressive man will have sex with Molly, because he has covertly encouraged this event. He is conscious of the time at which Blazes Boylan will arrive at their door, and he considers the moment of their sexual union. Although this causes him much pain, throughout the day he is aroused by masochistic fantasies, which scrutinize this event. At the climax of the book, in "Circe," we are given an only slightly disguised representation of Bloom's masturbatory masochistic fantasy, which the narration dissolves into the pain, sympathy and guilt that Stephen feels before the image of his dead mother. It is in "Circe" that Bloom's masochism is most apparent. Here, in the dream-text, Bello transforms Bloom into a transvestite maid: What you longed for has come to pass. Henceforth you are unmanned and mine in earnest, a thing under the yoke. N o w for your punish~nentfroclz. You will shed your male garments [. . . .] and don the short silk lux~irio~isly rustling over head and shoulders and quiclzly too. (U., p. 647)

He is not, however, to serve only as a domestic servant; he is also to be used as a sex slave:

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James Joyce 6 the Perverse Ideal

2

My boys will be no end charmed to see you so ladylike, the colonel, above all. When they come here the night before the wedding to fondle my new attraction in gilded heals. First, I'll have a go at you myself. (U., p. 651)

When Bloom puts up a token resistance-bending "his blushing face into his armpit" and simpering, with forefinger in mouth, "0, I know what you're hinting at now,"-Bello chides him: "What else are you good for, an impotent thing like you?" She then reminds him of Boylan and Molly: I wouldn't hurt your feelings for the world but there's a man of brawn in possession there. The tables are turned, my gay young fellow! He is something like a fullgrown outdoor man. Well for you, you muff, if you had that weapon with knobs and warts and lumps all over it. He shot his bolt, I can tell you! Foot to foot, knee to knee, belly to bell!; bubs to breast. (U.,p. 652)

Bloom's masocl~ismis not only evident in "Circe," however, but throughout the novel. From the first pages of our meeting with Bloom, we are given clues. On the second page of "Calypso," as Bloom feeds the cat, he thinks: "Cruel. Her nature. Curious mice never squeal. Seem to like it" (U., p. 66). When, on the next page, Bloom asks Molly if she wants something for breakfast, the onomatopoeic nature of her response-"a soft sleepy grunt [. . . .] Mn"-recalls Pussen's "Mrkgnao," and suggests that we should compare the cat to Molly. When Bloom goes to Dlugacz's to get his breakfast, he sees a girl and hopes to "catch up and walk behind her if she went slowly, behind her moving hams" (U., p. 71). It is clear that Bloom has spied on this girl prior to this, while she has beaten carpets: "Strong pair of arms. Whacking a carpet on the clothesline. She does whack it, by George. The way her crooked skirt swings at each whack" (U., p. 70). As we get to know Bloom, we come to understand that his interest in this girl's domestic chores is typical of his erotic imagination. In "Nausicaa," when Bloom masturbates while watching Gerty, his masochism is not obvious, but it is present. Fetishism, which is essential to masochism, is, however, obvious: "As for undies they were Gerty's chief care" (455). The clichC and voluptuous descriptions of lingerie here are echoed in "Circe," but in "Circe" it is Bloom who is dressed in these clothes. Because we are not in Bloom's mind when he masturbates, but in Gerty's, we have to determine the nature of Bloom's masturbatory fantasy from other sources. That we are in Gerty rather than in Bloom while he masturbates may support the contention that rather than objectifying Gerty, Bloom is identifying with her, and objectifying himself in his identification with her. It is not as simple as that, however: Bloom's fantasy is likely to be a riot of identifications, rather than a single identification. The main evidence that we have to determine the content of Bloom's masturbatory fantasy in "Naussica," is what we see of his masturbatory fantasy in "Circe," and what we see to be typical of the tone of his erotic

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Introduction

3

imagination throughout the book. There are, nonetheless, things in the chapter that may trigger Bloom's masochistic imagination. Bloom is more than likely to hear the following interchange: I'd like to give him [Tommy] something [Edy said] so I would, where I won't say. -On the beetoteetom, laughed Cissy merrily Edy Boardman said she was sure the gentleman opposite heard what she said. But not a pin cared Ciss. -Let him! She said [. . . .] Give it to him too on the same spot as quick as I'd look at him. (459)

Later, Bloom thinks: "Like to be that rock [Gerty] sat on [. . . .] Also the library today: those girl graduates. Happy chairs under them" (U., p. 491). The masochism here is not overt, but to be sat upon like an object, smothered by the "lowest," most physical part of a person, and disregarded by the person sitting on you, is certainly masochistic. The face-sitting scene is common in FemIDom literature. In "Circe," Bello sits on Bloom while she eats her thumping big breakfast. At the end of "Nausicaa," Bloom thinks: "I called you naughty boy because I do not like [that other word]," recalling his letter from Martha Clifford (U., p. 498). He then writes "[I.] AM. A." That the missing word may be cuckold is suggested by the rendering of a bell's chiming as "Cuckoo, Cuckoo, Cuckoo" (U., p. 499), immediately after he writes in the sand. The word cuckold is derived from the cuckoo bird, which lays its eggs in the nests of other birds. In "Scylla and Charbydis" Buck, in his running parody of Stephen's theory that cuckolding was involved in Shakespeare's urge to create, uses "cuckoo" for "cuckold" (U., p. 273). Also, it may be argued that "that other word" to which Martha refers is "cuckold." Martha replaces this missing word-which Bloom has asked her to call him when she, at his request, chastises him-with naughty boy. It seems to be the case that Martha does not understand the meaning of the word cuckold, but from the gist of Bloom's request to be called this name, she has gathered that he is not happy in his home (U., pp. 94-5). In "Circe," the humiliation of being publicly cuckolded is shown to be central to his erotic imagination. That the word that Bloom asked Martha to call him may be cuckold is also suggested in "Circe," when we learn that in "five public conveniences he wrote pencilled messages offering his nuptial partner to all strongmembered males" (U., p. 649). After writing I. AM. A., Bloom thinks "frillies for Raoul to perfume your wife." Raoul is a character in one of the erotic novels Bloom has given to Molly. In this novel, Raoul has sex with a woman who dominates her husband. The husband buys lingerie for the wife to wear while she is with Raoul, in the same way that Bloom buys purple garters for Molly, which she wears while with Boylan. In writing in the sand, Bloom intends to exhibit his shame to Gerty, as a typical masochistic gesture.

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James Joyce 6 the Perverse Ideal

Bloom's cuckolding, and his refusal to penetrate Molly sexually, are the predominant elements of his particular masocl~ism.What consolidates the importance of Bloom's sexual orientation to Ulysses, is Bloom's acquiescence to his cuckolding, and the evidence that he has been partly instrumental in bringing it about. He does not mention Boylan's letter to Molly when he delivers it to her, although he recognizes the handwriting, and knows what will result from this letter (U., p. 76). Althougl~he knows what they are doing in his marriage bed, he does not go home and catch or confront them, though the opportunity is there. The very fact that he is so precisely aware of what is going on, supposedly behind his back, suggests not only that he has done nothing to impede this event, but that he has guided it along. Molly too believes that Bloom has acquiesced in his cuckolding (U., pp. 874, 910). The way in which she only partly hides the letter beneath her pillow does not disguise Boylan's letter, but draws attention to it (U., p. 76). Evidence supporting this contention is extensive, but the definitive evidence is that, although they have regularly engaged in mutual masturbation, for ten years Bloom has refused to engage in penetrative genital intercourse with Molly. From Bloom's perspective, and from our perspective, the relevance of his cuckolding is not simply that Molly has had sex with Boylan, but that Bloom has been so powerfully aroused by this. Cuckolding is one of the central rituals of sexual masochism. It is at the climax of Venus in Furs. In The Cold and the Cruel, Deleuze distinguishes between masochism and sadism, arguing that they consist of completely separate rituals, aesthetics and intellectual tactics. A sadist does not seek a masochist, and a masochist does not seek a sadist. What the media commonly presents as masochism is nothing more than what Deleuze would consider to be a silly sort of sadism. Masochism is incredibly subtle, and it works through patient insinuation and manipulation. Although it may seem paradoxical to suggest that a person so much devoted to control as to manipulate his wife or lover into cuckolding him is a masochist, masochism is grounded on such paradoxes. A masochist operates from an apparent position of weakness. Partners of masochists never cease complaining of the selfishness of masochists. Exiles illustrates this, and it also portrays the manipulative nature of the masochist. In Venus in Furs, Wanda repeatedly asks Severin to disavow his masocl~ism,and to accept her as a conventional lover, but he persists in his attempts to convince her to debase him. This is the most typical pattern in masochism. The masochist meets a woman who is attracted to him, and he uses her attraction to him to manipulate her, and to instruct her, invariably against her wishes, to torture him. In this sense, the masochist betrays a selfish unwillingness to exchange affections. Furthermore, in the rituals that appear to make the masochist insignificant, or even invisible, the masochist is in fact the center of attention: he is the director, the ghost who holds the ritual in place. From those who will participate in his humiliation, a masochist demands rigorous adherence to his script. When Bertha visits Robert, they talk mostly about Richard.

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Introduction

5

Masochists are bullies: they trick the unsuspecting into participating in their dramas. These dramas dismantle not only the masochist's socially constructed selves, but also the sense of social grounding held by the unwitting participants. Bloom's avoidance of carnal intercourse is part of the same constellation as his cuckoldry. When he is sexually aroused, he does not want to love or feel sympathy, to be dragged "with her together down." Affection kills his desire: his desire must remain a desert. His sterility is a means of distancing himself from Molly, and it is related to Stephen's emotional exile, and to his emotional refrigeration apparatus. Joyce's own interests in being cuckolded were balanced by an inordinate fear of being cuckolded. Byrne describes Joyce's reactions to the belief that Nora had been unfaithful to him: "He wept and groaned and gesticulated in futile impotence as he sobbed out to me the thing that had occurred. Never in my life had I seen a human being more shattered."l Masochism often serves to overcome fears which are so great as to tyrannize the personality: the reasoning is that if I bring this to pass, I will no longer have to fear it, and in bringing it to pass I will have some measure of control over it. Bloom's reaction to thoughts of Boylan and Molly is by no means always arousal: "Today. Today. Not think" (U., p. 230). Why does Joyce draw a perversity so extreme and so unusual into a character who is, in other respects, meant to be unremarkable; why such a perverse event in the center of a day that is otherwise like every day? This analysis will suggest that Bloom's masochism is not an anomaly, or an arbitrary obscurity, but an illustration of the extreme implications of an equation that is the bedrock of Joyce's writing. Bloom's sexuality is typical of a variation of sexual masochism. This perversity is very difficult to trace as a cultural phenomenon, however, and it is here referred to as sexual masochism partly for want of a better word. Perversity such as Bloom's is documented in the highly stylized and formal models of the pornography and brothels of Joyce's time. These models, however, only serve as compromise for the urges they illustrate. The strongest manifestation of this perversity must be undocumented, in the secrecy of private lives. It is in part for this reason that Joyce's picture of this perversity is so important. The sexual liberations of the past century have not served to make this type of sexuality much less covert, perhaps because in seeking shame these masochists are toying with the essence of secrecy. Although traces of this masocl~ismmay be seen in the media, it exists more clearly in the subcultures of the brothel and the fetish club. It may be found not among top shelf porn in newsagents, but in sex shops, beneath gay, fetish, spanking and transvestite pornography. It had a day in the sun in the clauses and phrases preceding the numbers of sex lines in the British Daily Sport. More recently, it has manifested itself among the proliferation of porn on the Internet. Althougl~often very subtle, and strangely chaste, this perversion is more

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6

James Joyce 6 the Perverse Ideal

censored than even hardcore pornography, perhaps because it engages the taboo more subversively, or perhaps because it is masturbatory and solipsistic. Like bisexuality, this perversity is often scorned, not only by straight society, but by straight gays, straight fetishists, and even straight sadomasochists. This is most likely because this perversity works to bring scorn upon itself. Even at fetish clubs, where men and women are bound and spanked in fantasy torture chambers, the image of a male, dressed as a maid, coyly but willingly serving his wife and her boyfriend is a fringe phenomenon that is not totally acceptable. Central to this type of masochism, the masochism of the cuckold, is sexual humiliation. The key to the equation is shame: if there is pain it serves as an avenue to shame. Once the equation is constructed, there is an obscure tautological plunge into the ramifications of this equation, which ends not with resolution, but with the dissipation of momentum; any added humiliation becomes redundant. The scene is purposely unpalatable; the i n a s o c l h is trying to make his witnesses uncomfortable. The spectators should sense that though they are being urged to laugh at him, the last laugh will be his, because he will use their laughter to serve his ends. A labelling of this perversity as masochism may be misleading, because masochism is such a broad and overdetermined term, that may equally describe prodding a sore tooth with the tongue, playing sports, not getting along with people, sexual subservience, and self mutilation. Of the many terms that describe configurations of desire, there are a number that are of particular relevance to Joycean sexuality. The terms "sadomasochism," "BDISM," "fetishism," and "Fem/Dom," although related to Joycean masochism, are not next of kin. Sadomasochism is an inadequate description of Joycean masochism, primarily because of the distinctions that must be drawn between sadism and masochism. Sadism and masochism should not be viewed as two halves of a greater whole. Rather, they should be considered as independent and distinct, consisting of two coherent rituals that do not interplay. For the most part, sadomasochism is a construct of the sadistic temperament, which is distinct from masochism. The bondage and degradation of BDISM are perhaps closer, but are still a significant distance from defining Joycean masochism. Degradation is crucial to Joycean masochism, but bondage is not; the servitude should be shown to be willing, in order to intensify the shame, and so that it is understood that all is done for love or worship of the torturess. Fetishism in its technical sense is important to Joycean masochism, but in its popular sense (as it appears in magazines such as Skin 11) it is not as relevant. Popular fetishism tends to be a manifestation of fashion, which does not go much further, and is not always aware of its grounding. Although fashion, and the pop cliches of power and submission are important to masochism as a bank of symbols, fetishism rarely if ever looks beneath its own shining surface. Nonetheless, the kitsch tokens of power, control and submission with which it toys are very pertinent to Joycean masochism.

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Introduction

7

FemIDom may be found on tlle Internet, in advertisements for brotllellike establishments run by dominatrixes. It may also be found in magazines such as Cruelln and Goddess. Occasionally, it makes a media appearance as a human-interest story, such as has been the case recently in coverage of a castle kingdom in Czechoslovakia, in which men act as slaves to women.2 FemIDom tends to differ from Joycean masochism, however, in that the punisl~mentsare more physically cruel, and less psycl~ologicallypointed. Furthermore, these brothels serve only as compromise for masochistic urges; as there is no prior emotional engagement, the ritual is devoid of the sense of betrayal and loss that is essential. Taken together, the terms Pageism, Lancelotism, and forced feminization come closer to describing Joycean masochism. In Pageism, a man acts as a houseboy for a woman whom he loves, because he loves her, and she may or may not reward his devotion with sexual fidelity to him. Lancelotism is not unlike Pageism: it is a subversion of chastity and courtly love, through an application of the chivalrous code so extreme as to be absurd. In Lancelotism, the woman regularly engages in sexual intercourse with a third party, a more powerful male, but continues to accept the worship of the masochist. Forced feminization differs from transvestism, in that there must be gestures of reluctance, and the feminization never negates the masculinity of the masochist, but derides it. There may also be elements of reluctant homoeroticism, as the masochist is negated as a possible object of desire for the tortures, and erased as a worthy mate for any woman. All of these terms blur into one another, without being entirely inclusive of one another. Joyce's sexual masochism draws its line through each of these. This is the hall of cracked mirrors in which I am looking for Joyce. Joyce is situated, in terms of the history of sexuality, at a time of profoundly changing attitudes, and tactics of control. A number of key and interrelated issues prominent at his time-marriage, chastity, feminism and censorshipenergized Joyce's imagination. All of these issues were involved in the slow seismic shift from a perception of sexuality as serving the ends of reproduction, to a perception of sexuality as in the service of pleasure. Joyce was deeply engaged in the conflict through which these attitudes were changed. More than simply offering him a heated dispute to which he might address his powers, however, the deeper issues and conflicts regarding marriage, chastity, feminism, censorship, and masculine identity, forged and composed, in a paradoxical fashion, his conscience and the configurations and dynamics of his psyche. The argument presented herein depends upon a recognition of the paradoxical natures of Joyce's sexuality and his subversion. In his youth, Joyce was deeply immersed in, and thorougldy indoctrinated by, tlle most vehement advocate of repression: tlle Church. Georges Bataille, in Eroticism, considers Christianity to be unlike primitive religions, insofar as, from within its frame of reference, that which is taboo is not to be considered sacred, but profane.; In the Christian tradition, there are no official times of inversion, and no sanctioned transgressions. The extreme monism of such a

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James Joyce 6 the Perverse Ideal

tradition means that repression within it will be more thorough. Althougl~ he does not draw from Bataille, Jonathan Dollimore, in Sexual Dissidence, also identifies the monistic position of the Christian tradition, and considers it to be the cause of the perception of perversion as both paradoxical and subversive. According to the Christian monistic world view, the devil is not an entity separate from God, but a portion of God possessing no independent essence, or difference, although subverting God's will from within. The heightened piety of the official position in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly in the Ireland of Joyce's day, might be considered a fierce final thrust on behalf of Christianity, as the twilight of its hegemony became increasingly recognisable. In terms of values, and cultural norms, the period into which Joyce emerged was particularly torn between extremes. On the one hand, the official position intensified its vehemence and its vigilance, and so intensified repression. The voices urging repression were not only those of priests and moralists, but also those of elements which were later-although this is a point of contention-to further the emancipation of sexuality. The extent to which sexologists have emancipated sexuality, or have, on the contrary, merely transformed the repressive Christian discourse of control, and offered it a more viable language, is still a matter of dispute, particularly as regards the apotheosis of the sexological discourse in the writings of Sigmund Freud. In the initial manifestations of sexology, it is clearer that this discourse was intended to serve and sanction the repressive project of the official position with a more viable voice. The pseudo-scientific elements in the antimasturbation campaign, for example, heightened the perceived need for surveillance of the sexuality of children, in order to confiscate their sexual energy, and enable them to be moulded into the sort of subjects that would serve the industrial, bureaucratic and imperial ends of Victorian society. In terms of practical control, its descriptions of tangible symptoms and debilities could supplement waning belief in the prospect of eternal damnation. More ambiguous are the repressive or libertarian alliances of more advanced sexologists, such as Henry Havelock E l l i ~ and , ~ Baron Richard von Krafft-Ebing,.' who developed elaborate, minute and far-ranging classificatory systems with which to describe perverse sexualities. O n the one hand, they described the multiplicities and possibilities of sexuality, and so revealed systematically, for the first time perhaps, the transformative nature of sexuality. O n the other hand, however, their elaborations of the mutability of sexuality served, for the most part, to underline the legitimacy of the only sanctioned form of sexuality; genital discharge in the womb. Sex was still to be perceived to serve not pleasure, but the reproduction of the species. The classificatory systems of Krafft-Ebing and Ellis were more or less intended to enable surveillance, by showing the vigilators what to look for, and by offering them powerful tools of classification, that could also be used as terms of condemnation. ICrafft-Ebing, in Psychopathin Sexualis, for instance, describes sexual perverts as though they were exotic flowers in a

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Introduction

9

botanical garden: an introductory placard briefly describes the species, and is followed by a row of numbered and labelled case studies. Each case study is introduced by inquiries into the health of the parents, and a description of the presence or absence of physical irregularities in the subject. Michel Foucault emphasizes that, contrary to what we might have expected of the repressive atmosphere of Victorian times, sexuality was not an unmentionable, taboo topic, but the object of an obsessively prolific discourse."n putting sexuality into discourse, authority forced it into a narrow channel, and forged the sexuality and, more importantly, the identity of the subject. The discourse of sexology, however, always spoke from beyond its topic, and never from within it, in the first person of desire, thereby not so much putting sexuality into discourse, as enclosing it in discourse. For Foucault, sexuality is "an especially dense transfer point for relations of power." In James Joyce and Sexuality, Richard Brown draws attention to Joyce's interest in the scientific and legal discourses on sexuality.7 This interest, however, was a subversive interest, through which he gathered weapons for his perverse subversion. Joyce's textual engagement with sexuality differs from that of the sexologists, in that his intent is not to speak around sexuality, but to speak from within, and for sexuality. In Dubliners, Joyce demonstrates the ways in which sexuality and the body become situated in ellipses. Through A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and into Ulysses, he learns to speak from within these ellipses. In certain ways, the speech of perverse desire-perceived as a formless energy of subversion, which takes shape as a parodical rendition of that which tries to harness it-flows unrestrained in Finnegans Wake. Coinciding with, but undermining the efforts of the official position to force sexuality into the narrow confines of genital penetration with discharge in the womb, was an underground but popular discourse, alternative to the sanctioned sexological discourse. This alternative and unsanctioned discourse was the forerunner of what has become the industry of pornography: the very nature of this discourse implied that sex was to be seen as in the service of pleasure. Although Dubliners, Portrait and Ulysses were censored, the works of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, and works with less literary credibility, such as A Splendid Sin,8 The World of Sin,9 and A Sweet Sinner,lo and even magazines such as Photo Bits, or Le Tutu,ll were available.12 There was a sense that while pulp writings were relatively uncensored, any work with ambitions to enter the sanctioned discourse of what might be considered literature was subjected to stricter censorship. Any work that straddled these discourses was attacked with heightened vehemence, as it was perceived to subvert the sanctioned position from within. As the output of pornographic material grew, sexuality was increasingly recognized as a crucial target for consumerism, and as an energy that could be utilized to support the proliferation of needs that capitalism demanded. At the same time that the official line on sexuality strove to force it to serve

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James Joyce 6 the Perverse Ideal

the narrow ends of biological reproduction, the emerging tendencies of capitalism suggested the limitless possibilities of sexuality, through widely distributed pornographic photographs, pulp pornographic novels, and titillating magazines, thereby creating for itself a market that could not be exhausted. In "Sex and Credit: Consumer Capitalism in Ulysses," Michael Tratner argues that a strong consumerist market depends upon the ability of this market to create new needs in its consumers through advertisement.13 Joyce's interest in this alternative, underground discourse of sexuality was as great, if not greater than his interest in the sexological and legal discourses on sexuality. Stanislaus suggests, in fact, that the birdgirl was modelled on images of sexy girls given away on cigarette cards. Althougl~he subverts this discourse as well as the discourse of sexology-because both of these discourses attempt to inscribe his sexuality, and compel him to assume and adhere to a conventional identity-the proliferative nature of his later texts suggest sympathy with, as much as a parody of, this new discourse. When Stephen reels home after the hell sermons, he seeks solitude in a room in which he has hidden pornography in the chimney (Port., pp. 107, 123). Joyce's works often consist of a cacophonous echoing between these two ways of conceiving sexuality. Freud's allegiances regarding these repressive and proliferative discourses are increasingly considered ambiguous, and yet it is often this ambiguity that makes him of such continuing importance to interpretations of sexuality. Where the repressive discourse of sexuality sought to identify that which subverted it from within-the perverse-the contemporary discourse of sexuality, which is in certain respects a legitimizing voice for the proliferative, capitalist discourse on sexuality, locates in Freud a subversion from within. There is the worry that, because Freud is the first voice that seems to legitimize sexual profusion, he is a locus through which tendencies of the prior, repressive and limiting discourse may have slipped unnoticed, to subvert this new discourse, and continue to channel sexual energy. Although, on the one hand, Freud introduced the important notion of polymorphous perversity, and to some extent sanctioned it by considering it to be the natural state of the infant, he at the same time developed a prescriptive position, by arguing that in "normal" development the subject leaves behind polymorphous perversity, and moves toward an acceptance of heterosexual genital sexuality. Although Joyce, somewhat contradictorily, claimed to be both ignorant of Freud, and to reject Freud passionately and unequivocally, Suzette Henke, among others, draws attention to the extent to which he may have been influenced by Freud.14 Certainly Joyce and Freud were addressing the same issues, and it is likely that Joyce did not want his thought to be clouded by a powerful contemporary. Although there is no evidence to suggest that Joyce was familiar with the writings of Georges Bataille, this argument will nevertheless draw on Bataille's interpretation of sexuality. Although contemporary with both Freud and Joyce, Bataille is somewhat anomalous in that he straddles a

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Introduction

11

number of discourses, without properly belonging to any. He is of importance to this argument because in his interpretation of sexuality he cuts out a different tract of land than Freud; a tract that is in many ways more similar to Joyce's perspective than is Freud's. Althougl~Bataille's work is nowhere near as comprehensive as Freud's, it offers an alternative focus on sexuality. Despite the fact that Freud recognizes an aggressive and murderous element as intrinsic to sexuality, he often seems to cover over the rawness of this recognition by recourse to the Oedipal drama. Violence and sacrifice are more central to sexuality in Bataille's system. Bataille's works, however, seem to express primarily, or to speak from within, a sadism implicit to conventional male heterosexuality, and so while crucial to this argument, his position will be utilized by inverting its perspective, or point of reference. Current discourses on sexuality consist, in large parts, of a debate between those who more or less adhere to Freud, and those who attempt to locate and dispense of the rigid apparatus in Freud. This work does not in any way intend to adjudicate in this debate, but to borrow from and assimilate these disparate voices. Writers such as Jacques Lacan15 and Daniel Lagache16 may be considered to exist somewhere between the extremes of these tendencies, although toward Freud, and within the framework of psychoanalysis. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, although further removed from Freud, nevertheless-as the title of their major work, Anti-Oedipus,l7 suggests-in an important sense subvert Freud from within. Foucault is yet further removed from Freud; although Freud and Foucault both consider perversion to be a culturally central phenomenon, in almost all other respects their interpretations are diametrically opposed. To a certain extent we may discern what, if Freud is considered the apotheosis of a first wave of twentieth-century discourse on sexuality, may be considered a second wave of this discourse. The most important voices in this second-wave engagement with the topic of sexuality are those of Foucault, and Deleuze and Guattari. The works of Lacan have proved to be a solid critical foundation for many analyses of Joyce. Similar conclusions to many of these Lacanian readings of Joyce are drawn here, but through different avenues, and by utilizing a different terminology. The Lacanian critique intersects this argument most clearly in its conceptions of "the gaze" and castration. The notion of the gaze is significant to this paper's description of sadistic desire as voyeuristic, and masochistic desire as exhibitionistic. Also of importance to this interpretation of Joyce is Lacan's thesis that "what is foreclosed in the Symbolic returns in the Real," and his perception of Joyce as "remaining rooted in the problem of what a father is, while all the while denying it."18 From Lagache, the conceptions of the ideal ego I narcissistic ego, and the ego ideal I superego have been adopted.19 These conceptions are come to, however, priinarily through Deleuze. This argument is most heavily dependent upon the works of Deleuze and Guattari. It is, however, selective in its use of their position; they are followed, but not unquestioningly. In the preface to Anti-Oedipus, Foucault

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James Joyce 6 the Perverse Ideal

claims that the aim or value of Anti-Oedipus is to teach people to resist fascism, within and without: "How do we rid our speech and our acts, our hearts and our pleasures, of fascism? [. . . .] The Christian moralists sought out traces of the flesh lodged deep within the soul. Deleuze and Guattari, for their part, pursue the slightest trace of fascism in the body."20 A paranoiac identification with their text will not be assumed in these pages. To do so would be to demonstrate the way in which-as they argue-subject groups become subjugating. Certainly it was never their intention to become intellectual father figures, establishing new dogmas, and imposing mindforged manacles. One of the major defections from, or modifications of their anti-oedipal position herein is the assimilation of the minoritarian and majoritarian poles of identification, as described in Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, with the masochistic and sadistic poles described in Deleuze's earlier work: Masochism: An Interpretation of Coldness and Cruelty. I feel that it is important to do this, and that the implications of this assimilation are broad, and of immense significance to conceptions of freedom. The work of Foucault is important to this argument-particularly his conception of panopticism-but will remain somewhat peripheral. His reading of sexuality depends upon a more sociological and historical focus than does this argument. This is not to dismiss the importance of the social and historical dimensions to such an interpretation. This argument differs from Foucault's, insofar as masochism is considered here as a sort of ur-force; a formless, transformative energy that manifests itself simply through the tendency to embody the inversion of prescribed ideals of a particular historical milieu. In this way, while masochism is inscribed by the social, it is always in reaction against predominant hierarchies and prescribed ideals. Althougl~I would accept, and will incorporate Foucault's contention that sexuality is drawn by the discourse of power, more important to this reading is the sense in which sexuality is not inscribed so much as circumscribed by discourse. This distinction implies a somewhat unjust oversimplification of Foucault's position; however the scope of this work precludes a more adequate engagement with Foucault's theory. The focus of this argument is different to that of Foucault's. It is not that sexuality is herein perceived to be an unequivocally revolutionary energy, but rather-following Anti-Oedipus, and connections drawn between this and The Cold and the Cruel-that there are both reactionary and revolutionary trends in sexuality. Other theorists who are of importance to this argument are Julia Kristeva, Leo Bersani, and Jonathan Dollimore. I
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Introduction

13

celebration, and not as a refutation of Freud. Bersani considers Freud's repeatedly thwarted efforts to draw conclusions about the subject of his discourse-desire-to replicate the Freudian processes of repression, and the return of the repressed. He considers this aspect of the Freudian text to embody an irresolvable conflict between two contradictory tendencies of thought; the scientific and anthropological project, which seeks to conclude, and an artistic and imaginative agency, which seeks to proliferate and continue. The urge to cancel and conclude may be seen in Freud's uneasy insistence on defining sex and desire through their negation, as genital discharge, rather than as ascending excitement. Sex and pleasure, Bersani argues, are perceived by Freud as the descent from a singular peak, to which desire has driven the subject; it is the release of tension in orgasm, rather than a meandering across "a thousand plateaus." The Freudian text attempts to cancel, or repress, the continuative nature of desire, by forcing it-like genital sexuality-to move toward a conclusion: the repression of desire. Desire, however, will not be cancelled or defined; it inserts paradoxes into the text, and disappears only to re-emerge elsewhere. Bersani's inquiries into Freud's uneasy definitions of pleasure lead him to uncover a masocl~ismthat is implicit in the nature of sexuality. It is this masocl~isticaspect of desire that Bersani considers Freud to shy away from in his efforts to define pleasure and sexuality. For Jonathan Dollimore, in Sexual Dissidence, the sexual, or more specifically, perversion, is the battleground on which is waged a fierce dialectics between dominance and dissidence. It is his position that "the challenge of the perverse lies less in the once influential psychosexual category of the polymorphous perverse than in the paradoxical perverse or the perverse dynamic. If perversion subverts it is not as a unitary, pre-social libido, or an original plenitude, but as a transgressive agency inseparable from a dynamic intrinsic to social process."23 Where Dollimore, however, does not do much more than touch upon the topic of masochism, this argument proposes that the paradoxical nature of the perverse is nowhere so evident as in masochism such as Joyce's. Masochism is a central concern of what has been described as the secondwave of twentieth-century discourse on sexuality. The term "masochism" was coined by Krafft-Ebing, in reference to the writings of Baron Leopold von Sacher-Masocl1.24 There are, however, a number of significant differences between the masochism of Masoch and that of Joyce. The implications of attempting to offer too rigid a definition of masochism will at all times be kept in mind. It seems that there is something in the nature of masochism that resists definition. The topic of masochism always presented difficulties for Freud, forcing him to develop and redevelop a number of contradictory interpretations of sexuality. Masochism presented such difficulties for Freud, because of the fact that it consists in the willing and paradoxical subversion of what Freud considers to be the proper, or normal ends of sexuality; that is, genital discharge in the womb, and the release of unplea-

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James Joyce 6 the Perverse Ideal

surable tension. After Freud, Theodore Reik is the first important voice to offer an interpretation of masochism. His description of masochism is powerful and insightful, and although he works from within Freudianism, he is willing to mangle, although not to dispense of, the Freudian apparatus. The argument herein will often move between the Freudian, tlle Reikean, and the Deleuzian interpretations of masocllism. Deleuze's interpretation of masocllism, in Sacher-Masoch:An Interpretation,2j is without a doubt the most crucial work on masochism, with implications that go far beyond what might-no doubt mistakenly-be seen to be the somewhat narrow topic of his consideration. Althougl~Deleuze does, in this work, for tlle most part operate within the Freudian position, and rely upon Oedipal terminology, the argument is highly charged by what might be considered the growing storm that will occur in the refutation of the essential nature of the Oedipal triangle, in Anti-Oedipus. It is my opinion that, through the vehemence of this attack, Deleuze and Guattari direct readers away from drawing immensely important parallels between The Cold and the Cruel and Anti-Oedipus. I will resist the tendencies, which Deleuze and Guattari encourage, to see The Cold and the Cruel as somehow outdated by Anti-Oedipus, and instead read Anti-Oedipus by the light of, or as an extension of, The Cold and the Cruel. The following manifestations of sexual masochism shall be discussed in relation to Joyce: flagellomania, the sexualization of shame, the sexualization of alienation that drives the willing cuckold, and forced feminization. Although all of these are related, and typically overlapping phenomena, it is perhaps best not to view them first as a unified phenomenon, but as distinct compulsions that move in orbit around the masochistic drive. Of these masochistic compulsions, flagellomania is the most typical and well documented. This paper's analysis of flagellomania is indebted to Ian Gibson's The English Vice: Sex, Shame and Beating in Victorian England and After. Gibson makes it clear that, given the published evidence available to them, and the evidence of their own sense, the schoolmasters of Britain must have been aware of "the dangers and delights associated with flogging children."26 The Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau, and William Acton's The Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs were both widely read, and in both of these it is made clear that corporal punisl~mentapplied to the bottom has a strong sexualizing effect on the beater, on the beaten, and on any witnesses of the beating. Even if these educators and their administrators were unfamiliar with either of these widely read works, there was a plethora of pornography, and newspapers columns where semi-pornographic correspondence revealed the sexual elements involved in the formal beating of children. Given all of this, Gibson asks, how are we to explain "the prevalence of flagellomania in Britain and the survival of beating in schools until our own time?" He also analyses the

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Introduction

15

condition of those wounded by this system: "Not only is [the masochist] sexually impotent without having recourse to a fantasy which places him in the position of a naughty child of six or seven, but he has to live with the shame of knowing that he is unable to reveal his true self to other people."27 Gibson offers a thorough history of the representation and interpretation of the sexually stimulating effects of beating, which may be summarized as follows. The earliest instance of sexually overt beating that he cites is the beating of Encolpius by Oenothea, the priestess of Priapus, in the Satyricon. She whips his belly with green nettles, in order to render his flagging member "as stiff as a horn."28 From the thirteenth century, he refers to the Spanish epic, Poewza de Myo Cid, "in which there is a beating scene (in the "Afrenta de Corpes" incident) with strongly sadistic overtones."29 The English Vice contains a plate of an early fifteenth-century flagellation attributed to the Catalan painter Luis Borrassa.30 In it, Christ is tied to a thin pillar in the center, and there are two men, one to the left and one to the right. They hold the handles of their "cats" at such a level that there can be no doubt that these are intended to suggest erect penises. Furthermore, lashes of the whips are clearly indicative of urine or of semen caught in the trajectory of its ejaculation. The lashes of the left figure, whose eyes are half closed, spray up toward Christ's chest and chin. The figure on right is turned half away, smiling back over his shoulder at Christ. The lashes of his whip arc downward into the lower right corner as though he was urinating. The ropy whiteness of the three lashes, however, suggests semen. Gibson also refers to fifteenth-century misericords at the Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon, Whalley Church, Lancashire, Manchester Cathedral, Sherborne Abbey, and Henry VII's Chapel in Westminster Abbey. In the misericord at Stratford-upon-Avon, a "grotesque hooded figure [ . . . ] is applying the birch to the inverted posteriors of [a] lady," and his penis is uncovered."l Pico della Mirandola (1463-94), the great Italian humanist, refers to sexual beating in Disputationes Adversus Astrologiam Divinatricem (1502, Ch. 27). Stephen refers to Pico in "Proteus" (U., p. 50). In the Disputationes, Mirandola describes an acquaintance of an acquaintance: There is now alive, says he, a M a n of a prodigious, and almost unheard of lzind of Lechery: For he is never inflamed to pleasure, but when he is whipt; and yet he is so intent on the Act, and longs for the Strolzes with such an Earnestness, that he blames the Flogger that uses him gently, and is never thoroughly the master of his wishes unless the Blood starts, and the Whip rages smartly o'er the Wicked Limbs of the Monstec This Creature begs this Favour of the Woman he is to enjoy, brings her a rod himself, soalz'd and harden'd in Vinegar a Day before for the same Purpose, and entreats the Blessing of a Whipping from the Harlot o n his Knees; and the more smartly he is whipt, he rages the more eagerly, and goes the same Pace both

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James Joyce 6 the Perverse Ideal

16

to pleasure and Pain. X singular Instance of one who finds a Delight in the Midst of Torment; and he is not a Man very vicious in other Respects, he aclznowledges his Distemper, and abhors it. 32

An epigram by Sir John Davies (1569-1626) describes the way in which the sexualization of beating may result in fixation and psychic impotence, which may only be alleviated by sexual beating. When Francis comes to solace with his whore, He sends for rods and strips himself stark naked; For his lust sleeps, and will not rise before By whipping of the wench it be awa1zed:j.j

In De Flngrorum Usu in Re Veneria 6 Lumborum Renumque Oficio ("On the Use of Rods in Venereal Matters and in the Office of the Loins and Reins") the German doctor Johann Heinrich Meiboin (1590-1655) attempts to establish as a fact that flogging of the lower back and bottom can cause erection in the person being beaten, and to reconcile this seeming paradox. "This work was first published at Leyden in 1629 and went through numerous editions. It was translated into German, French and E n g l i s l ~ . " ~ ~ Meibom's interpretation of the sexual qualities of beating were widely accepted by the medical world, and the outline of his argument, if not the mechanics of it, continues to be amenable to, if not a source for many efforts to understand the phenomenon. "During the seventeenth century his work was rehashed in several popular volumes of medical divulgation, among the most famous Genenthropeiae (1642) by Giovanni Sii~ibaldi."~.j For Meibom, semen is produced, "not in the testicles, but in two seminal vesicles or vessels" which are located close to the kidneys. Flogging of the lower back and buttocks can warm this fluid, causing it to descend to the testicles, from where it may be ejaculated. A cooling or sluggishness of the lumbar region causes impotence, so that flogging of this part might act as a cure, as a rough but effective aphrodisiac. "It is all very straightforward, very mechanical, a simple matter of hot and cold."36 "By the end of the seventeenth century, Meibom's ideas were well known to the educated men of Europe, including theologians."37 Meibom's treatise on the sexual effects of flagellation implicated the Catholic Church, with its utilization of self-flagellation as a form of penance. This situation was exacerbated when Abbe Boileau published Historin flagellnntium, de recto et perverso flagrorum us apud Christianos ("the History of the Flagellant, and of the Correct and Perverse Use of the Rod among Christians") (Paris, 1700)"s In this book, Boileau uses Meibom's findings to argue that, although beating the shoulders and upper arms-"upper disciplem-might be more dangerous to the body, the beating of the lower back and buttocks-"lower discipline"-was more dangerous to the soul, and so should be discontinued.

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Introduction

17

Many churcl~inenimmediately spoke out against Boileau's insinuations, among them Jean-Baptiste Theirs, who published his riposte, Critique de I'Histoire des Flagellans, at Paris in 1703.39 Theirs does not comment on Boileau's use of Meibom's ideas, because he feels that to d o so would be morally dangerous. He avoids the issue, and argues that Christ was the first practicioner of voluntary flagellation, because He could have prevented His flagellation had He wished to do so. "The contents of Boileau's book, and of Theirs's commentary upon it, became widely known in England as the result of the publication of a volume ascribed to John Lois Delolme: The History of the Flagellants: Otherwise, of Religious Flagellations among Different Nations, and Especially among Christians. Being a paraphrase and Commentary on the Historia Flagellantium of the Abbe' Boileau, Doctor of the Sorbonne, Canon of the Holy Chapel, etc. By one who is not a Doctor of the Sorbonne (London, 1777)."40 Sexual beating is depicted in 1748, in John Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, better known as Fanny Hill. But what yet increased the oddity of this strange fancy was the gentleman being young; whereas it generally attacks, it seems, such as are, through age, obliged to have recourse to this experiment, for quickening the circulation of the juices, and determining a conflux of the spirits of pleasure toward those flagging, shrivelly parts, that rise to life only by virtue of those titillating ardours created by the discipline of their opposites, with which they have so surprising a consent.4' Cleland makes clear in this passage that the sexual compulsion to be beaten cannot wholly be accounted for as a remedy for lack of sex drive, because once this gentleman is well whipped he proves to be sexually potent. Such ideas began to appear in English newspapers and periodicals with increasing frequency. A letter to the editor of The Gentleman's Magazine in 1780 condemns flogging in schools, describing school masters as "birchenscepter'd monarchs," and as "cloistered Dionysii" who inflict "severe, shameful and indelicate" beatings on "the defenceless nudities" of their pupils. He considers this to be "an obscene custom," and "a humiliating treatment." Gibson remarks: "That such a forthright comment could have been published in a respectable and widely-read journal in 1780 prompts one to marvel at the hypocrisy of the Victorian age that was to follow some fifty years later. For 'A.B.' [the writer of this letter] clearly had n o doubt about what nowadays we would call the 'sadistic' element in whipping."42 The first part of Rousseau's Confessions was published in 1782, four years after his death, and it immediately became widely read throughout Europe. Toward the start of the Confessions, Rousseau describes being beaten by an attractive woman at a very young age. He confesses that this had a sexual effect upon him, and that from this point on he could never

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James Joyce 6 the Perverse Ideal

become sexually aroused unless he imagined or placed himself into situations that reiterated the terms of this event. He urged educators not to beat children, so that others might avoid becoming obsessed by this perversity. Gibson comments: "After the publication of the Confessions the dangers of beating young children on their buttocks should have been obvious to all. Where Britain was concerned, Rousseau's warning was heeded by some doctors but not by the teachers or by Parliament. This despite the fact that the Confessions were well known in the country, the first translation having appeared in 1783."43 William Acton's The Functions and Disorders of the Re-Productive Organs in Youth, in Adult Age, and in Advanced Life: Considered in Their Physiological, Social, and Psychological Relations, was first published in 1857. By 1975, it was in its sixth edition. Acton's warnings about the sexual effects of beating are cleat Because beating of the lower back and buttocks could be aphrodisiac, as Meibom had explained, it was best not to expose children to this, because it could lead to masturbation, which he considered to be the gravest danger. Gibson expresses astonishment that the educational authorities of the country still did not listen, and children continued to be flogged, birched and caned on the bare buttocks.44 Some of the tactics employed in this argument will possibly seem objectionable. The most crucial of these is the reading of Bloom's adult sexuality and full-blown masochism as a logical development of Stephen's adolescent sexuality. We do not need to posit Bloom's awareness of the awful humiliations that overtake him, or to equate them with Stephen's hallucination of his dead mother, to see that Bloom's Circean adventure is deeply apposite. The original intention of this study was to limit the scope to the masochism in "Circe," but a linking of Stephen and Bloom through Joyce was arrived at in part through a sense that the death of Rudy was an inadequate explanation of Bloom's masochism. Bloom's Jewishness is often considered to play a part in his masochism but, like Rudy's death, this leads us away from seeking the sources of Bloom's masochism in Stephen, and acknowledging the extent of Joyce's preoccupation with this perversity. The death of Rudy is an example of the way in which Joyce's confession of masturbatory masochistic fantasy utilizes innumerable disguises: it consists of compulsive, exhibitionistic gestures of exposure and concealment. Joyce's letters, and the testimony of Nora, reveal that Joyce had masochistic inclinations. "Araby," "An Encounter" and "The Sisters" present the development of a young man's sexuality, and show us the forces and reactions that produce a sexual masochist. Stephen is an autobiographical character We see in Stephen the growth of a masochistic character, who exhibits his own masochism in many ways. Bloom is not an autobiographical character in any obvious sense, but he is a sexual masochist, through whom Joyce presents many of his own masochistic traits; traits that he explored in Exiles. and to a lesser extent in "The Dead."

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Introduction

19

In "Circe," Stephen's and Bloom's faces become one with Shakespeare's, and they are all three crowned by the horns of the cuckold. Cuckoldry is central to Joyce's masochism, and to the theory of artistic creation that Stephen expounds in Ulysses. It is in this theory, also, that Joyce suggests that we might seek the artist, and his motivations for creating, in his work, but that we should not assume the obvious in determining the author's autobiographical point of reference; he is as likely to be the old ghost as the prince. In Stephen, and the young protagonists of "The Sisters," "Araby" and "An Encounter," we see the forces and reactions that contribute to sexual masochism: in Gabriel, Richard and Bloom, we see the fruition of this masochism. Objections might also be raised to my interpretation of "Circe." In "Circe" we see the desires and fears of Stephen and Bloom, disguised by something like a dream censor. The desires and fears of Bloom and Stephen flow in and out of one another, in the sense that the narration focuses on Bloom, and then moves through an indeterminate middle ground, before focussing on Stephen. It moves back and forth from Stephen to Bloom a few times, passing through the straightforward narrative each time. If the dream show in "Circe" reiterates history, or the text, this is in addition to the apparition of Stephen's and Bloom's fears and desires. If not, why does Stephen attempt to strike his mother, and instead strike the lamp? This is the clearest evidence of the nature of the juxtaposition of the narration of the dream and the narration of the linear, realistic text. It suggests that the distortions are occurring in the minds of Stephen and Bloom, or that these distortions represent what is going on in the minds of Stephen and Bloom. Joyce is not simply spinning a yarn; in his work he is engaging the dragons of his mind. His themes are the battles he has fought with his own conscience, his own desires, and his own fears. Despite what anyone might say, Joyce is a personal writer, and nowhere is this truer than in the searing confessional of "Circe." The chapter may explain the psychodynamic potentialities of the book, or it may be a reiteration of history, but this is avoiding the issue. In "Circe," Joyce is addressing the human condition, and in particular his own. Joyce did not go to the trouble of writing "Circe" to play off of the masochistic, feminine stereotype of the Jew, or so that he could present an experiment in metanarrative, or a parody of the Abbey "style"; he has much more invested. It is the personal commitment, the self-engagement, that drives this chapter out at us. Although we are not to read the psychodrama as in the minds of Stephen and Bloom, this psychodrama represents what is going on in the minds of Stephen and Bloom. The text does not simply represent what is latent, or what is subconscious, however. Stephen sees his dead mother, and Bloom is fantasizing about sexual masochism. They do not see exactly what we see, but we see the gist of what they feel. Stephen does not sit with an empty mind waiting while the text reiterates itself, and then jump up and smash the lamp in order to lead the action out

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of the brothel. Rather, he is engaged in a climactic conflict with the dread and self-recrimination that have swamped him since the death of his mother: "Look. He's white" (U., p. 682). He is not white simply because he is drunk, and has not eaten; he is up against something more. He is not reading the words that we have before us on the page, but he sees something that is represented by what we see written on the page. Stephen smashes the lamp because the death of his mother is on his mind. Bloom becomes, not a woman, but a masochist's parody of a woman, because he has on his mind the fact that the most powerful component of his masochistic fantasy has passed from his dreams into life on this day. In both cases, the dreams are influenced by a kind of empathy for women, and by an excruciating sympathy for the sufferings of women. It is this sympathy, and not the memory of his mother, that Stephen tries to destroy. Bloom has Molly cuckold him because Stephen feared May dragging him "with [her] together down" (U., p. 57), and because Stephen fears Dilly's lank seaweed hair dragging him "with her together down." It is a Daedalean escape. Because of an excess of sympathy and love, Bloom distances himself from Molly, by encouraging his own cuckolding. For Stephen the sea is the agonizingly sentimental goo of the mother goddess. Bloom avoids this abjection by giving Molly wings, and making her one of the birdgirls, subject to a static, but nonetheless sexual, admiration. He makes her seem far off and untouchable to him, not possessed by him, in order to recharge his desire for her. It is humane, but it is also selfish. Despite use of the term masochism, and the linking of Stephen, Joyce and Bloom, this is not an attempt to cinch Joyce's life and works into a reductionist, monistic psychology. I have never considered reducing Joyce's sexuality to a single trait. At least until the conclusion of Ulysses, however, masochism is the predominant sexual trait, and it inverts and overrides Joyce's other sexualities. I will also acknowledge that Bloom is other things than a masochist, just as a gay man is other things than a gay man. Masochism necessarily entails a psychic dualism, or multiplicity; the masochism must work against the interests of the non-masochistic self. Deleuze suggests that, for this reason, masochism serves liberty, in that it dismantles-even if only temporarily-the inauthentic interests of the socially constructed self. In an important sense, there is no such thing as a masochist: masochism is always only a psychic trend, which operates against the construction of individual identity. We call someone a masochist when we sense that this psychic trend is particularly powerful in that person. Masochism can never stand alone: it entails that the subject which it inhabits has interests other than its own. It may only take form, in fact, or become apparent, as the inverse of these interests. Typical examples of the socially constructed identities which masochism dismantles include gender (what a man should be), and the sense that a mate's affections should be monogamous, that his or her body is the property of the subject. Masochistic rituals do not consist of sadism's quantification of strokes, or its mapping

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Introduction

21

of the inert body, but of the parody of social constructs of identity: an adult may be spanked like a child, a husband may watch while his wife has sex with another man, and a man may be dressed like a woman. It is a mistake to look for a consistent stance in Bloom. The best we can do is locate predominances in his character and in his attitudes. Bloom's masochistic traits offer perhaps the strongest impediments to our attempts to define Bloom. A study of masochism in Joyce reveals a psychology that is anything but monistic.

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CHAPTER ONE

The Cracked Looking-Glass

"Dark v ~ r g ~ nsald " ; the hairy j'outh, "thj' father stern, abhowd, "Rzvets rnj3tenfold chams w h d e stdl on h g h n ~ s p m soars; t " S o r n e t ~ n ~an e s eagle screamng 112 the skj; sometunes a lion, "Stalkmg u p o n the mountams, & sometunes a whale I lash " T h e ragmg fathomless abjlss; anon a serpent foldzng "Around the pdlars of Urthona, and round th)' dark l m b s , " O n the Canadlan wdds I fold; feeble rnj3s p m t folds. "For chaln'd beneath I rend these caverns: w h e n thou brmgest food s t o behold th)' face" I howl m)' 1031:and m)' red e j ~ seek " I n vain! these clouds roll t o & b o , & hlde thee b o r n rn)' slght.1

In sadism and masochism, the tools of authority-the whip, the cane and the stern command-and the experiences of loss and betrayal, become objects or conditions of desire. For Deleuze, although masochism and sadism are distinct, they are equally dependent upon a resexualization that mirrors a prior desexualization; a resexualization in which the desexualization is sexualized while retaining its qualities of desexualization. Sexuality traces a path back through its repression, reclaiming lost ground, by sexualizing that which served to shut it off initially. In the Oedipus complex, and in mourning and melancholia, Freud presents two distinct models of loss. The desexualization is based on the loss imposed by authority, in the oedipal triangulation, and on the authority of loss, in n a r c i ~ s i s m . ~ In the Oedipus complex, the subject makes an identification with prohibitive authority. This identification is motivated by a fear that this authority will punish the subject if he does not renounce an object of desire. In order to accommodate the prohibition, psychic energy that was allotted to the desire of this object is negated when another quantity of psychic energy is allotted to the imaginative recreation of the prohibitive authority. When the authority has been internalized, the likelihood of transgression, and thus the threat of punishment, is diminished. The portion of its internality that the subject has given over to the voice and eyes of authority now serves as prison guard in a body that has become a panopticon.

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For Freud, the object of desire in this equation is the mother, and the prohibiting authority is the father. The internalization of the father as the superego is a reiteration of a cannibalization of the fathers in a primal scene, in which primal sons gorged on their fathers, on guilt, and on fear. In the Oedipus complex, the son competes with his father for the presence of his mother. He imagines his own jealousy and competitive ill-will for his father mirrored back at him, and he becomes suspicious that the father might do him harm, as he has imagined doing harm to the father. His fears seem to be confirmed when he sees that his mother has no penis, and he imagines that his father has cut off her penis in order to put her in the position of one who attends to those who have penises. He fears that the father may do this to him also, and so he clings more tenaciously to his own penis, and identifies more strongly with those who have penises, such as the father. He attempts to become more like the father, and a portion of his mind gives itself over to imagining itself to be the father. It displays itself, to say to the father: "I am one of your kind." The familial elements of this equation, however, are perhaps overstated, to the detriment of its credibility. Castration anxiety is perhaps best read as a fear of symbolic castration, and the father and mother as symbolic mothers and fathers: it is all allegory. In "1914: One Wolf or Several," Deleuze and Guattari argue that Freud was wrong to reduce the Wolf Man's tree full of wolves to a single wolf, representative of the father. If the voice of prohibitive authority is internalized, it seems unlikely that it is internalized suddenly, in the trauma of a cataclysmic primal scene. The strength of the Oedipal equation should be its generality, its simplicity, and its tendency to reiterate. Socialization consists of learning to restrict urges and desires that are considered inappropriate by external authorities. Once you know without asking whether something is considered wrong, you have established a superego. The superego is less the father, than a succession of prohibiting authorities. This triangulation describes a dialectical relation between desire, the object of desire, and the prohibiting authority. It denotes the bare bones of a situation in which we must compete, and cannot always have what we want. In his analysis of mourning and melancholia, Freud presents another model of inhibited desire. In this case, energy is directed toward an object of desire that is suddenly removed. In order to take time to adjust to this loss, the subject does not redirect this energy immediately, but withdraws it, and dedicates it to the imaginative reconstitution of the missing object. This is the normal process of mourning; when it continues too long, because of ambivalence toward the missing object, however, there is melancholia. Just as in the Oedipus complex, where a portion of the self is given over to identification, so here is a portion of the self given over as ground on which to conjure the lost object of desire. In this narcissism, the desired object both is and is not distinct from the self. Through attempting to method-act the desired object back into being, an illusory alterity is set up within the self, and he parades before himself.

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For the purposes of this argument, the object of this narcissistic desire will be no more considered to relate to a single external object than the superego is related to the father. The love for the mother is likely to be the first love that is withdrawn in order to create a piece of the mother within the self, a mother whose love may not be withheld or denied. After the mother, however, there will be a succession of objects whose love, for one reason or another, will have to be stolen in this way. Eventually, the object of this narcissistic love will become a zone of conjuring, on which he will become that one who will love him, by dressing in the stolen clothes of women he has known. Loathing, as well as fear, serves to uphold the desexualization. In both of these models of loss, there is a perceived separation of body and soul, that is considered as a wounding, or a potential for wounding of the body of the self, or the body of the object of desire. This wounding comes to be seen as abjection; as a particularly sordid state of non-being, in which the body wallows in indifferentiation. In the Oedipus complex, it is the body of the self that is lost to abjection, and in narcissism it is the physical body of the beloved. In the Oedipal and the narcissistic models, the self gains autonomy by renouncing the external object of desire. The desexualizing identification is founded on these renunciations. Both of these models of loss preclude loving, because in his approach to an external object of desire the subject is stricken with a sense of abjection. This abjection is triggered by the external object's threat to impinge on his autonomy, and blur his differentiation. In the oedipal equation, abjection resides in the perception of the desired object as castrated, and the fear that approaching the desired object might result in the castration of the self. In the narcissistic model, abjection resides in the refusal to redirect love or desire toward an object from beyond the self, because of a fear of renewed loss, and also because of an unwillingness to renounce the internalized object of desire. Matching these two models of loss, are two strategies for coping with renounced desire, and for deploying abjection between identification and projection. Although Freud at times distinguishes between no fewer than four types of desexualization, and at times contains them all within the category of repression,; I will follow the example of a number of writers-such as Deleuze and Bersani-who reduce these to two, and make a sharp distinction between repression and sublimation.4 In The Cold and the Cruel, Deleuze notes these two types of desexualization, and asks whether there might not be "a third alternative which would be related not to the functional interdependence of the ego and the superego, but to the structural split between them?"' He never says so explicitly, but his rejection of the conception of sadomasochism as a single complex makes it clear that this third alternative is itself double sided. In these distinct strategies of self-enclosure and selfsubsistence, either desire is expelled, or desire is withdrawn. The oedipal model of loss results in repression. The identification with the prohibitive authority becomes predominant in the person. Although the

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hydraulic model of desire has been criticized, it is helpful, particularly for a study of Joyce, who uses imagery of liquid so extensively in his pictures of both loathing and desire. In terms of this model, we may see the repression as a seizure or damming of the flowing of the urges. This damming serves not only to negate the anarchic threat of this free-flowing energy, but also to colonize this wild energy so that it may power society's psycho-electrics machine. The repression is dependent upon the establishment of a fixed identity, a static and essential self. The subject dreads the polymorphous quality of his desires, and to evade the abjection that emanates from these urges, he affirms and reaffirms his identity. This identification corresponds to what Deleuze and Guattari describe as the majoritarian identification. The subject situates himself in a series of dominant terms along a grid of binary oppositions. It is the dominant term in which he situates himself, because he is reiterating the choice he made in renouncing his love for the mother. He chooses to stand with power, and to turn aside any threat that power may pose to him, by participating in its oppressive project. The personality thus produced may be described as paranoiac, because the biggest threat, against which it must remain vigilant, is the threat from within: the indifferentiation, and the polymorphous urges which he renounced in order to identify with the master race. His originary state makes suspect his place among power and, because of his own vigilance against this threat arising from within, he can anticipate the vengeance which power would level at his defection. In "The Psychoanalytic Model of the Personality," Daniel Lagache emphasizes that, just as the superego subdivides the mind, so the superego itself may be subdivided.6 Initially, the superego represents the internalization of external authority. Once the superego is established, the subject may respond to its pressure by dividing himself further, into the ego ideal, which seeks esteem before the superego, and the ideal ego, which glorifies the body wounded by the superego. In repression, the superego and the ego ideal, which seeks esteem before the superego through the thoroughness of its repression, gaze at one another. The mother, and desire, are hidden away, and if they make too much racket they are projected beyond the self, where they may be dealt with more effectively. The narcissistic model of loss results in sublimation. In terms of the hydraulic model of desire, although the flow of the urges has been forced underground, it has not ceased to flow. In the sublimation, the predominant identification is with the object of desire. The authority that removed the loved object has been disavowed in the recreation of this object in the imaginary. The goal of the subject is evasion; evasion of the facts, initially, and later evasion of all that threatens to impede the free flow of its desire. His initial contraction has meant that an identification with the father has failed to predominate in the symbolic realm. This failure has resulted in the subject's unwillingness to coalesce into a stable identity. His beloved is dependent upon his ability to resist a singular identification, in that it is his

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ability to be both he and she which animates her; his desire must flow freely as it is the blood in her veins. Where the repressive choice is paranoiac, the sublimative choice is schizophrenic. It is not enough, however, to consider the sublimative identification to be an identification with the mother. Bisexuality, or rather, polymorphous ambivalence, rather than homosexuality, proves to be the factor that disintegrates Freud's attempts to account for desire, and to fix it in a representational structure. The binary pole to which paranoiac identification is opposed is not simply an identification with the mother, but an indeterminacy, or fluidity of desire: An inherent indifference of our desires to their objects makes our desiring relations to the world mobile and experimental. In their important work Anti-Oedipzts, Gilles Deleuze and FClix Guattari have virulently attacked the notion that desire is necessarily "recorded" in the terms of the Oedipus complex. In fact, even within those terms, desire remains unstable [ . . . . ] light, and shifting, identifications may save us from the curse of 'having a character' [ . . . . I 7

Central to Deleuze and Guattari's model of schizophrenic sexuality is the notion of becomings; a metamorphic flowing through minoritarian identifications. The first becoming is becoming woman, followed by, deeper still, becoming animal, becoming molecular, and becoming indiscernible. The becomings serve to evade the closure and the stasis of the majoritarian identification. In terms of the subdivision of the superego that Lagache describes, in sublimation the narcissistic ego looks into the ideal ego, the "glorification of the wounded body." If the wound is the absence of the beloved from the real, in her reconstitution in the symbolic he draws the tenor of her absence into the qualities of her beauty. The sublimative choice constitutes what Deleuze and Guattari describe as a minoritarian identification. In the meeting of the narcissistic ego (that which desires) and the ideal ego (the wounded object of desire), the subject becomes desire itself, lover and loved one unto himself, through a rejection of the authority of the real. In order to continue to produce desire, he must continually seek his position outside of power, and be ready to relinquish any identifications he might make with the real. His desire is always evasive of the truth. It is secretive, because it is internal. Sadistic and masochistic sexualities are tautologies of denial and loss: they are reiterations of a primal wounding, resexualizations of the desexualization. These resexualizations are dependent upon projections, which accommodate a prior identification. Projection, like identification, is a means of dealing with threat, but in the projection the threat to be parried arises from within. In sadism, there is a resexualization of the repression. This resexualization works through the mechanism of the return of the repressed, whereby that

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which is foreclosed in the imagined returns in the real. When the pressure of repressed desire becomes too great to be held back by the identification with authority, the subject projects the desire for which he feels guilty onto an object of desire beyond the self. The desire which he wishes to cancel is considered to originate in her, and he passes the blame for his desire onto her; she shouldn't have been wearing such a short skirt, or whatever. He stands beside the prohibitive authority and says: "look what I have found trying to reach within our walls." Through symbolic gestures, he reiterates the cancellation of his own desire, on the external object onto whom he has projected these guilty desires. Through the thoroughness of this cancellation, the ego ideal seeks esteem before the prohibitive authority, and attempts to re-establish his fraternity with this authority; a fraternity that was jeopardized by the emergence of this threat from within. In masochism, there is a resexualization of the sublimation. The ideal ego, the glorification of the wounded body, is drawn in a sexual tone, and observed with masturbatory earnestness. In the union of the narcissistic ego and the ideal ego there is a union of desire and the object of desire. Authority and prohibition only impede on this virtual perfection, and so he projects authority onto an object of desire from beyond the self. As a double of the father, this external object does not intrude on his production of desire; far from prohibiting desire, she and authority force the subject to produce desire. Through this ritual, he demonstrates that he needs neither him nor her. In sadism, the abjection of the sadist's body is projected onto an object of desire. The masochist, on the other hand, absorbs the abjection of an external object of desire into his own body, with the same movement whereby he projects the superego onto her, and so glorifies her wounded body, showing her to lack nothing. Sexuality is grounded in dualities. It is the nature of sexuality that there must be an object of desire (real or imagined) and a subject of desire. Furthermore, the sexual stands in opposition to the non-sexual: whether or not there exists an energy which may be considered specifically sexual, and how far the scope of what may be considered sexual extends, are issues which must be considered. Patterns of dualism emerge in Joyce's presentation of sexuality. These patterns, and the nature of these dualities, correspond in important ways to those presented by a number of other writers, and it might be useful to compare Joyce's use of dualities to these. The most important correspondence is not so much in the nature of these dualities, as the way in which they are dissolved into one another, and their hierarchical relations are inverted, resulting in a transgressive aesthetic. In his earlier writings, Freud distinguishes between ego instincts and libidinal instincts.8 Later, he proposes a distinction between a death instinct and an Eros instinct.9 The extent of the differentiation between these instincts is a point of contention in this issue, and a point through which a number of

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writers have entered the Freudian body to criticize and deconstruct Freud's argument. The death instinct works to divide, or to disintegrate and destroy composite unities, such as the individual being, or static identity, while the Eros instinct serves to perpetuate and consolidate these unities As soon as he introduces this distinction between the Eros instinct and the death instinct, Freud recognizes that these models are not wholly distinct, and that they are often, if not always, found at some point in a process of fusion or defusion. He argues, in fact, that the death instinct, which is essentially silent, may only be witnessed in fusion with the Eros instinct, as sadism or masochism.l0 Throughout his writings, Freud acknowledges that the issue of sexual energy is a point of confusion for him, as are the natures of the death and Eros instincts. This alignment of dualities influences Freud's definition of sexuality. In the "Three Essays" Freud presents " t w o distinct ontologies of sexuality itself." "From the teleological point of view, Freud will call the 'kind of pleasure due to the excitation of erotogenic zones' 'fore pleasure,' and 'the other kind due to the discharge of sexual substances' will be known as 'end pleasure.' "11 Before the awakening of genital sexuality, all sexuality will consist of excitation. The discharge of excitation will apply only to genital sexuality, but even the end pleasure of genital sexuality is dependent upon fore pleasure being driven to a certain pitch. The release of tension, which Freud eventually defines as pleasure, "consists simply in the extinction of excitement." End pleasure is considered to be the "principal act" of human sexuality, to which the pleasure which precedes end pleasure is subordinate. Sexuality is thereby defined through its negation, through the orgasm that concludes desire. Freud's argument assumes that only the end pleasure of genital emission, the extinction of desire, serves sexuality, while the repetitive, unpleasurable pleasure of foreplay and arousal serves the death instincts. His discussion of pleasure seems to stall at the points at which he recognizes paradox as the essence of sexuality, insofar as it consists of a pleasurable unpleasure. More significantly, when Freud attempts to push through this paradox, he finds it to repeat itself endlessly, or until he cancels its circuitous repetition by a return to the topic of end pleasure. "Generally Freud tends to speak of sexual excitement as if it were something like an itch, or an urge to sneeze. But in sex preceding discharge [ . . . . ] we have an itch that seeks nothing but its own prolongation, even its own intensification." Sex preceding discharge, preceding its own negation, heightens and prolongs pain: this "pleasure is somehow distinct from satisfaction, perhaps even identical to a kind of pain."l2 When, in "Beyond the Pleasure Principle," Freud unites the pleasure principle with the sexual instincts, it seems that he has cancelled out fore pleasure, and so completely accounted for the sexual with its negation. There is a return of the repressed in the sense in which desire becomes inherent to the death instinct. Desire returns to Freud's discourse as a disintegrative force, pushing him toward paradox and oxymoron. He proceeds to trace

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the death instinct in the mysterious tendency to repeat, or even intensify, something unpleasurable, without apparently recognizing the similarities that emerge between the death instinct and the conception of fore pleasure which he had begun to enunciate fifteen years earlier, in the "Three Essays." In "Beyond the Pleasure Principle," "Freud seems almost on the point of suggesting that beyond the pleasure principle we find-sexuality. It is, in any case, repetition-or what we could perhaps call an insistent stasis-which blocks Freud's attempts to define the sexual."l; While Freud often seems to resist an inclination to concede the point, Deleuze and Guattari, like Jung, hold that all psychic energy is libidinal: "Everywhere you have libido as machine energy."l4 "The truth is that sexuality is everywhere: the way a bureaucrat fondles his records, a judge administers justice, a businessman causes money to circulate; the way the bourgeois fucks the proletariat; and so on. And there is no need to resort to metaphors [ . . . . ] Hitler got the fascists sexually aroused."lj In one sense, the perception of all energy as libidinal allows Deleuze and Guattari to dispense of the categories of sublimation and repression, and of desexualization and resexualization. In another sense, however, these categories persist in their writings-with certain modifications-as the molar and the molecular tendencies of sexuality. For Deleuze and Guattari, although all energy is libidinal, a distinction must be made between a function which seizes and colonizes desire for societal purposes, forcing it into extroversion and moralization, and a contrary function which-although an equally social investment-frees desire to flow, to break out of molar aggregates and become molecular. The sexuality of the bureaucrat fondling his records is different from that of the "black beast" escaping, becoming metamorphic and indiscernible: "The decoded flows of desire form the free energy (libido) of the desiring-machines. The desiringmachines take form and train their sights along a tangent of deterritorialization that traverses the representative spheres, and that runs along the body without organs. Leaving, escaping, but while causing more escapes."l6 Deleuze and Guattari's conceptions of the molar and the molecular are, despite assertions to the contrary, not unlike Freud's death and Eros instincts, and the conceptions of repression and sublimation. At times we contrasted the molar and the molecular as the paranoiac, signifying, and structured lines of integration, and the schizophrenic, machinic, and dispersed lines of escape [ . . . . ] At other times, on the contrar!; we contrasted them as the two major types of equally social investments: the one sedentary and biunivocalizing, and of a reactionary or fascist tendency; the other nomadic and polyvocal, and of a revolutionary tendency. In fact, in the schizoid declaration-"I am of a race inferior for all eternity," "I am a beast, a black," "We are all German Jewsm-the historico-social field is no less invested than in the paranoiac formula: "I am one of your kind, from the same place as you, I am a pure Aryan, of a superior race for all time.""

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In rejecting the notion of sexual energy, Bataille's stance, although founded on the opposite premise, is not unlike Jung's, or Deleuze and Guattari's.18 If no energy is specifically sexual, all energy is potentially sexual. For Bataille, all of human life is torn between two opposing purposes; one ultimately sexual, and another which excludes the sexual from its precincts. In his system, sex is of sovereignty and disintegrative violence, while the other of sex is reason and work.19 Civilization is preserved by the mode of thought which counters and denies desire; by work. Practicality, productivity, reason and restraint all serve the end of preserving society and the socially defined self. Behind or beneath this lucidity and composure, however, as the ground on which these systems of preservation are built, there is an opposing purpose, which seeks to overcome restraint, and spend in one self-annihilatory surge all that has been saved. Sex is a squandering of energy, and so opposed to self-preservation; the movement of arousal is violence against the profane self, directed toward a self-inflicted "little death," which in turn represses this disintegrative desire, and announces the re-emergence of the practical, profane self. Deleuze and Guattari's conceptions of preservative molarities, and the disintegrative trend of the molecular, may also be compared to Bataille's conceptions of the tendencies to work and to save on the one hand, and to spend, desire aild destroy on the other. In changing his perspective from an opposition between ego and libidinal energy-a position which would coincide with that of Bataille-to an opposition between the death instinct and the Eros instinct, Freud places difficulties before himself. Freud's revised conception of the sexual differs from Bataille's because he, unlike Bataille, links sex and self-preservation within the Eros instinct, and opposes these to the death instinct. Where, in "Beyond the Pleasure Principle," Freud considers the protozoa as living on in each of the organisms into which it has divided,20 Bataille sees the original protozoa as negated by the two new lives which supersede it:21 for Bataille, sex implies death, while for Freud, sex implies life. In his conception of the sexual, Freud avoids a vision of generation as both creation and destruction; he does not, like Joyce, link tomb and womb, or recognize the "Sheelana-gig." Although he stresses emphatically the importance of a conception of dualities, he is never free from unease about his particular alignment of these dualities.22 In order to account for the most glaring contradiction of his alignment of sex and self-preservation-sexual masochism-Freud proposes a fusion and defusion of the death instinct and the Eros instinct. Of all theorists of dualities, it is perhaps Yeats who presents the most elaborate and developed model of such fusion and defusion, with his image of interpenetrating gyres, and the four-part system of tensions through which he isolates points upon this double flux. In fact, it would be interesting to compare Yeats's Mask, Will, Creative Mind and Body of Fate to the superego, the ego ideal, the narcissistic ego and the ideal ego. Yeats speaks endlessly of dualities, while denying their verity, and collapsing them into one another.

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Nietzsche also stresses the fusion and defusion of these opposites, in his conception of the tragic, in which the Apollonian sinks into the Di0nysian,~3 and in the unmentioned but implied comic moment, in which order steps out of chaos. Within these movements, there is a reversal of the relations of priority between the terms, and as the subordinate terms swell into precedence, the overturned primary terms achieve a moment of almost supernatural purity. Tragedy, although it ends in its opposite, is predominantly classical, while comedy, although it too ends in its opposite, is predominantly grotesque. Joyce adopts his conception of the fusion and defusion of opposites partly from Giordano Bruno, who based his theories upon the premise that "Extremes Meet."24 In his 1903 essay on Bruno, Joyce states: "Every power in nature or in spirit must evolve an opposite as the sole condition and means of its manifestation; and every opposition is, therefore, a tendency to reunion" (C.W., p. 134).It is the fusion and defusion of these opposites that may account for the compulsive complexity and confusion that overcomes any attempts to engage them, and for the hypocrisy and illusion which undermines any efforts to establish a final intellectual coherence regarding these dualities. As soon as a statement is made, its contrary presents itself as equally true, and each thing is shown to contain its opposite. With the partial exception of Freud there is, however, a profound correspondence in these alignments of dualities, which would seem to reveal the limits of these doomed lunges to their ineffable sources. Bataille's poles of self-preservation and self-disintegration correspond in many ways to Yeats's antithetical and primary poles. Yeats's antithetical aild primary poles in turn correspond to Nietzsche's Apollonian and Dionysian poles. Each of these poles correspond in important ways to Deleuze and Guattari's conceptions of the molar and the molecular, and to Deleuze's conceptions of sadism and masochism. Altl~ougl~ language usage and particular interests may disguise their coincidence, all of these poles correspond roughly to western culture's categories of the classical and the grotesque. O n the one hand, we have the conservative and formal, and on the other we have the revolutionary and the formless. Binary conceptions of the high and the low, of symbolic man and woman, of life and death, of identity and difference, of depth and surface, of spirit and nature, and of culture and nature, may be absorbed into these broad dualities of the formal and the formless, or transformative. It is crucial to note that while the formal pole depends upon duality, in that the individuated image is juxtaposed upon the formless, the transformative pole excludes the possibility of stable dualities, by disintegrating differentiation. The opposition between the classical and the grotesque is a deeply rooted duality in Joyce. Patrick Parrinder recognizes the pervasiveness of this duality in Joyce's writings: "Stephen may show a romantic inclination for the classical, but Bloom and Molly [ . . . ] plainly belong to the grotesque."25 Parrinder adopts his definitions of the classical and the grotesque from Bakhtin:

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In his book on Rabelais, Balzhtin shows how the confrontation of the classical and the grotesque may be exemplified by a difference in bodily imagery. Classical art: 'presents an entirely finished, completed, strictly limited body, which is shown from the outside as something individual. That which protrudes, bulges, sprouts or branches off [ . . . ] is eliminated, hidden or moderated. A11 orifices of the body are closed. The basis of the image is the individual, strictly limited mass, the impenetrable facade.' The grotesque bod!; by contrast, 'is cosmic and universal [ . . . . it] can merge with various natural phenomena, with mountains, rivers, seas, islands and continents.'26 In Joyce, there is a movement which blurs distinctions between classical thought and what may be considered grotesque thought. The classical body is the body of repression, and the grotesque body is the body of sublimation. Furthermore, the abject may be considered as the classical perspective on the grotesque body. To visualize these distinctions, we may see the formal, sealed and individuated attributes of the classical in Michelangelo's statue of David. The metamorphic, formless and indifferentiated nature of the grotesque may be seen in the pages of The Book of Kells. In The Cold and the Cruel, Deleuze distinguishes between the speculative thought of the sadist, which imposes form upon the formless, through negation, and by inhibiting flow, and the imaginative thought of the masochist, which transforms the formal, through the disavowal of the real. This distinction is taken over, in Anti-Oedipus, by a distinction between the arboreal, biunivocalizing thought that is practiced by the paranoiac, and the schizophrenic's rhizomic, non-dualistic mode of thought. To set up these dualities simply to live with them is paranoiac; to set them up, however, to undercut them, is an example of the perverse dynamic. It is not so much the alignment of these oppositions that is of interest here, as the manner by which they may fuse and defuse with one another. In the transgressive aesthetic, these dualities are blurred by a parodic reversal of their hierarchical relations of priority. By its nature, transgression is aligned to the disintegration of form, the breaking of boundaries: it is molecular rather than molar, and minoritarian rather than majoritarian. It is grotesque in that the orifices are opened: the prohibition on release is relaxed, and emission flows freely. Transgression is opposed to work, and self-preservation, and tending to violence, play, riot, and orgy. It is not, however, to be conceived of as a return to animal nature. Sex and violence may be considered primary; the state of nature. The prohibition of the taboo is a reaction against this primary nature, an attempt to restrain and control, or desexualize, this primal, disintegrative and wasteful surging. The taboo is secondary, and the transgression, the overcoming, breakthrough or overflowing of the taboo, is tertiary. Here, however, we move back to the binary, as the tertiary becomes the secondary, and this

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mutable ring continues to spin. The first term is now always excluded: the resexualization is founded upon its desexualization. Carnival, for instance, is not a simple unleashing of violent nature. Rather, it parodies and inverts order and convention. In the new urge to order, the hangover, there is an impulse to recoup losses, and a resurgence of paranoia. A working distinction may be drawn between sex and eroticism. Eroticism is transgressional sexuality, in which a resexualization retains the traits of its desexualization. Eroticism, the sexuality of the socialized, is based upon the violence, death, crime or disease with which prohibition has threatened it, aild is therefore knit to elements of punishment and pain. Thus the resexualization of the desexualized produces either sadism or masochism, each of which, in its own way, mocks the conception of law, without ever escaping this compulsion to mock. The sadist mocks law through identification and extension, through an application of the law so extreme as to be absurd. The masochist parodies law through projection of, and submission to law, so extreme as to be absurd. It is arguable that all socialized sexuality will contain some elements of sadism and / or masochism, and that it is only the unsocialized, the solitary animal, that may enjoy the primal aild simple, non-reflective, although nonetheless violent joy of pure friction. When deconstructionist thinkers urged us to step outside of dualistic thought, they proposed an end to history; a closure to the arbitrary tyrannies of the twilight of the idols. History, however, has as yet refused to end. Deconstructive theory recognizes the oppressive potential, and even the innately oppressive nature of the biunivocalizing tendency. It attempts to disentangle thought from the tyrannical illusions perpetuated by dualistic thought. In Sexual Dissidence, Dollimore notes that: It is an achievement of deconstr~ictionto show the limitations of binary logic in theory and its often pernicious effects in practice; to show how binaries, far from being eternal necessities of cultural organization, or essential, unavoidable attributes of human thought, are unstable constructs whose antithetical terms presuppose, and can therefore be used against, each othec Meaning becomes an effect of difference and deferral. Because its terms are vulnerable to inversion and its structure (via inversion) to displacement, the continued existence of the binary is never guaranteed; it has to be maintained, often in and through struggles over representation.2'

There is, however, little consensus regarding tactics by which these "violent hierarchies" might be overcome, and to what extent it is even possible to overcome these hierarchies. Dollimore describes a number of issues central to the debate regarding what can aild what should be done about dualizing thought: we should not deceive ourselves into thinlting that to deconstruct these binaries somehow neutralizes their effect in history and 1 or the here and

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now. This is a n instance of how the indispensability of theory can be deflected into a 'theoreticist' evasion of d a t it might most effectively challenge. Binaries remain fundamental to, and violently active within, social organization and discursive practices, more so than we usually realize as we live and suffer them daily But hon7, then, are they challenged?

Derrida has insisted that metaphysics can only be contested from within, by disrupting its structures and redirecting its force against itself. H e defines binary opposition as a "violent hierarchy" (Positions, 41) where one of the two terms forcefully governs the other, and insists that a crucial stage in the deconstruction of binaries involves their inversion, an overturning, which brings low what was high [ . . . . ] he adds that the political effect of failing to invert the binary opposition, of trying simply to jump beyond it into a world free of it, is simply to leave the binary intact in the only world we have. Despite this emphasis in Derrida, some of his adherents still want to make that jump, insisting that the inversion of the binary achieves nothing.28 Neither Joyce, nor Deleuze and Guattari, considers that there may be a final escape from the biunivocalizing impulse: subject groups become subjugating groups, and the escape is always marked by the point of its departure. Conflict is unavoidable, and escape from tyranny and domination must be perpetually renewed: escape may be the only truly revolutionary gesture. At the end of Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari defend themselves against anticipated charges of fleeing into fantasy, by claiming that they have never stopped saying the opposite.29 That they should feel it necessary to defend themselves in this way might suggest that they have been presenting a transgressive aesthetic, in which the relations of priority between the binaries of depth and surface, and of essence and difference, have been inverted. They are defending themselves against charges similar to those brought against Wilde: "It is said that Wildean inversion disturbs nothing; by merely reversing the terms of the binary, inversion remains within its limiting framework: an inverted world can only be righted, not changed. Moreover, the argument might continue, Wilde's paradoxes are superficial in the pejorative sense of being inconsequential, of making no difference.";o Similar objections have been made about the moral value of Bloom's inasocl~istic inversions in "Circe.";l As transgression is not a return to primal nature, but instead a dismantling of form, it tends to be marked by multiple inversions. The individual is taught that the object of his desire is lowly, sordid and abject: if he is to make this object sacred-as the masochist is inclined to do-the subject of desire must instead emphasize his own lowliness before the object of his desire, and draw her abjection into himself. He must heal her wound of body, by taking this wound upon himself, and emphasizing his own corporeality. Freedom

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and release from oppression are afforded by subversion and irreverence. For the masochist, in resexualization the predominant conception of the highlaw-is viewed with irreverence, while the predominant conception of the lowly-the castrated body-is viewed with reverence. For the sadist, in resexualization irreverence is directed to the castrated body, and reverence to the law: she is abject, and he is pure; he is purified by her abjection. Joyce sets up a number of antithetical pairs in his work, and draws out the tension between them. In his masochistic subversion, he shows how these opposites may blur into one another, and how their hierarchical relations may be inverted. This reversal is most clear in the switch from Stephen to Bloom as the central character of Joyce's fiction. Stephen's protracted Apollonian flight, his refusal to fall into grotesque liquid, is remedied in Bloom's transgressive reversal of this construct. Imagery of liquid and slime are central to Joyce's presentations of the sexual and the abject. In Portmit, Stephen is preoccupied with his reactions to liquid and slime, and in "Proteus" this preoccupation has become paralysing to him. Liquid represents for Stephen death, claustrophobia, and a loss of personal autonomy resulting from the sexual urges, and from sympathy, pity and love. His attitudes toward liquid force him into a misanthropic posture, and his perception of liquid mirrors and upholds his desexualization. In "Telemachus," Buck imposes a classical perspective of the grotesque body as abject, when he says to Stephen: Isn't the sea what Xlgy calls it. "Our great sweet mother. The snotgreen sea [ . . . ] The bard's noserag! A new colour for our Irish poets: snotgreen. You can almost taste it, can't you?(U., p. 3)

This excremental imagery recalls for Stephen the green sluggish bile that accompanied his mother's demise, relating excrement and liquid to decay and death: The ring of bay and skyline held a dull green mass of liquid. A bowl of white China had stood beside her deathbed holding the green sluggish bile which she had torn up from her rotting liver by fits of loud groaning vomiting. Buck Mulligan wiped again his razorblade. (U., p. 4)

When Bloom walks through Hades, he also relates slime to decomposition and death: I daresay the soil would be quite fat with corpsemanure, bones, flesh, nails. . . T~irninggreen and pink and decomposing [ . . . . ] Then a kind of a tallowy kind of a cheesy. They begin to get black, black treacle oozing out of them. (U., p. 137)

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Imagistic analogies are drawn between the cemetery as Bloom sees it, and the beach on which Stephen walks in "Proteus." In "Hades," Bloom thinks: Air of the place maybe.. . Must be an infernal lot of bad gas round the place [ . . . . ] broken heart. A pump after all, pumping thousands of gallons of blood every day. One fine day it gets bunged up: and there you are. Lots of them lying around here: lungs, hearts, livers. Old rusty pumps: damn the thing else. (U., pp. 130, 133)

Bloom's description of the cemetery as a place of broken down, forgotten or discarded things is similar to Stephen's perception of the seashore in "Proteus." Hades is scattered with broken hearts and misread memorials, while the strand is strewn with old bottles and broken hoops. Like the cemetery, the seashore breathes up a gas of corruption: Unwholesome sandflats waited to suck his treading soles, breathing upward sewage breath. A porterbottle stood up, sogged to its waist in the caltey sand dough [ . . . . ] Broken hoops on the shore; at the land a maze of dark cunning nets [ . . . . ] Ringsend: wigwams of brown steersmen and master mariners. Human shells. (U., p. 50)

Tatters, dogsbody and Proteus, the deity of this strand, stand in opposition to the desexualized birdgirl. The birdgirl represents bodily existence at its furthest remove from Proteus. While Proteus represents time, body and change, she represents timelessness, soul and changelessness. She, like Daedalus, has wings to rise above the bitter waters. The birdgirl and Proteus are, however, synthesized in Gerty. The seaweed that clings to the birdgirl's leg becomes the lameness of Gerty, who has been partly pulled down into slime. Where Stephen can find no way of evading the paralysing pull of the beach, which sucks at his treading soles, in the cemetery Bloom thinks: "Feel live warm beings near you. Let them sleep in their maggoty beds. They are not going to get me this innings. Warm beds: warm, fullblooded life" (U., p. 146). Stephen can not find a source of strength similar to Bloom's, because his perception of life and the bodily functions as abject is so predominant as to be almost exclusive. Stephen has considered the bodily functions as abject since a young age. When he visits the cows, early in Portrait, disillusionment and disgust are drawn through images of slime. Aubrey and Stephen had a common lnilltlnan and often they drove out in the milltvan to Carricltlnines where the cows were at grass: and the first sight of the filthy cowyard at Stradbroolt with its foul green puddles and clots of liquid dung and steaming brantroughs sickened Stephen's heart. The cattle which had seemed so beautiful in the country on sunny days revolted him and he could not even look at the milk they yielded. (P., p. 65)

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After the hell sermons, Stephen is tormented by a perception of his bodily functions, the opening of his orifices to the external, as dragging him into abjection, and smearing him with slime. He ate his dinner with surly appetite and, when the meal was over and the greasestrewn plates lay abandoned on the table, he rose and went to the window, clewing the thick scum from this mouth with his tongue and licking it from his lips. So he had sunk to the state of a beast that licks his chaps after meat. (P., p. 115)

Imagery of liquid and slime also represent a sensation of claustrophobia in Joyce. When Stephen is thrown into the slimy ditch, it is his co-occupation of this ditch with a rat, and the mortality of the rat, that particularly revolt him: the way a rat felt slimy and damp and cold. Every rat had two eyes to look out of [ . . . . ] When they were dead they lay on their sides. Their coats dried then. They were only dead things. (P., p. 22)

Later, Stephen withdraws from the sight of his friends swimming, because of a perception of both liquid and the bodies of other men as abject: He recognized their speech collectively before he distinguished their faces. The mere sight of that medley of wet nakedness chilled him to the bone. [ . . . ] H o w characterless they looked [ . . . . ] Perhaps they had taken refuge in number and noise from the secret dread in their souls. But he, apart from them and in silence, remembered in d a t dread he stood of the mystery of his own body. (P., p. 172)

He is disgusted by the body that he has in common with the rat and these other men. It is a lurid truth which he tries to keep hidden from himself, although he cannot help but brood on it. Stephen considers himself and others as immersed in a liquid that is human existence: "my will; his will that fronts me; seas between" (U., p. 279). He dreads losing his freedom in this liquid, being dragged down by another. When he asks himself would he try to save a drowning man, he recalls washing in the basin at Clongowes, and thinks: "Can't see: who's behind me? Out quickly, quickly!" (U., p. 57) Water makes him feel defenseless, its democratic nature submerges the walls between people, leaving all indistinguishable in blind orgy, like the damned pressed together in hell. The hell sermons, and the death of his mother, consolidate Stephen's desexualization, forcing him to perceive the body as wounded, and physicality as corruption: Imagine some foul and putrid corpse that has lain rotting and decomposing in the grave, a jellylike mass of liquid corruption. And then imagine this sickening stench multiplied a millionfold and a millionfold again from the

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millions upon millions of fetid carcasses massed together in the reelzing darlzness, a huge and rotting human fungus.(P., p. 111) The damned howl and scream at one another, their torture and rage intensified by the presence of beings tortured and raging lilze thelnselves [ . . . . ] In olden times it was the custom to punish the parricide [ . . . ] by [ . . . ] casting him into the depths of the sea in a sack in which were placed a cock, a monkey and a serpent.(P., p. 113)

In "Proteus," when Stephen asks himself whether he would attempt to save a drowning man, he is stricken by a fear that he would be dragged down as well. When he thinks "I could not save her" (U., p. 5 7 , shifting suddenly from the drowning man to his mother, we see that he has come to perceive life as a cruel orgy of panic stricken people who are selfish in their dying: it is not only the violence of a struggling stranger that he would avoid, but also the clutching, teary love of his drowning mother. In saying "I want his life to still be his, mine to still be mine" (U., p. 38), he denies malice, but resists sacrificing his individuality to the sordid sea of pain that is community. Dilly's desperation elicits a similar response in Stephen; he feels sympathy for her, but will not allow this sympathy to drag down and annihilate his autonomy. As well as death, body and claustrophobia, liquid in Joyce represents sympathy and love. She is drowning. Agenite. Save her. Xgenbite. All against us. She will drown me with her, eyes and haic Lank coils of seaweed hair around me, my heart, my soul. Salt green death. We Xgenbite of inwit. Inwit's agenbite. Misery! Misery! (U., p. 313)

It is this fear of accepting the pain of a dying other in loving her that is the most powerful desexualizing force faced by Stephen. Liquid imagery is also used to portray the forces that would usurp Stephen's freedom from within: the sexual urges. The desexualization operates by including Stephen's sexual desire in the constellation represented by liquid and slime. Stephen's confession of his submission to bodily lust, is drawn with an image that suggests masturbation and ejaculation: his sins triclzled from his lips, one by one, triclzled in shameful drops from his soul festering and oozing lilze a sore, a squalid stream of vice. The last sins oozed forth, squalid, filthy. (P., p. 148)

Here, his soul festers in the way that bodies do, it becomes like a body, because it has too often acquiesced to the will of the body. Liquid imagery suggests a separation of body and soul, or self. After acquiescence to the

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desexualization, the movement of the body is perceived to be following a will that is distinct from that of the self. Stephen's sense of alienation from his penis is typical of repression: he says of his desire: "it is not mine, it comes from someone else; a devil or a woman." The serpent, the most subtle beast of the field [ . . . ] who made it to be like that, a bestial part of the body able to understand bestially and desire bestially? Was that then he or an inhuman thing moved by a lower soul than his soul? His soul sickened at the thought of a torpid snaky life feeding itself out of the tender marrow of his life and fattening upon the slime of lust.(P., p. 143)

In relation to lust, however, Stephen's loathing of liquid is ambiguous. In Portmit, Stephen toys with the sensation of building tension toward release, letting symbolic water creep toward his feet, and then chasing it away, and so suffering a pain mixed with the promise of pleasure as sexual tension subsides, unreleased and so reinforced (P., p. 136). Stephen is here learning to take tension as delight, by controlling his own rhythm, and forestalling end pleasure, so that he may revel in a self-made rhythm without release. This ritual is a foreshadowing of the masochist's delay of end pleasure. End pleasure is delayed in order to lengthen the duration of excitement, more than to increase the intensity of the postponed release, or the depth of the following rest. Stephen is only half-heartedly resisting the transgression of emission from religious scruples. He is subverting the tools of authority, to use them as toys for stoking and prolonging his desire. As when he recognizes that he enjoys certain horrible smells, he is experimenting with the germinal delights of masochism. Coinciding with Joyce's use of liquid imagery, and also opposed to his conception of flight, is his conception of falling. In Joyce, the motif of the fall conveys the inverted nature of eroticism, in which the resexualization retains the traits of its desexualization. The first fall is the fall from unity and continuity of self and of body, and is brought about by the initial denial, which initiates the creation of the superego and the ideal ego: it is the result of the desexualizing identification, and it coincides with the renunciation or loss of an immanent object of desire. After the initial fall, the indifferentiation which constituted his omnipotence before this fall is perceived as abjection, as the loss or drowning of the volition and the self in a formless background. To fall is now to be drawn toward this abjection. It is from fear of this that Stephen flies. At the start of Portrait Stephen is triangulated when he is removed from the company of his mother. The desiring self, which has until now considered itself to be continuous with the object of its desire, is forced to recognize itself as discontinuous and lacking. Once this initial fall has transpired, and an awareness of prohibition has been implanted in the child as the superego, subsequent falls are mirror images of this initial fall, in that now to fall

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is to move from discontinuity back toward continuity, from isolation back toward unity, from identity back toward indifferentiation, and from orthodoxy back to perversity. The fall is now an always ambiguous attempt to return to the archaic and indifferentiated state from which he originally fell. When he is desexualized, the mother from whom he has fallen is represented by imagery of liquid, as is his desire. It is this liquid-the symbolic mother, body, continuity, immanence and death-into which he both dreads and longs to fall. A tension between extremes holds him triangulated, suspended between desire to approach the mother, or immanence and, at the other angle, pulling into place the triangle, the father repulsing this approach; the soul's disgust with the wounded body. Despite, or perhaps because of this inversion, the initial fall is-as Freud says of the initial demolition of Oedipal designs-echoed in, and in some way definitive of all subsequent f a l l s 3 The subject continues to be triangulated by the tension between the lure of the object of his desire, and the authority or dread which prohibits his approach to the object of his desire. As he learns, adding each subsequent re-enforcement of this triangulation to its predecessor, he builds a complex, which becomes nothing other than his identity: a suspension, a trigonometric equation, rather than a flow. A history is imposed upon him: he is moulded into this shape, and even if flows begin to ooze, and traverse the angles, or if he becomes obtuse or acute, he must continue to inhabit this equation of original sin. In the flight which Stephen learns at the end of Portmit, he is escaping the abject body, the wounded mother, and so acquiescing to the desexualizing authorities which he had intended to evade. It is not only he who seems to fly, but also the object of his desire. In flying he is reiterating the movement of desexualization. In order to learn to fall, to return to sympathy, love and body, he must take Bloom as his example. This is suggested when Stephen connects Bloom to a figure in his dream who pressed a melon to his face as a rite of entry to a brothel (U., pp. 58-9, 647). From what we know of Stephen, who fears closing his eyes in the sink, this is a grotesque ritual. This melon also suggests the "melonous spheres" (U., p. 867) of Molly's bottom, the bodily lowliness and voluptuous physicality to which Bloom returns; the wounded body which he glorifies. The establishment of the superego inhibits the subject's desire by, at one and the same time, designating his object of desire, and forbidding him access to this object. It inflicts a wound which seems to separate body and soul, and compels the subject to either limit and negate his desire, or replace his external object of desire with a transcendent image of desire. In flying, the subject of desire attempts to detach or distance himself from the abject body, becoming either externally directed and involved, or inwardly engrossed and solitary. A sense of isolation, however, makes him long to return to intimacy with the body, but this impulse is countered by a dread of returning to the body. He fears fouling himself with the corruption of the body, and losing the self in indifferentiation. The schizophrenic process of escape has become a

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continuation in the void. Stephen stranded aloft, lost in a protracted deterritorialization, with nowhere to reterritorialize, thinks "I am lonely here [ . . . ] Touch, touch me" (U., p. 61). He longs to fall from the solitude and sterility of flight. The net that Stephen has flown above in escaping, however, remains between him this return, prolonging his disconnected Daedalian flight. In falling, there is always a danger of being stopped short of return, of relinquishing self-mastery, and being molarized, caught in those nets that he has tried so hard to elude; the nets that make Chandlers, Bob Dolans, and Farringtons. The ideal ego is always only a compensatory libidinal cathexis. Until the ego rediscovers some means of reifying this image, it is disconnected and alone. When the focus of desire is separated from immanence, and withdrawn into a transcendent world, then the promised land, an immanent bodily paradise, dries, turns to dust, becomes a barren land that can bear no more children. This is the source of the sense of alienation, and exile from the source, the female, that is focused for both Stephen and Bloom by the matin cloud, that is at first no bigger than a woman's hand, and which, in "Circe," becomes a castrating crab claw (U., p. 682). In Joyce, there is a fluctuation between extremes: Bloom's love of the bodily, and his longing for the relinquisl~mentof self mastery, are as much an aspect of Joyce as Stephen's loathing of body, and his desire to be free of all bonds, to fly above the watery excretions of dung-clotted bodily existence. As well as the dualities of liquid and flight, there are other dualities in Joyce which contribute to this complex. A distinction that Jonathan Swift draws between the diminutive Lilliputians and the gigantic Brobdignagians, in Gulliver's Travels, is significant to a study of Joyce's masochism. The distinction to which I refer constitutes an aesthetics of proximity and distance: the Brobdignagians represent the grotesque, abject body, and the Lilliputians represent the classical, idealized body. When Gulliver watches a Brobdignagian nurse suckle a child, he thinks: I must confess n o object ever disgusted me so much as the sight of her monstrous breast, which I cannot tell d a t to compare with, so as to give the curious reader an idea of its bulk, shape, and colouc It stood prominent six foot, and could not be less than sixteen in circumference. The nipple was about half the bigness of my head, and the hue both of that and the dug so varified with spots, pimples and freclzles, that nothing could appear more nauseous [ . . . . ] This made me reflect upon the fair slzins of our English ladies, who appear so beautiful to us, only because they are of our own size, and their defects not to be seen, but through a magnifying glass, where we find by experiment, that the smoothest and whitest slzins loolz rough and coarse, and ill coloured. I remember when I was at Lilliput, the complexions of those diminutive people appeared to me to be the fairest in the world [ . . .

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It is of significance that Gulliver considers the Lilliputians to be vicious and cruel, and the Brobdignagians to be (in general) gentle and kind, and that Swift here draws the grotesque through a maternal image. The wounding, or fracturing of the self, into the abject, wounded body and the exiled, disconnected soul, accounts for the binocular perspective in Joyce's fiction. In order to appease the superego, which has chased the subject from body into soul in the desexualization, the desired object is drawn as distant, as Lilliputian. When approached, the desired object will become unattractive, as the superego forces a Brobdignagian perspective of proximity, which focuses upon the physicality of the object, its tendency to cling to the subject, and draw the subject down into indifferentiation and abjection. This is the wound he was taught to see in the movement of desexualization. It is from fear of the sight of this wound that the ideal ego is desexualized, and is drawn as non-bodily, as Lilliputian. The bodily disgust forced by the superego causes her to be drawn in opposition to body, as the inverse of abjection; as purity, invulnerability and self-subsistence. She is in this way like the fetish, representative of the female body, and of the denial or disavowal of the female body, at one and the same time. He turns to her to elude the claustrophobic horror and disgust of bodily proximity, so that he may desire without being thrown into the sea "in a sack in which are placed a cock, a monkey and a serpent" (P., p. 87). The imposition of the Brobdignagian perspective is one of the most insidious ways in which the king "in here" perpetuates his power and his prohibitions. Joyce often portrays the binarism of the sublimative and repressive choices through the use of oppositional characters, or ''Shein and Shaun brothers": Cotter opposes Flynn, Mahoney opposes the narrator of "An Encounter," Michael Furey and Bartell D'Arcy oppose Gabriel, Robert opposes Richard, Mulligan opposes Stephen, Virag opposes Henry Flower, Boylan opposes Bloom, and the Ondt opposes the Gracehopper. Taken together, in these binarisms Joyce is drawing two modes of sexuality. Although in "Circe" Virag seems to be aligned with Bloom, he is primarily present as a paternal figure, and so as a spokesman for the repressive perspective. Virag is a scientist, who views women as objects of mechanical gratification, and who sees love as uncontrollable and mechanical bestiality. For Virag, the object of desire is all body. VIRXG: Well then, permit me to draw your attention to item number three. There is plenty of her visible t o the naked eye. Observe the mass of oxygenated vegetable matter on her sltull. What 110, she bumps! The ugly ducltling of the part!; longcasted and deep in keel. (U., p. 629) Insects of the day spend their brief existence in reiterated coition, lured by the smell of the inferiorly pulchritudino~isfemale possessing extendified pudendal verve in dorsal region. (U., p. 631)

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Virag views the object of desire as Brobdignagian; he magnifies her. His desire is coarse, brutal and pornographic: the female body is considered as immanent, pliable and appropriable. His comments are as matter of fact as Buck's remark that 'all redheaded women buck like goats.' (U., p. 26) While for Virag sex is to be understood mechanically, for the "narcississy" Henry Flower, sex is to be understood aesthetically. Henry the fetishist idealizes and worships a lifeless image, a birdgirl. His narcissism draws her as refined, subtle and delicate, but at the same time as distant, cold and cruel, in that she has left him alone with his hopeless longing. For Henry, the object of desire has no body, and his means of loving is a worship of her absence. This corresponds to the Lilliputian perspective on the object of desire. H e w ) ' Flower comes forward t o left front centre. H e wears a dark mantle and droopzng plwned sombrero. H e carrzes a szlverstrznged znlazd dzllczrner and a longstemmed b a m b o o Jacob's pzpe, zts claj, b o w l fashzoned as a female head [ . . . . ] H e has the rornantzc Savzozlr's face wzth flowzng locks, thzn beard and moustache. Hzs spzndlelegs and spawow feet are those of the tenor Marzo [ . . . .I. H e settles d o w n on hzs goffered ruffs and ~nozstens hzs lzps wzth a passage of hzs amorous tongue [ . . . . ] Caresszng on hzs breast a severed female h e a d rnurmers) Thme heart, mine love. (U., pp. 634,637)

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CHAPTER TWO

Daedalus Desexualized The Determinants of Masochism

Oedipus is first the idea of an adult paranoiac, before it is the childhood feeling of a neurotic [ . . . . ] an idea projected by the father, before it is an inner feeling experienced by the son.'

CULTURAL SPECIFICITY AND THE DEVELOPMENTAL APPROACH Although Joyce is the focus of this study, masocl~ismin general should not be regarded as a culturally specific phenomenon: the superficial manifestations may be drawn from a specific culture, but the underlying ritual is pancultural. From this it follows that masochistic tendencies may be more common during particular cultural and ideological moments, but not restricted to these moments. In Psycopathia Sexualis, ICrafft-Ebing, drawing from nineteenth-century German examples, considers sexual masochism to be a surprisingly widespread. In 1996 two American psychoanalysts, Chris and Kerry Novick, found that only 6 of 111 of their indexed cases had beating fantasies, which they considered to be the essence of masochism.2 It is, however, impossible to say whether Krafft-Ebing would have considered 6 of 111 to constitute a surprisingly common figure. This disparity suggests that the cross-cultural presence of masochism is a matter of degree, rather than of absence or presence. Without wishing to oversimplify Gibson's position, there seems to be in it somewhere the position that the banning of institutionalized beating might lead to the eradication of this mania. Of course, the recentness of this banning does not allow us to say yet whether this might be the case. Although it is now against the law to beat children at home or in school, children may still gain access to pornography produced by adults who were beaten as children. Most commentators have noted that such literature can produce this mania as easily as can the actual experience of beating. Gibson's argument suggests that we will face a diminishing vicious circle, and in a few generations masochism will be a rare phenomenon. This, however, seems unlikely. Gibson's model is based upon a limited range of determinants. Beating is only one of these. Bullying and a tendency to idealize women also contribute to the masochistic psyche.

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The Novicks remark that "despite putative shifts in the types of pathology presented to the modern psychoanalysts, our caseloads are in fact very similar to Freud's, since he too grappled with masochistic phenomena of varying intensity and pervasiveness in his daily ~ o r k . Althougl~ "~ the props may be culturally specific, the essence of masochism cuts across cultures. In American pornography, table tennis bats and paddles are the preferred instruments of castigation, while in Britain and Ireland the preferred instruments tend to be canes or straps. The banning of beating is unlikely to eradicate masochism, because masochism defends against other threats than corporal punishment, such as bullying, mockery, unrequited love and alienation. Masochism is at least in part a means of averting threat, or seducing the aggressor. It is likely that we are witnessing the evolutionary origins of masochism in the rump-presentation posture that dogs, cats and monkeys often adopt when attacked by a more powerful aggressor. As this analysis of masochism in Joyce's writing begins by tracing the development of the Joycean object of desire, it is useful here to briefly outline some of the values and limitations of the psychoanalytic developmental approach. Although most of what Freud said about masochism in his 1905 essay on sexual aberrations might be found in Krafft-Ebing, at the end of that essay he applied the developmental point of view, and so diverged from the positions of his predecessors. Psychoanalysis has always been preoccupied with memory, and while this makes it useful for an analysis of a partly autobiographical work such as Portmit, which traces the development of a consciousness, its application also introduces considerable difficulties. When analyzing figures in a literary work, we are faced with gaps in the trajection of the development. Although Freud reconstructed the vicissitudes of the beating fantasy in boys and girls from adult analytic material, his findings were at least partly verifiable, because he had the living subject before him. In the analysis of literature, however, we have only the text, and the text's problematic relation to the biographical material. Freud's position vis-a-vis the patient, however, is not necessarily more insightful than that held by the reader vis-2-vis the text. After all, the unconscious, like the literary work, operates at an implicit, figurative level, rather than an explicit literal one. Nonetheless, the degree of interpolation that the reader must employ tends to be greater than that of the psychologist. This is because the writer's omissions are final, whereas the living patient's omissions may still be teased out over time. In Joyce, there is no account of the earliest months of Stephen's life, because of the formal and thematic demands of the work. Many commentators consider masochism to be determined by disturbances in the earliest months of the subject's life. The Novicks, for instance, found that mutual lack of pleasure on the part of both mother and baby was universal in the fixed beating fantasy, and it recurred in all their subsequent cases of masochistic pathology where social history data was available." There is no evidence of such mutual displeasure in Joyce's writing or in the biographical material.

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Although the Novicks consider the initial determinants of masocl~ismto be preoedipal, they very wisely avoid a "big-bang" theory, stressing instead that adult masochism is dependent upon a series of consolidations. The experience in childhood may have little impact until the memory becomes linked to later sexual impulses. They stress the layering throughout the development of the masochist's relation to pain, arguing that the determinants should be sought "in a series of transformations that both alter and retain earlier determinants."5 These transformations imply further difficulties for an analysis of masochism that is focused on literary texts. Freud describes these transformations as "rearrangements" and "retranscriptions," in which the subject reformulates his life story. It is clear that Joyce does this in Portrait, and more radically in Ulysses. In analyzing literary masochism we have only these experiential reformulations, especially when we consider that much of the biographical material is also subject to rearrangements and retranscriptions. This apparent difficulty, however, is by no means insurmountable. Although we have no access to the actual events, of which the fictions are retranscriptions, in his writings Joyce has done much of the work for us, taking the first sincere steps toward interpreting his own sexual mania. Another issue in psychoanalytic interpretations of masochism concerns whether masochism is primarily a means of drive gratification, a maladaptive mode of coping with traumatic events or an adaptation to a hostile environment. It is the contention of this paper that all of these factors may contribute to sexual masochism. In Joyce masochism may be interpreted as a supportable ethical, aesthetic and political position.

An analysis of the Joycean object of desire should help to determine the nature of the triangular interplay between the desiring subject, the object and the prohibitive forces. Rather than falling into line on either side of the polarized debate concerning whether a normative object of desire exists initially, or is forged by the prohibition, it will be argued that the truth is somewhere in the middle. This is to say that the development of the Joycean object of desire demonstrates the way in which the prohibition distorts the desire so as to produce not an object of desire, but a condition or an equation of desire, in which the normative object is merely a factor. In Portrait, Stephen's first object of desire is the warmth, rest, and peace facilitated by the domestic scene. This is perhaps not so much an object of desire, as a condition of desire. The nurturing and affection of the mother to the child makes the home a place of comfort, and the darkness that he associates with the home allows the objects of his desire to proliferate. This is a world before responsibility, in which desire and attainment are never far apart. The infant experiences a sense of omnipotence because of this lack of duty, and the certainty of gratification. For the Novicks the initial determi-

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nant of masochism is a premature cessation of this condition of infantile omnipotence. When the economy of infantile omnipotence is disturbed before the infant is prepared to renounce this omnipotence, the child utilizes magical modes of thinking in an attempt to retain this condition of omnipotence. In their opinion, this supplementary magical omnipotence is a constant in all cases of masochism. Although Stephen's removal from the home occurs later than would the child's renunciation of infantile omnipotence, the results of these events are similar. It could be argued that in the first disjointed pages of Portrait we are seeing a parable or retranscription of the child's loss of infantile omnipotence. Even if this is not the case, an objection to the psychoanalytic method might be that it situates psychic developments within restrictively narrow historical phases. The same emotional dynamic exists in Stephen's removal from the home to the chastising priests, as in the loss of infantile omnipotence: school brings responsibility. The peace of the home will not be found again in Joyce, and there will be no return, no contentment, until the black dot signifying Bloom's sleep in "Ithaca." Being expelled from the domestic scene initiates longing in Stephen. His new environment is not comforting, but intimidating, and he must console himself with memories and images of his mother and home. When he conjures images of home, he is establishing the ideal ego, recreating what was lost. He becomes homesick, and writes to his mother: "Dear Mother [ . . . . ] Please come and take me home [ . . . . ] Your fond son" (Port., p. 33). This plea is at the root of all of Joyce's writing: it resonates throughout the stories in Dubliners; it is manifest in the eponymous characters of his play; it informs the Odyssean parallels of Ulysses; and it is apparent in the return of the final pages of Finnegans W a k e . In the infirmary, as Stephen's pleas go unanswered, he recognizes his discontinuous self, and begins to understand the sorrow and the horror of separate existences. He sees that, despite his calling out, he is on his own, and he experiences an intimation of mortality, as he dreams of his own death, and imagines that he will be loved again only when he is dead (Port., p. 33). This movement is typical of magical thinking: my pain, or my death, will somehow pay for, or bring back the love that has been taken away. The Novicks describe masochistic patients who conceive of their attempted suicides exclusively in terms of the reactions of sorrow, apology and love that their deaths will produce in the people whose love they consider to be lacking.6 Coinciding with Stephen's expulsion from the domestic scene is the genesis of dichotomies. Once he establishes an opposition of attitudes toward the home and the school, a number of corresponding oppositions fall into line. The serenity of the singular female guardian is contrasted to the rowdiness of the mob of males. The comfort and affection that the mother bestows upon him are opposed to the violence and bullying to which his peers and teachers subject him. Images of darkness, warmth and subterranean fire are abstracted from memories of time spent with his mother by the fire, and

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opposed to the white, the damp, and the cold of the cheerless corridors and common rooms at Clongowes. In an early fetishistic reversal, his mother's glittering, perfumed slippers are contrasted to the bog-colored water that smells of urine in the Clongowes lavatory. Learning as adventure and exploration, as with Dante's geography, is opposed to learning as conflict and competition, as in the awarding of prizes, and the red and white roses at Clongowes. These roses are opposed to Stephen's exotic "green wothe" (Port., p. 19), as the real to the imaginary: imaginative parameters are restricted by experiential growth. At Clongowes, Stephen discovers that play is opposed to pragmatism and law, and that adventure and the exotic are forbidden by the institution. He is pandied by Dolan because he is suspected of playing, of neglecting his work, and of being a "Lazy little schemer" (Port., p. 55). The laws of the world of work erect boundaries within which Stephen is expected to stay, and so he becomes fascinated by, and drawn towards that which is beyond bounds: the para-institutional. In this second stage of his development, the carefree world afforded by infantile omnipotence is prohibited. Also, the self that seeks pleasure, the inward looking, luxuriant self, is outlawed as a schemer. These laws do not define desire, but cut off avenues of approach to boundless desire: law does not define desire, but desire must be approached beyond law. The free flow of play is desired, as is the comfort of home. Rest being the primary manifestation, play constitutes a secondary manifestation of the desired object. Play entails a disavowal of the real, an introversion, and becomings. Stephen must first be taught that there is a boundary to be transgressed, and a forbidden world beyond these boundaries. Although this world is really no more than what is termed his laziness, his desire to sit and recall a condition that is lost to him, he considers this world exotic, because of his dissatisfaction with the world to which he is restricted. The transgression becomes a thrill in itself, a way of playing, or rather, play is the basis of transgression. The desired object is no longer tangible, but an unknown, existing beyond the bounds which confine him, and so the desired object becomes metamorphic, a subjective rather than an objective phenomenon. It is beyond the bounds of language, beyond bounds of discourse and meaning, because it is boundless and formless.7 In this secondary manifestation of the desired object, there is the genesis of eroticism. In this foretaste of resexualization, the desired object wears traits of the desexualization, in that it is forbidden, and always elsewhere. Desire then is a process with no goal, flowing blindly. In "The Sisters," although Flynn is not the object of the boy's desire, he seems, to the boy, to hold a key that would allow access to this object, whatever it might be. He leads the boy toward contemplation of the system of taboo, from a sceptical, playful and eroticizing perspective. When the boy goes to bed, he is frightened and disgusted when he thinks of the priest. This

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fear disappears, or rather, he sinks through it, rather than repressing its source, and begins to dream of Persia (Dub., pp. 4, 6 ) . In Joyce, from Mangan's sister to Molly, oriental images are consistently associated with the desirable other. A conception of the sexual other as foreign, exotic and oriental, is also central to Deleuze and Guattari's anti-oedipal position: choices in matters of love are a t the crossroads of "vibrations," which is to say that they express connections, disjunctions, and conj~inctionsof flows that cross through a society, entering and leaving it, linlting up with other societies, ancient or contemporary, remote or vanished, dead or yet to be born. Africas and Orients, always following the underground thread of the libido.8 With the introduction of the oriental motif, "The Sisters," like "An Encounter," and "Araby," becomes the story of a quest. When Cotter comments: "I wouldn't like any child of mine spending too much time with a man like that" (Dub., p. 4), his discouragement, and his threat of prohibition, serve to heighten the boy's perception of worlds such as that of the priest's as mysterious and forbidden, and therefore enticing. This is a nexus at which truth, the secret, the self and sexuality are conjoined. The priest, about whom so much is unmentionable, begins to represent for the boy an alternative world, a world foreign to the real world, which he is learning, with Cotter's help, to perceive as narrow, stupid and prohibitive. For the boy, the priest's quota of truth and self are increased in a direct relation to his association with secrecy and mystery. The priest, he suspects, knows of some strange light-or rather, some mysterious darkness-which compliant, unquestioning people such as the sisters and Cotter can never comprehend. The boy begins to suspect that these people will not speak of Flynn for fear that he will search in Flynn's direction, and find something there which fascinates him, and leads him to abandon their tedious and fearful tribe. In "An Encounter" also, the narrator finds his quest for the exotic and the foreign to place him in opposition to the sanctioned world. This time, it is the world of work that opposes him, and he must break the rules, and risk chastisement, to take a day off school so that he may seek adventure, and traces of the oriental. At the quays he scans the sailors for the green eyes he believes they should have (Dub., p. 13), but he finds no green eyes until he meets the pervert in the waste ground. The pervert is the adventure he has been seeking unknowingly. Altl~ougl~, like Flynn, the pervert is not the object of desire, he seems to the boy to possess a secret with which he is fascinated. As with Flynn, the narrator is simultaneously repelled by and drawn to the pervert, as an apprentice compelled to learn this strange knowledge. The pervert has transgressed sanctioned bounds, and discovered some engrossing phantom of desire. In "Araby," the boy moves beyond meeting travelers who point out the way to mystery, and embarks upon a quest himself. He sets Mangan's sister

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up over his vague longing, and endeavors to win a way toward her. He does not suspect that this longing is not to be appeased by his possession of her, that it is desire in itself, an end in itself. While gazing at the two empty jugs in the empty hall, he has an intimation that this longing will not be satisfied by the acquisition of a commodity: there is no way of winning, and nothing to be won. The retreat for which Mangan's sister must miss the bazaar, combined with the religious tone of his longing for her, endows the taboo object, the girl, with an aura of sacredness. He behaves as a knight-errant for an idealized woman. As in the two previous stories, that which interests the narrator becomes coincident with images of the orient. Also, as in the two previous stories, this interest stands opposed to the profane world of work. As the narrator becomes more and more deeply engrossed by his desire, moving around it as though magnetized, like the pervert to his dream of discipline, the quality of his schoolwork declines (Dub., p. 19). Gallagher's travels, in "A Little Cloud," also link the foreign to the forbidden. Chandler asks Gallagher "is it true that Paris is so . . . immoral as they say" (Dub., p. 50), and then listens fascinated to tales of the exotic and the forbidden. Afterwards, Chandler suffers from an awareness of the tedium of his own sanctioned, tethered and responsible life. His desire is confined, forced into the shape of his wife. He longs to escape, to free his desire from these constraints, but he is quickly caught by "those nets," and his emotional breakthrough becomes a breakdown. Like Eveline, he cannot escape. The nets of responsibility seize his lines of flight into the foreign. His whole life, like his furniture, is on the 11.p. The foreign is similarly linked to the desired object in Portrait, when Stephen steps toward the "white arms of roads" (Port., p. 218) as though toward a lover. All of these examples support Bataille's contention that the sexual is opposed to work and responsibility, and that the erotic is erotic because it transgresses boundaries. Desire is polymorphous, but law disguises this, and makes it strive against its nature to be triangular and monogamous. Desire is constrained by its unnatural subsumption into the category of love. To escape the father's law, the subject must enter exile, and risk indifferentiation: "We are told that Oedipus is indispensable, that it is the source of every possible differentiation, and that it saves us from the terrible nondifferentiated mother. But this terrible mother, the sphinx, is herself part of Oedipus; her nondifferentiation is merely the reverse of the exclusive differentiations created by Oedipus."9 Joyce's sphinx is called Proteus. To escape the tyranny of exclusive differentiations, the subject must learn to flow, and escape identity. Eileen in Portrait is similar to Mangan's sister as a pre-phallic object of desire. As with Mangan's sister, Stephen has as yet no idea of what sort of consummation he seeks with Eileen, although he feels a vague, inexplicable attraction, which leads him to declare that they intend to be married.

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Stephen soon learns, however, that Eileen is taboo. He gathers this from the unexpectedly harsh reaction of Dante, who threatens him with blinding and, by implication, castration. It is not entirely clear what Stephen is intended to apologize for, or to whom he is intended to apologize. Dante's threat seems to have something to do with the idea of Stephen and Eileen being married. Its particular virulence however, is typically ascribed to the fact that Eileen is a Protestant. That Eileen is a Protestant makes her seem somewhat foreign to Stephen, which would be consistent with the objects of desire discussed so f a t That she is a Protestant would also make her seem somehow immoral, corrupt and corrupting. That this is the case is clear from references to Protestants made during the Christmas dinner (Port., p. 42). We may also recall that Nora told Joyce of an occasion on which she was beaten for dating a Protestant boy (J.J., p. 159). It is easy, however, to overemphasize the sectarian element of this event, and overlook what is really going on here. It is likely that Stephen is hiding under the table because Dante has hit him, or chased after him with the intention of hitting him. The threat of eagles tearing out Stephen's eyes is not the language of the nursery, but of the hell sermons. The tone of this threat, however, is as much Victorian as it is Catholic in its depiction of vengeance extracted by a god of retribution. The image recalls Oedipus, and Prometheus, who was tormented by an eagle for giving men a knowledge that would make them independent of the gods. As with Flynn's sin in "The Sisters," Stephen's transgression is hidden in ellipses, or occluded from the discourse, tainting the event with mystery. The narrative is fragmented here, and although the sentences are linearly conjoined, there is no causal relation between Dante's rebuke and Stephen's belief that he and Eileen will be married. The incident in which Eileen puts her hand in Stephen's pocket and then runs away laughing, is recalled later, between the reference to sexual experimentation at Clongowes, and the anticipation of punisl~mentfor this. Stephen may recall Eileen at this point, not only because of her hands, but also because this memory relates to punishment and, more specifically, to punisl~mentas a rebuke for sexual play. Someone is likely to have seen the hand in the pocket, or a similar experimentation. Perhaps it was explained to Stephen that boys and girls should not do such things until they are married, and Stephen naively replied that he and she intended to be married. Perhaps for Dante this was the final straw, and Stephen ran and hid beneath the table. Whatever the case, it seems certain that Stephen is being punished for sexual play. It is also not entirely clear to whom Stephen is intended to apologize. The offense is not against Dante, although she may be asking him to apologize to God. It seems more likely, however, that he is being commanded to apologize to Eileen, for impinging on her "modesty." The intensity of this event is underlined by the fact that it occurs on the first page of the book. It is more than likely that Stephen is ashamed and crying beneath the table. If Stephen

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is intended to apologize to Eileen, this event caters very neatly to a budding masochist, who is to be pulled out from under a table, still blubbering from chastisement, and compelled to apologize to a pretty little girl to whom he is attracted. There is also an element of fetishism in Stephen's perception of Eileen. When Stephen associates Eileen's hands and hair with the images of the Virgin Mary as a "Tower of Ivory" and a "House of Gold" (Port., pp. 43, 49), we see him trying to make the tabooed object sacred. As in "An Encounter," and "Araby," the hands and the hair of the desired girl are abstracted from the whole as signifiers of the feminine. The hands and hair become fetishes in the same way as women's undergarments become fetishes for Bloom. They are less forbidden and more attainable than the girl herself, and therefore may allow a small degree of open admiration, a small measure of conciliatory consummation. For Stephen, the fetish as hair and hands represents what he does not recognize or understand, while for Bloom the fetish as feminine undergarments represents and disguises what he wishes to consider unattainable. The paradoxically compensatory and disavowing nature of the fetish suggests that it is closely related to the ideal ego, which also represents at the same time that it disguises the forbidden object of desire. The aesthetic sense of beauty and ugliness, rather than the superego's moral sense of right and wrong, are the motivating factors in the creation of the fetish. As is characteristic of the Joycean object of desire, Eileen tempts Stephen, and then withdraws. When Eileen puts her hand in Stephen's pocket and then runs away laughing, she seems more knowing than Stephen and, in this way, in control (Port., p. 49). By the time Stephen meets Emma Cleary, his genital drives have become united with the shapeless longing that has until now been associated with the objects of desire. Somewhere in the masochistic equation, there is a normative drive that is underlined by its negation. Emma, like Molly, is voluptuous (S.H., p. 51,72), and Stephen longs to take pleasure in contact with her body. Although this, he believes, is what she desires also, she is much more acquiescent than he to their society's prohibition of this union outside of marriage. He attempts to convince her to ignore this dictate, but finds that she is acquiescent to social mores, to the extent that she not only concurs with the dictates of prohibition, but also considers even the suggestioil that she might transgress to be deeply insulting and implicitly insane. As when his mother and Simon leave him at school, he feels that he has been cuckolded, that she has chosen the father's authority over him. When he considers this, he sees her as a temptress, teasing him. He believes that she is "obliged to insist on the forbearance of the male and to despise him for forbearing" (S.H., p. 73). It is not as clear in Stephen Hero as it is in Portrait, however, that Stephen is a product of his society, just as is Emma, or her more abstract form E-

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C-, and that it is not only she who impedes their bodily union. As Stephen has also internalized the prohibitions of his society, and been desexualized, his desires are erotic rather than sexual, and so it is essential to him that EC-seems to be out of bounds or forbidden. There is a sense in which in his blunt proposition to Emma-that she and he spend a night together-he is provocatively and masochistically courting rejection (S.H., p. 203). Whereas in Stephen Hero Emma is drawn as primarily bodily, in Portrait, when it becomes clear that he will achieve no consummation with her, E-C-is described as birdlike (Port., p. 188). She becomes a forerunner of the birdgirl: he draws her as Lilliputian. She and the superego conspire to compel him to consider her in this way. He desires and admires her qualities of unattainability by default, as compensation for his inability to achieve bodily contact with her. Altl~ougl~ clearly unable to achieve consummation with Emma without giving himself up in marriage, Stephen nonetheless extends and tinkers with the notion of her unattainability. When, in Portmlt, E-C-and Stephen stand together on the tram, and she seems to ask him to kiss her, but he does not, it is possible that he does not do so because a kiss would merely frustrate him, knowing that more fulfilling contact will not follow (Port., pp. 70-1). Suzette Henke suggests that he will not kiss her because he is in fact in love with an aspect of his own mind; his creative imagination, or image-making faculty.10 He is already closed in the narcissistic ego 1 ideal ego system; man and wife unto himself. Stephen desires E-C-, and the tight form of the villanelle (Port., pp. 189, 193-4), which he substitutes for the kiss, suggests a sort of self-bondage, a self-inflicted restraint. He constrains himself, to keep a powerful image of unattained desire, instead of an impotent, diminished object of desire attained. We may recognize in this an early initiation of the mechanism of masochism, in which expectant frustration is favored over disenchanting achievement. Reik argues that the masochist pre-empts punishment by engineering his own punisl~ment,thereby controlling any sudden increase or decrease in excitement, and preparing himself for the expected displeasure.ll In denying a kiss to E-C-, Stephen pre-empts frustration, in order that he will feel less helpless when it is forced upon him; in order that he will feel more in control, and less at the mercy of this displeasure. Issy, like the already mentioned Joycean objects of desire, is taboo. She is taboo to H.C.E. because she is his daughter, and to Shem and Shaun because she is their sister. John Gordon suggests that "the twinkly way [ . . . . ] winking at me in bed" (F.W., p. 148.13-4) implies that there are stars painted on the ceiling of Issy's bedroom, and that "herewithin [ . . . ] like the blue of sky" (F.W., p. 238.28-30) suggests that the walls of her bedroom are covered in blue wallpaper.12 In this way, Issy is associated with the sky, the stars and flight, and drawn as an ideal to strive toward: "Belisha beacon, beckon bright! Usherette, unmesh us!" (F.W., p. 267.12) 'Unmesh us' suggests to pull us up out of abjection and bodily squalor, as represented in Joyce by

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liquid, which sucks downwardly, and in which the mutually immersed clasp blindly at one another as they drown. Issy is like the birdgirl in this respect, but perhaps more like Gerty in others. In her we see the object of desire considered as sacred, instead of profane. She is drawn as precious and sidereal, as luring and untouchable. As well as being a virgin, in the sense that she is beyond bounds, Issy is, in a certain sense, considered a whore by H.C.E.-or rather, a predatory, active virgin-in that she is a dangerous temptress luring him toward her. Gerty is another figure of the active or cheeky virgin. In "Nausicaa," she either wants Bloom to masturbate while looking at her, or is aware that he is already doing so. After Gerty recalls the gentleman lodger in Bertha's house masturbating to images of skirtdancers, she thinks of Bloom looking at her: "he couldn't resist the sight of the wondrous revealment half offered like those skirtdancers behaving so immodest before gentlemen and he kept on looking, looking" (U., p. 477). Gerty is also a precursor of Issy in her preoccupation with mirrors. Gordon considers there to be three mirrors in Issy's room-one above the bed (F.W., p. 327.13-14), one on a dresser (F.W., p. 561.16), and a "priceless pearlogs," that may be a "scrambling of pierglass."l; These three mirrors suggest that she objectifies and offers herself as a sexual object, luring the male with signifiers of the feminine. Like a cat, Issy is sleek and beautiful, but innocently cruel. It is in many respects her cold, amoral and selfish narcissism that constitutes her desirability: "You want to be slap well slapped for that. Your delighted lips, love, be careful! Mind my duvetyne dress above all! Its golded silvy, the newest sextones with princess effect" (F.W., p. 148.6-8). Crucial to understanding Issy's place in Finnegans Wake, is the situation of her room above H.C.E.'s. John Gordon notes that: Issy's room contains a fireplace (F.W.,p. 461). It is this fireplace down wllich Issy tries to call birds on behalf of her cat 'decoying more nesters to fall down the flue' (F.W.,p. 28.09), presumably with the birdcalls re-enacted at (F.W.,p. 359.31-360.16). A nester is also a Nestor, H.C.E. in his old man incarnation, who falls for Issy every time, and to whom Issy's voice repeatedly calls from above, by virtue of one simple crucial fact: his room is directly below hers, so that their fireplaces share a common chimney. The chimney which passes from the second-story bedroom of H.C.E. and A.L.P. to Issy's room has its origin in the downstairs kitchen, location of the servants. The route wllich brings a voice from above can also carry noises from below [ . . . . ] ' 4

The chimney is the nexus of tensions between extremes. It is in his chimney that Stephen hides pornography, his "fluefoul smut" (F.W., p. 183), in Portmit. Like Molly, Issy is associated with her cat. When Issy whispers up her chimney to call down birds to feed her cat, H.C.E. believes that she is calling him. Issy, like the sirens, is tempting and dangerous, urging him to trans-

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gress. She is irrational and impulsive, like Stephen's image of E-C-as a bird, and she calls him to lose himself in her irrationality, to transgress bounds and dissolve the order of his life. The birds she calls down represent his discontinuous self, his Daedalian moments, his disconnectedness. She beckons him to return, and to die a little death in the vagina dentata of her cat. Issy's mirrors, and the interchangeability of the bird image, also suggest that she, like the birdgirl, is a manifestation of the ideal ego, a portion of the self set up as a sexual object to the self. The big blue bedroom is the space of the soul in which Daedalus the birdman loves his female image, the birdgirl, in which the artist is man and wife unto himself. There is a flowing between he as she and she as he, as we see the beloved dressed in the subjective criteria of the lover's desire. Issy exists as a fragment of H.C.E.'s mind, just as the birdgirl exists as a fragment of Stephen's. It may be posited that that the predatory or active virgin, as seen in the birdgirl and Amelia Popper, and more clearly in Gerty and Issy, is the essential other in the masochistic equation. Although she is typically absent from the inasocl~isticscene, the whole performance, the theatrics of shame and submission, is for her benefit. Molly and the prostitute are defaults for her absence. There is, however, a recurring disillusionment with, or renunciation of the active virgin, which is consolidated again and again in the indifference due to masturbation. When Stephen encounters the prostitute, he is again uncertain of what he is seeking (Port., p. 95-6). He is like a more daring Chandler, who sometimes "courted the causes of his fear [choosing] the darkest and narrowest streets [ . . . ] he walked boldly forward [ . . . ] at times the sound of low fugitive laughter made him tremble like a leaf" (Dub., p. 47). By the time of Ulysses, we know that visits to prostitutes have become habitual for Stephen (U., p. 510). By drawing close to the forbidden, and by wandering along the margins of transgression, he hopes to escape the tedium of his life: to deterritorialize, and draw a line of flight. The Jews' quarter through which Stephen passes bestows an element of the oriental on his adventure (Port., p. 95). As with Eileen, Stephen proves to be passive in his initial encounter with the prostitute; it is she who approaches him, she who is active. She takes the conventionally masculine role, and he the conventionally passive, feminine role. The issues of inversion and passivity are crucial to an understanding of masochism. He becomes her virgin, "Shy but willing" (U., p. 661). When the prostitute takes him "firmly" in her arms, and presses her "softly parting" lips to his, he feels that what he has sought is the sexual entwinement of bodies. He learns that his quest has been toward this paradoxically exciting rest, this surging relaxation of the classical, the opening of orifices, and the return to body. The doll in the corner of the prostitute's room, however, is ominous (Port., p. 95). Stephen finds that he and the prostitute have only mingled bodies,

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and that no lasting contract has been made. He cannot afford to pay for sex with any regularity, and so when he leaves her room, he finds himself still hungering. In Ulysses, we find Stephen still craving, thinking: "I am lonely here. 0, touch me soon, now" (U., p. 61). Sexual entwinement is only a part of what he needs. He needs, more than this, an emotional alliance with a woman, by which she would touch and be touched freely: by which she would become alive for him. The prostitute is, however, not a real girl for him but a fetish, a symbol that he situates in relation to himself, in the alchemical process of his desire. She is a symbol of body, without being a body, a symbolic token rather than a flesh and blood other. More than by this, however, Stephen is isolated because his first love is internal, a portion of himself, his creative imagination. The doll in the corner of the prostitute's room is the pure virgin, the virgin that is within watching his descent into squalor. He is compelled by the fantasy, because his imagination, his image-making faculty, is predominant. When, in "Circe," Bloom half hears the unconscious Stephen's mumblings, and thinks "A girl. Some girl. Best thing could happen him" (U., p. 702),the irony of Bloom's assumption is that Stephen is not thinking of "Miss Ferguson," but recalling the poem he recited to his dying mother: a declaration that despite exile, Fergus is alive, and perhaps closer to the heart of life, as king of an internal and alternative kingdom. An exile such as Fergus seeks becomings, not communion. He draws a line of flight and remains molecular, refusing to be grasped by molar aggregates. His inner world and his inner struggles, and the echoes of the initial losses that necessitated the composition of his ideal ego, and drove him into exile, still stand in the way of Stephen's attaining the affection of any flesh and blood girl. Bloom is a progression on Stephen, and it is suggested that if Stephen is to mingle his life with another, and so evade his isolation, the terms will have to be no less complicated, and compensatory, than Bloom's. Molly is voluptuous, like Emma. Just as Cranly calls Emma fat (S.H., p. 221), so there are some who consider Molly to be fat. There is a tendency for interpreters to read large breasts as representative of the mothet Stephen's mother, however, is represented primarily by sickness and cancer, and even in Portrait she is not represented by her breasts. A distinction must be drawn between the mother and the earth mothet Although Molly is mother earth (Joyce tells us so), May is not. Large breasts often represent not the mother, but an immanent, bodily nature, and, perhaps, the normative object of desire which masochism makes the subject work so hard to reach. Molly, the Jewess, is also associated with the oriental qualities that have hovered around each of these Joycean objects of desire. As Bloom does not accept marriage's consignment of Molly to the role of his commodity, she maintains the mystery of the other, of another world. Although these factors contribute to Molly's desirability, they are in

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danger of being negated for Bloom by the fact of his marriage to her. Without the sense of transgression, and the illusion of untouchability, Bloom's desire for Molly would be diminished. In order for his desire for Molly to persist, she must be for him both an ideal ego and a flesh and blood other. The elaborate mechanisms of Bloom's inasocl~isinallows for this sense of untouchability and taboo to fall upon Molly. Through this cuckolding, Bloom recharges the desire which marriage kills. Molly may become a combination of the first desired object and the second, by offering the comfort and rest of the domestic scene, and by remaining the tabooed, foreign, and untouchable temptress. In the Joycean world, there can be no final resolution, or absolute unity in life. The notion of monogamous love is a myth, at best, or a lie, at least. To be more specific, for Joyce there may be a compensatory monogamous love, but never a monogamous desire. Society restricts free-flow by suggesting that love and desire should be one and the same, but they are not. The sorrow and pain of separate existences is inescapable in this world. The other who will make the solitary man whole does not exist as anything but a figment of mind, like the princess Selene in "Circe" (U., p. 605). The object of desire inhabits the subject, and the external other is attractive in so far as she approximates, or mirrors, this subjective criterion. This subjective criterion can never be fully satisfied by an object from beyond the self, and so symbols and rituals are incorporated to help minimize the compromise, to traverse the tension between the inner and the outer, and to summon and make real the ideal. This is why Molly cannot be fully considered except in relation to Boylan. Such troilism is central to Joyce; it is central to Ulysses, and to Exiles, and it is apparent when Stephen begins to suspect that E-C-and Cranly are attracted to one another. A description of the Joycean object of desire that did not mention Robert, Boylan and Cranly would be inadequate, but there is a tendency to overemphasize the lability of Joycean desire. Of course, it is metamorphic, but it is also dependent upon a structure. Bloom and Robert are not revealing homosexuality, heterosexuality, or even bisexuality in their respective urges to be cuckolded. The masochist is not bisexual, because that would mean that he wanted to find a beautiful man, or a beautiful woman, and take pleasure in that person's body. The masochist is seeking the inhuman in sexuality; the object of his desire is not a body, but an alchemical equation, a structural ideal. "Man delights him not nor woman neither [ . . . . I " (U., p. 273) Nonetheless, there is a normative object hidden in this equation, and it is perhaps the always-futile purpose of the ritual to call this object back from the symbolic realm, to which it has been lost. The masochist's sufferings would be meaningless if they did not ultimately serve to call back the woman whom these same rituals have already distanced. He struggles to approach his goal, knowing that if he ever reaches it, it will lose its power to compel. His deliberately plotted path is an amalgam of Sisyphuen struggle and Tantalean desire.

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Krafft-Ebing considers the sadist's active flagellation to be a substitute for sexual intercourse with a female, although such flagellation is: also practised o n other living, sensitive objects-children and animals. There may be a full conscio~isnessthat the impulse is really directed towards women, and that only as a lnalzesl~iftthe nearest attainable objects (pupils) are abused. But the condition of the perpetrator may be such that the imp~ilseto cruel acts enters the consciousness accolnpanied only by lustful excitement, wllile its real objects (which can alone explain the lustful colouring of such acts) remains latent."

It is different for the Joycean masochist, however, because the ritual serves not only as an attempt to summon the missing object, but also an effort to recreate a relation to society, to recreate the conditions under which alienation became sexualized. The eyes of the community are also utilized as an object of desire. Masochism and sadism are more than simply shadows of, or defaults for the normative act. This may be partly the case in their inception, but it is never long before the perversities take on independent lives.

The following is an examination of the general prohibition of contextually specific sexual urges as it is drawn in Joyce, and the way in which the prohibition interplays with the Joycean object of desire. Central to this analysis is Deleuze's conception that in sadism and masochism there is a resexualization of the desexualized, in which the qualities of desexualization are retained. Desexualization is a problematic term, but it has been retained here despite its shortcomings. Desexualization is a movement whereby the normative drive is disguised or repressed, and sexuality is attached to something else. Apart from the fact that desexualization is dependent upon the presupposition of a normative drive (the difficulties of which have already been touched upon), the conception also assumes that the something else to which sexuality is attached-violence, cruelty, domination or submission-is not already sexual in its own right. For this reason, it is perhaps impossible to distinguish between desexualization, resexualization and sexualization. The resexualization is written into the desexualization, and sexualization might describe both desexualization and resexualization. Despite these apparently insurmountable difficulties, these terms will nonetheless be utilized, in part to retain a link between this work and Coldness and Cruelty, which, through its use of these terms, comes closer than any other study to an adequate understanding of sexual masochism. For the sake of clarity, desexualization may be considered the determinant, and resexualization the transformation. Sexualization might highlight the sense in which these both partake of a single, continuous movement. It is perhaps appropriate that a perversity so paradoxical as masochism should be best described in terms so plagued by paradox.

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Fathers Interpreters of masochism tend to stress the primacy of either the mother's or the father's role as a determinant of the perversity. The mother initiates the process, by undermining the normal course of the child's renunciation of infantile omnipotence. The father becomes a determinant in one of two ways. According to the simpler of these, masochism is simply an extension of the child's submission to Oedipal conditions. The more sophisticated of these explanations describes the father as weak or missing and, for this reason, the superego as a reduced force in the psyche of the child. It is an oversimplification to consider masochism to be determined solely by the mother or the father. Even if we consider that both the mother and the father play a part in determining the child's masochism, it is also an oversimplification to consider these influences in terms of too neatly defined developmental phases. As "Simon" is an anagram for "Minos," it is suggested that in Portrait it is the father who impedes the individual's quest for what he desires, by incarcerating him in a maze of laws. Simon, however, is merely a dim emanation of the principle of fatherhood: behind him stand more solid fathers, who confine him as much as they confine Stephen. The father is the maze itself, the pervasive force behind triangulation of the subject between lack and desire. These more ubiquitous fathers are those who hold power because they uphold and embody inherited systems of power: the systems of church and state. Stephen declares to Lynch that "[a] Church is not a fixture like Gibraltar: no more is an institution. Subtract its human members from it and its solidity becomes less evident. I, at least, will subtract myself" (S.H., p. 239). Emancipation, however, is not so simple. Not only do these institutions hold power, unrecognized, over a portion of his mind, but also his subtraction of himself from these congeries will not be perceived as passive escape from, but as the active disintegration of these selfsame congeries. For this reason, he will be branded a heretic, or a pervert, and be considered to be the worst type of threat-a threat arising from within. Those who uphold the system do so because it offers them power. The removal of solitaries will only assist the slow erosion, or metamorphosis of these systems. In order to topple them, a new system of power must oppose and replace them. These new systems, however, will merely fill the space vacated by the old system, and give power to new fathers. The revolutionary investment will become colonizing in its turn. Although, in "Circe," Stephen breaks the lamp with his stick, it is not his intention to topple the walls of the inherited systems through violence. His quietism leads him instead to remove himself, through exile from these systems. He recognizes escape as the only truly revolutionary gesture. He cannot avoid the fact, however, that the taboos, values and prohibitions of his society were stamped upon his psyche before he was old enough to ques-

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tion this inheritance. History may deliver a back kick (U., p. 42), or kick from within. Exile is not simply a question of a singular choice, but a stance that must be perpetually renewed, in a struggle against aspects of the mind, the king and priest 'in here.' That he considers his enemy to be the king and priest, rather than the father, emphasizes that for Joyce this struggle for psychic emancipation is political rather than oedipal. Although Simon is merely a dim emanation of the fathers who stand behind him, he is a manifestation of Minos nonetheless, and therefore he has helped to force Stephen's desexualization. When Stephen travels to Cork with Simon, he is preoccupied with the frustrated desire boiling within him, and feeling disconnected, lost and loveless. Before his genital sexuality awakened, his society trained him to resist such release. Once it has awakened, and he has found the urge for such release irresistible, he experiences a crisis in the opposition between his own desires and the mores of his society. When traveling to Cork with Simon, Stephen considers his lust as loveless and, because of the essential secrecy of masturbatory release, he feels alienated and ashamed. The intensity of Stephen's shame when traveling with Simon should be recognized. His shame is visceral, and it relates to the open secret that sits between them. Stephen is aware that he is the product of Simon's arousal, that he is alive because of Simon's sexual urges. Stephen's later claim that a man of genius is repulsed by other males of his flesh calls back to, and waters down, or intellectualizes, the bodily disgust that Stephen feels in Cork beside his father. He and his father can never be friends. There is a paradoxical sense in which his shame and his alienation from his father result from his recognition of what he has in common with his father. That none of this may be spoken of, or compared, makes him feel alone with his lust, and causes him to consider this tendency to be excessive in himself. He feels that if he could simply have sex and be done with blind longing, the depravity of his masturbatory imagination might be tempered. To sin with a woman, however, would signify his adulthood, which is a possibility at which Simon sneers. Simon recognizes, unconsciously, that as long as Stephen is a child, he himself is able to retain and prolong his youth. Simon suggests that he, like his father to him (Port., p. 88), would be more a brother to Stephen than a father, but that Stephen is peculiar, unlike Simon or his father. It is not enough for Simon to prove that he is young; he wants also to prove that he possesses more attributes of youth and virility than does Stephen. He proposes libidinal, homosocial challenges to Stephen. He says that he would "vault a fivebarred gate against [Stephen or] run with him after the hounds across the country" (Port., p. 91). He puts himself forward as Cotter's ideal sporty boy, and presents Stephen as the unhealthy boy who spends too much time in his room alone, a potential masturbator. This is just what Stephen is afraid he has become. When Simon says that Stephen is "not built that way" (Port., p. 90), he is directing the conversation away from the topic of female objects of desire, to suggest that Stephen is a child, too young to hear such things.

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Somewhere here, with them in Cork, is Stephen crouched beneath the table, repenting for having thought that he and Eileen might be married. The shame that hovers between these events is obscure, and so it blurs into the sexuality that touches it everywhere, and shame becomes sexualized. Stephen's prospect of sinning with another seems far off and futile-his lust secret, sordid and unnatural. Although never fictionalized, it would be in Simon's nature to have sometime made some witty remark about Stephen hidden beneath the table, and his proposed marriage to Eileen.

Beating At the start of Portrait it is more than likely that Stephen hides beneath the table because he is evading a physical attack from Dante. Nowhere in Portrait do we see May or Simon earnestly disciplining Stephen: May dotes on him, and Simon entertains and ridicules him. In the absence of parental discipline, Dante, the traditionalist, believes it is beholden upon her to censure the child. May says that Stephen must apologize, but it is Dante who adds that if he does not the eagles will pull out his eyes. Until very recently, it has been traditional for parents to beat children. It has typically been considered as not simply a right, but also a responsibility. It was argued that if children were not disciplined through physical punishment, they would not be sufficiently socialized, and would lead immoderate lives. Gibson notes that "Beating has always been common in British schools, the schoolmaster's legal right to administer corporal punishment deriving from the fact that society has considered him to stand i n loco parentis to the children under his care."l6 Typically, scholastic discipline in these islands has consisted of the caning or birching of the bare or clothed buttocks while the victim is in a bent over position. This is where sex comes into play. Gibson notes that, according to the Report of School Commission Enquiry (1968), canings were more often inflicted in public than in private, presumably to enhance their alleged deterrent value. This is where shame becomes mingled with sexuality. This practice, he remarks, "is likely also to have had a stimulant effect on the spectators, given the strongly voyeuristic component in flagellomania."l7 In Portmit, it is clear to Stephen and the other boys that Corrigan is likely to be flogged on the bottom in a bent over position by Mr. Gleeson. It is unclear, however, whether this punishment will occur in public or in private. The song they sing suggests that it is likely that he will be flogged on the naked bottom. It can't be helped; It mist be done So down wzth )'OZW breeches And out wzth )lour b z m . (Port., p. 3 3 )

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As evidence that some people were aware of the sexual nature of the flagellation of the buttocks, the pandy batting of the hand was considered to be a more modest, delicate means of castigation. This is the punishment to which Stephen is subjected in Clongowes. Stephen's recollection of this event in "Circe" suggests that he sexualizes it retrogressively, although at the moment it is inflicted he takes no delight. Such an instance stands as proof that Meibom's ideas of masocl~ism,though possibly sound once the mechanics are modified, must be supplemented to acknowledge that the masochistic compulsion is due not only to a mechanical response, but also to a psychic response to the idea of submitting to a beating.

The Debate Justifications In Victorian Britain and Ireland, parents and educators who were in favor of corporal punishment believed that God had directed the corporal punishment of children, through the mouth of Solomon. They held that the references to beating in the Old Testament were to be taken literally. The maxim that was repeated most frequently was "Spare the rod and spoil the child." Gibson's research reveals, however, that although universally attributed by the Victorians to Solomon, this phrase comes from Samuel Butler's satirical poem Hudibras, published in 1664 (part ii, Canto I, 1.884). In this section of the poem an amorous lady urges Sir Hudibras to undergo a whipping on her account as a proof of knightly love. But since our sex's modesty Will not allow I sshould be by, Bring me, on oath, a fair account, And honour too, when you have done it; And I'll admit you to the place You claim as due in my good grace. If matrimony and hanging go By dest'n!; why not whipping too? What medicine else can cure the fits Of lovers, when they lose their wits? Love is a bo!; by poets styled, Then spare the rod and spoil the child. (1885)18

The topic of whipping children was in the air throughout the nineteenth century, and well into the twentieth century. Gibson documents the debates on the topic that filled the editorial pages of many newspapers and journals throughout this period. The pro-beaters found Divine example in the Old Testament rather than the New. They emphasized the retributive aspect of authority. The just God of the Old Testament is harsh and exacting, and to

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Victorian parents he offered a satisfactory disciplinary model. The following passages from the Family Herald are typical of this position: As human parents created in His image it is our duty to emulate Him in treatment of our children who 'are given in charge to us in order that we may teach them the nature of the Divine Law, and prepare them for manhood and ~vomanhood'( 1 7 November 1849). The world is a battlefield, an arena of fierce, or animated, or interested conflict. It is a world of authority and obedience, a world in which all must learn to obey before they can be authorised t o govern. (24 November 1849)'s

Support for the policy of whipping children was heard not only in the editorial columns of the papers, but also in the discourse of educated people who must have been familiar with the more sophisticated arguments against the beating of children. In 1835 Dr Arnold of Rugby School, the father of Mathew Arnold, argued that the "proud notion of personal independence . . . is neither reasonable nor Christian," and that pride and self-will in children should be met with corporal punisl~inent:"Impatience of inferiority felt by a child towards his instructors, is merely wrong, because it is at variance with the truth: there exists a real inferiority in the relation, and it is an error, a fault, a corruption of nature, not to acknowledge it" ("On the Discipline of Public Schools").2~Tom Brown's Schooldays makes it clear that Dr Arnold put his ideas into practice at Rugby. Pro-beaters addressed the arguments against corporal punishment in tones of righteous indignation. Here is an example from Dublin in 1905, written by Colonel P.F. Robertson: "Think what the members of the Humanitarian League will have to answer for if they are able to induce weak men and silly women to disobey God's command-to whip naughty children under their colltrol."2~

Objections The sense of urgency and indignation was strong among the anti-beaters also. The main concern of the anti-beaters was the sexual nature of beating for both the beater and the beaten. Gibson quotes from one of the earliest attacks on the practice of beating in British schools, The Children's Petition; Or, A Modest Remonstrance of that intolerable grievance our Youth lie under, in the accustomed Severities of the School-discipline of this Nation, published in 1669. "In this, the sexual nature of 'lower discipline' was made explicit by the author. He argued that beatings 'were of that nature as to make our schools to be not merely houses of correction but of prostitution, in this vile way of castigating in use, wherin [sic]our secret parts, which are by nature shameful, and not to be uncovered, must be the Anvil exposed to the immodest eyes and filthy blows of the smiter."22

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Anti-beating sentiments were, however, much stronger on the continent. In 1769, in the article 'Verge. Baguetter divinatoire' ('Rod. Divining Rod') in the Dictionnaire philosophique, Voltaire writes: It is shameful and abominable that such a punish~nentshould be administered to the buttoclts of young boys and girls. It used to be the punish~nent of slaves. In our colleges I have seen barbarians strip children almost naked, and a brute, often drunk, lacerate their flesh with long rods, which made their groins bleed and swell fearfully. The two nerves wl~ichjoin the sphincter to the pubis being irritated, emissions were produced; and this has often happened to young girls.23

In the Confessions, published in 1782, Rousseau begins his description of his sexual obsession with being beaten by declaring: "How differently people would treat children if only they saw the eventual results of the indiscriminate, and often culpable, methods of punishment they employ! The magnitude of the lesson to be derived from so common and unfortunate a case as my own has resolved me to write it down."24 In "Aphrodisinque externe, ou Tmite' du fouet," (178 8) Franqois-AmedCe Doppet states: I suppose it is necessary, in certain cases, to inflict corporal punish~nenton children; but should we beat the miscreants on the lower back and loins? We are taught during our first five or six years to hide our buttoclts and pa~tleshonteuses ['shameful parts']; then, after this period, along comes a teacher who forces us to unbutton our trousers, push them down, lift our shirt, show everything and receive the whip in the middle of the class. And don't these parts become even more 'shameful' when it's some u ~ ~ o u t h pedant who's loolting at them and touching them?2'

Doppet believes that the beating of children prematurely enflames their sexuality. Furthermore, he considers the beater to be expressing sodomistic desire on the buttocks of the beaten child. French educationalists heeded his message, "and it was not long before the beating of children was outlawed in French schools."26 In England and Ireland, those who spoke out against corporal punishment were greeted with contempt until a much later date. George Bernard Shaw was one of the most persistent opponents of corporal punishment, and he entered into a series of debates in the letters column of the papers. Mathew Arnold, no doubt the recipient of Dr Arnold's program, writes that corporal punishment "will more and more come to appear half disgusting, half ridiculous, and a teacher will find it more and more difficult to inflict it without a loss of self-respect. The feeling on the continent is very strong on this point."27

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Nonetheless, despite an awareness of the sexual implications of corporal punishment, it continued to be accepted by the English and the Irish. In My Early Life, Winston Churchill says the following of a teacher who administered a severe flogging to him: "My reading in later life has supplied me with some possible explanations of his temperament."28 Clearly the explanation of which he is speaking is the psychological study of sadism. Like Old Cotter, he connotes but does not name this temperament, using euphemism and ellipses.

Beating in Pol-&ait When the boys at Clongowes discuss the crime for which "five fellows out of the higher line," and Tusker Boyle and Simon Moonan (Port., pp. 48-9) are to be flogged and / or expelled, the sexualization of beating seems to be determined by the profusion of paradoxes in which this incident is embedded. It is suggested that the crime was to drink the wine of the sacrament, and Stephen is stunned by the immensity of such a transgression. He feels himself wither at the thought of transgressing against God, and a vortex spreads inside him, drawing him into desexualization, along with the impressions that latch onto his feat Although he cannot comprehend how the boys could have dared to use the wine for profane purposes (inebriation) he cannot stop himself from an act of imaginative empathy with their sacrilege. He sublimates rather than represses his shock. He configures the sacred as profane, and vice versa, and so becomes guilty by infection. When it is revealed that the boys did not steal the sacred wine, their crime ("smugging") retains an aura of inverted sacredness. This is due as much to the fact that the two explanations of this crime follow hard upon each other, as to the mystery that shrouds this crime. As these impressions enter the rent in his consciousness, which has been opened by his fear, they are conjoined. When he hears that the iniquity related to the lavatory, and not the tabernacle, his mind continues to reel before the enormity of such inversions (Port., p. 48). Within moments, he has considered the most sacred of things as profane, and the most profane of things as holy. For Stephen, the cloaca1 and the sacrosanct are now commingled. Although it is never made explicit, it is clear to us, as it seems to be clear to Stephen, that "smugging" entails some sort of sexual experimentation. Stephen is tainted further as his curiosity, enticed and compelled by the unspoken nature of the crime, attempts to recreate, and so understand this mysterious transgression. His efforts to conjure the crime in his mind, and comprehend these contradictions, excite him, both bodily and intellectually. One of the participants in the crime was "Lady Boyle," who is always paring his fingernails like a girl; whose hands then are fetishes, like Eileen's (Port., p. 49). More significantly, Mr. Gleeson, who is to administer the flogging, has "long and pointed fingernails," and Stephen thinks: "Perhaps he pared them

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too like Lady Boyle" (Port., p. 51). The entwinement of human bodies, the feminine, the sacred body of God, and the sordidness of bodily emissions, are all drawn together in a cluster of associations, as compelling but forbidden, and drawn down together into the vortex of Stephen's desexualization. His imagination is driven to a peak of excitement trying to assimilate such contradictions, and then the notion of flogging is introduced, as the boys wonder whether Corrigan will be flogged or pandied, and how many strokes he will get.29 (Port., pp. 50-1) The thought of flogging joins the series of paradoxical associations, as Stephen contemplates M r Gleeson's hands: So long and cruel they were though the white fattish hands were not cruel but gentle. And though he trembled with cold and fright to think of the cruel long nails and of the high wl~istlingsound of the cane and of the chill you felt at the end of your shirt when you undressed yourself yet he felt a feeling of queer quiet pleasure inside" (Port., p. 51).

His pleasure is related to the openness and the objectification that comes with nudity. The sense in which to strip is to prepare for the sexual act, or sacrifice, and the transgressional drawing together of bodies, all leap into Stephen's mind, flooding the notion of flogging with tones of pleasure. His imagination, already aroused by this exotic dream of discipline, broods on self-conjured images of flogging, becoming further aroused by its undertones of ritual: "It made him shivery: but that was because you always felt like a shiver when you let down your trousers [ . . . . ] He wondered who had to let them down, the master or the boy himself" (Port., p. 51). To submit to whipping and objectification is, like sexual congress, a means of escaping the discontinuous self, and achieving continuity; it is a communion, a connection. All of these impressions are tied together in Stephen's mind, as aspects of submission, the sacred, the forbidden, the lowly, the exotic, the feminine and the cruel.

The Church In leaving him at Clongowes, Simon expels Stephen from the domestic milieu, and passes him into the custody of the priests. Simon's role in Stephen's triangulation seems to be of less relevance than that of the priests. It is the priests, and not Simon, who teach Stephen that it is wrong to desire bodily. Simon is never really a superego figure for Stephen. Stephen's Oedipal father is, in the Deleuze and Guattarian (anti-oedipal) scheme of things, many wolves, not one. According to Deleuze and Guattari, when Freud assumes that the wolf man's wolves are representative of his father, he overlooks the fact that the wolf man sees not one, but several wolves. That these priests, with their vows of celibacy, are so deeply desexualized themselves, means that their repressed libidinal energy is likely to be released as sadism or m a s o c h i s m . ~In~ Coldness and Cruelty, Deleuze argues that just

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as the alliance is the niche of the masochist, so is the institution the sadist's milieu.31 It is suggested that these priests are sadists, because it is their role to identify with authority, and negate desire as it reveals itself in the world beyond them. They repress their own desire, but it appears again, in the return of the repressed, projected onto the children. They are frustrated that they cannot negate desire altogether. They grow red or white of cheek, tremble, throw tantrums, and Stephen notices this, and is suspicious of their piety (Port., pp. 53, 135). These easily frustrated priests adopt a condescending, taunting, mocking tone with the children, which will be adopted by Bello in "Circe," and reiterated obsessively in Finnegans W a k e . This droll, mechanical sneering becomes identified as the voice of the superego, as the voice of denying authority. The masochist makes this voice a plaything. The priests attempt to obliterate the children's interiorities, their senses of privacy. D o h declares: "I can see schemer in your face" (Port., p. 55). In suggesting to Stephen that his privacy is translucent to them, they suggest that they know what he does not, because he is only a child. When Stephen reaches an age at which they can no longer convince him of their omniscience, they remind him that though they may not be omniscient, God is omniscient, and so push him back into Catholic guilt. Student and priest alike utilize this power politics. When Wells asks Stephen if he kisses his mother before going to bed, and then laughs at him whether he says he does or does not, he is identifying himself with the fathers, and restricting Stephen's longing toward the object of desire through mockery (Port., p. 25). This bullying is libidinally and oedipal charged, as Wells is attempting to establish a relation in which he is the father who knows what Stephen the child does not, and so forcing Stephen to embody the passive role of a child. Wells is suggesting that to desire the feminine is weak, womanly or childish, and that in order to be accepted into the male world of his new community he must consider affection unmentionable. For Wells, the only right answer would have been no answer, to repress the answer entirely. This does not dawn on Stephen yet, although he will later learn to shield himself in silence. Instead, he sees desire again shrouded in mystery. Secrets, paradox, confusion, and the sense that something is 'queer' are all signs of sexualization in Joyce. Here, there is a sexualization of the relation of knowing and not knowing. The unspoken nature of the topic of desire does not deter Stephen from transgression, or desexualize him as thoroughly as the moral world has hoped, but instead prompts him to conceive of the tabooed object as sacred. To speak the unspeakable will become a factor in his resexualization. In his resexualization, he will make parodic play of pulling that that is beyond the gaze of the panopticon into a parody of its scope. Even before the hell sermons, Stephen is sufficiently a product of his society that he feels shame and self-loathing for masturbation, for the rampant tenor

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of his desire, and for his encounters with prostitutes. After the sermons, he willingly enters a second childhood, purposely subjugating himself, and attempting to repress, rather than sublimate his desire. He feels selfish and degenerate for succumbing to the callings of his lust, and he is frightened and amazed by the riotous nature of his fantasies, which feed on their own freedom, proliferating in darkness, and dropping him ever deeper into obscenity. He is alienated, and his secrecy is like an abyss between him and all others: "Nothing moved him or spoke to him from the real world unless he heard in it an echo of the infuriated cries within him" (Port., p. 89). As his sins are unspeakable, enclosed by, but occluded from discourse, he imagines that no one but he could find delight in such sordid rioting, could revel so before sagging into the slime of emission. By making desire unspeakable, the panopticon has effectively isolated and alienated each subject. Furthermore, the condition of alienation becomes sexualized, in both bodily and intellectual terms. The Church, in its capacity as a bastion of control, more than as a repository of myth, understands the age at which the lust of boys becomes focused and irresistible, and so it makes a massive push at this time to remind them of the prohibition on emission. The Church denies these boys the right to discharge, because masturbation entails privacy. The imaginative flow of the fantasy wastes the energy they intend to colonize and confiscate, to serve the ends of society. Shame has served so far to keep this act hidden, has driven it into privacy, and expelled it from discourse. Now, however, the priests tell the boys that nothing may be hidden. God has seen them pulling at themselves, and worse; he has viewed the dreams in which they have rioted. He has witnessed the obscenity of the images they have called up, and pushed further and further against prohibition, into madness and obscenity, just to prove themselves masters of their own inner worlds, to prove themselves free to desire and dream anything. Now it seems as though the shameful thoughts will stick. The slime of these emissions has left an ineradicable mark. The priests reinforce the shame they have been teaching, and pull the covers away from the masturbators. The superego, God, the father, is recharged. The hell sermons condemn the fluid flowing of one image into the next, the imagination thrilling in the freedom and spontaneity of its own desire. The priests would prefer the boys to repress desire, and became neurotics, denying their instincts and their interiorities, than that they should transform desire, and let it flow inwardly, when they shut themselves off, and withdraw from the world. In the hell sermons, the proximity and the entwinement of bodies is drawn as abject and disgusting, as is the clinging reek of bodily emission. The useless dream is perceived as wasteful and sordid expenditure. The boys are urged to restrain their image-making faculties, to control the flow of one image into the next, just as they are urged to restrain and control bodily emissions. They evade this repression by magical thinking. We may envision here the flow of dreams as escaping through what

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Bataille describes as the "solar anus."32 The solar anus, or pineal eye, situated at the peak of the skull like a volcano, allows psychic emission. This psychic spew is the production of desire. The emission of the "solar anus," the free-flow of dream, is prohibited because it jeopardizes the prohibition, by allowing disguised representations of desire to enter into discourse. Ellinaim notes that when Stanislaus offered suggestions about Portmit, Joyce replied: "is the novel to be your puke or mine?" (J.J., p. 264) The sermons meet desire on its own ground, in the imagination, and counter it, transforming lust into disgust. Body, and all that is liquid, all that oozes out of the body, and flows in the body, is said to be corrupt. Physical desire is bestial, lacking in understanding, possessing no light of soul; it usurps volition and identity; unable to resist flow, the subject drowns in his own mire. The priests threaten the boys with indifferentiation and abjection. The binary opposition of the high and the low is reinforced, but from the sadist's perspective, in which desire, and the object of desire, are lowly and profane. The fathers force the ego ideal on the boys, and the ego ideal seeks esteem before the superego, by disdaining, expelling and negating desire. In urging the boys to be manly and forthright, they urge the boys to denounce the feminine and covert ideal ego. Although they compel the boys to participate socially, they urge them to eschew any contact that might be private or intimate. The prohibition on privacy is, however, double sided. A certain sort of privacy is prohibited, while a certain sort is enforced. In Stephen Hero, Stephen is interested to hear that at Clonliffe, where Wells is studying to be a priest, the students are told not to walk in twos, but to be in groups at all times: "Companions are not allowed. You must join the first group you meet" (S.H., p. 77). By forbidding flow, and the entwinement of bodies, and by encouraging a certain sort of isolation before all things except God, the priests confine each boy in the cell of his own body. At the same time, they place each boy under the surveillance of an all-seeing God, so that they cannot hide themselves in imaginative riot. They incarcerate the boys in mind-forged manacles. Altl~ougl~ Stephen is deeply affected by the hell sermons, and for some time afterwards sees the tabooed object as corrupt and profane, the confusion and the sense of mystery already surrounding the taboo for him will ultimately counter these renewed efforts of the priests. It will not be long before he again begins to consider the object of desire as sacred. The hell sermons drive Stephen to the depths of desexualization. It is Stephen's vision of the birdgirl that is the first spark of his resexualization, promising his release from the gaze and the denials of a tyrannical superego. In the first Portrait, the essay, the prostitute occupies the place of the birdgirl. That Joyce wrote the essay in a flurry of creativity after the death of his mother (J.J., p. 144), may suggest that the hell sermons and the death of the mother are somehow twinned events in the Joycean world. In Ulysses, Stephen is desexualized by the memory of his mother's death. Both the hell

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sermons and the death of the mother have drawn the body, and therefore the desired object, as lowly, abject, corrupt and bestial. In both the birdgirl and the prostitute of the essay, there is an effort to re-establish the desired obiect as sacred.

Homosocial Bullying: Beating by Older Students As well as in the home, and from the priests, Stephen is chastised by his schoolmates. In Victorian schools, particularly boarding schools, it was often the case that "senior boys were empowered to inflict corporal punishment-characteristically of the 'lower discipline' sort-on their fellows [ . . . . ] Every so often during the century accounts would appear in the newspapers of flogging excesses committed in the schools-often by boy against boy.":: In Joyce, there is no evidence of boys administering whippings as a formal function. The first time Wells bullies Stephen, however, it is over a point discussed at school, and the tone of the event is distinctly pedagogical. The second time, the mirroring of formal school discipline is more obvious. In both cases, the bullying is erotically charged. Heron bullies Stephen because Stephen is guilty, by infection, of Byron's immorality (Port., p. 80), in the same way that he is guilty of Parnell's transgression, and the narrators of "The Sisters" and "An Encounter" are guilty of Flynn's and of the pervert's transgressions respectively. The bullies do not understand the exact nature of Byron's immorality, but accept the word of their elders, imagining him to have accessed-because of weakness of will, or perverse wilfulness-forbidden objects of desire. As Deleuze says of the sadist, these bullies identify with the superego, locate desire in the world beyond them, and attempt to negate this desire. They, like Stephen, have been desexualized, but this bullying affords an example of the resexualization of the desexualized as sadistic. The purposes of bullies are always libidinally charged. As Heron identifies with the father, he must, by punishing Stephen, the compensatory object of his desire, assume the role of the father to the child, or the husband to the wife. He wants to become the active party, and put Stephen into the passive position. The condescending, playful, ironic tone he adopts as he punishes Stephen is similar to the tone that D o h adopts when he punishes Stephen. This tone will be echoed again by Bello, its note of condescension serving to underline Bloom's weakness. Later, when Heron quizzes Stephen on E-C-(Port., pp. 76-7), he assumes the role of the father in a double sense. In so far as he lets on to be an authority on such matters, he pretends to be a father in that he may claim access to the sexual object. When he suggests that Stephen is naughty to have a girlfriend, he assumes the role of the father as moral judge. Stephen understands the pantomime that is being played here, and he begins to confess to

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Heron, as he soon will to a real priest for his consummation with prostitutes, and his masturbation. As it turns out, it is the bullies, or "Shaun brothers" such as Heron, who become priests. Tellingly, Wells, who pushes Stephen into a ditch in Portmit, and Dillon from "An Encounter," the robust boy who is the most aggressive in games of Cowboys and Indians, both become priests. Bullying in itself, in isolation from its mimicry of pedagogical methods, is also a sexualizing phenomenon. Stephen considers himself to be at a disadvantage among his fellow students, and at the mercy of bullies, whom he cannot emulate. The exclusive maleness of Clongowes contributes to making it seem cheerless, cold and damp. It is not the mother per se, but comfort, warmth and affection that have been replaced by discomfort, cold and bullying. He interprets this as the replacement of the female by the male. Clongowes is well lit, because privacy and concealment are prohibited here. The school strives to be a panopticon. As they are so thoroughly banished from the object of desire, the feminine, the boys at Clongowes console themselves by establishing libidinal ties among themselves. In his 1909 essay on Wilde, "Oscar Wilde: The Poet of Salome," Joyce utilizes the logic of the perverse dynamic to argue that the English educational system produces homosexuals: "Wilde, far from being a perverted monster who sprang in some inexplicable way from the civilization in modern England, is the logical and inescapable product of the AngloSaxon college and university system, with its secrecy and restrictions."+' (C.W., p. 204) The point, however, may be extended to cover also the schooling system of Irish Catholicism.3j The boys at Clongowes try to recreate Oedipal ties among themselves, and triangulate themselves tighter still. Power and lack of power become defaults for male and female, as sexual currents continue to flow, despite the absence of the feminine. Certain boys become identified as feminine; some willingly, such as Simon Moonan, who offers himself as an object of desire in return for sweets, and some unwillingly, when forced to adopt a passive posture toward bullies (Port., p. 49). The most overt expression of this system is seen when Bertie Tallon is dressed in female clothes, and addressed as though he were a little girl (Port., p. 74). Bertie Tallon is here a parody of the ideal ego. The female object of desire is absent from, or denied to this community, and so they create female objects of desire, not only by bullying and dominating one another, but also by toying with the energies of transvestism. This is a foreshadowing of masochistic transvestism, and of Bloom's emasculation. Bloom notes that it was Gerald who introduced him to cross dressing, when they prepared for a school play: Vice Versa (U., pp. 648-9). The masochistic transvestite hopes to be laughed at, as is Bertie Tallon. Within the framework of the fantasy, the masochist accepts humiliation, and adopts a female posture toward male power.

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Shauns Bullying Shems "Shaun brothers," who emulate the fathers, push "Shem brothers" into the positions of the female or the child. "Shaun brothers" are extroverts, and sadists, while "Shem brothers" are introverts and masochists. Being extrovert, and therefore preoccupied with their appearances, the "Shaun brothers" preen themselves, and reach out into the world, to capture the desired object. In Schopenhauerian terms, Shaun lives the "World as Will," and Shem the "World as Idea."36 While Bloom and Stephen are dressed in black, as they are both in mourning, Mulligan wears a "primrose waistcoat" (U., p. 320), and Molly thinks of Boylan's clothes: "lovely stuff in that blue suit he had on and stylish tie and socks with the sky blue silk things on them hes certainly welloff I know by the cut of his clothes" (U., p. 887).Where Bloom is an outsider, slipping along margins, Boylan is a folk-hero, watched and admired by everyone. The sirens flirt very openly with Boylan. In Joyce's world, women tend to favor "Shaun brothers" over "Shem brothers" as sexual objects. This is fair enough, as Shems do not try as hard to impress or to catch, because they are inwardly preoccupied. In the notes to Exdes, Joyce writes that "women find Robert unceasingly attractive because unceasingly aggressive" (P.+E., p. 352). In the game of colors, in Finnegnns Wake, the rainbow sisters admire Chuff, the Shaun brother, and laugh at Glugg, the Shem brother.37 When Glugg answers a question wrongly, the Maggies gather round, and ''theirs is a little tittertat of hilarity (Lad-0'-me-soul! lad-0'-me-soul, see!) and the wordchary is atvoiced ringsoundingly by their toots ensembled" (F.W., pp. 224.36-225.1-2). Glugg is described as a "Warewolff! Olff! Toboo!" (F.W., p. 225.8) From the rebuke of these girls, Glugg goes into exile, and becomes morbidly obsessed. "So olff for his topheetuck the ruck made raid, aslick aslegs would run; and he ankered on his hunkers with the belly belly prest [ . . . . ] Breath and bother and whatarcurss. Then breath more bother and more whatarcurss. Then no breath no bother but worrawarrawurms" (F.W., p. 225.9-14). The "whatarcurss" here suggests Spencer's description of the dying Irish eating watercress, as Shaun and Shem take the roles of conqueror and conquered. Issy urges Glugg to guess again, "Speak, sweety bird" (F.W., p. 225.20), recalling the way in which she lures birds down her chimney to her cat. Glugg's responses suggest that he now associates her with damnation, with "monbreamstone" and "Hellfeuersteyn" (F.W., p. 225.22,24). His answers are wrong, and the girls dance around Chuff: "Ring we round, Chuff! [ . . . . ] All's rice with their whorl!" (F.W., p. 225.30-1) Glugg enters another exile and, in this darkening, through a masturbatory preoccupation with his own body, takes up writing: "He would jused sit it all write down just as he would jused set it all writhefully rate in blotch and void [ . . . . ] reading off his fleshskin and writing with his quillbone" (F.W., p. 229.26-30). This is the same darkening which Stephen describes Shakespeare as having undergone.

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Chuff, by contrast, is praised and admired by the Maggies, and so free to take a normative route toward a normative object of desire: Of all the green heroes everwore coton breiches, the whitemost, the goldenest! H o w he stud theirs with himselfs moolzst lzevinly [ . . . ] whiles his host of spritties, l~isspillerinderlznees,they went peahelming a ripidarapidarpad around him [ . . . ] alluding to him by all the liclznames in the litany [ . . . . ] we certney like gurgles love the nargleygargley so, arrahbeejee, tell that old franlzay boyulz to bellows upthe tombuclzy in his tumtum argan and give us a gust of his gushy old (F.W., p. 234.8-11, 18-9, 31-3).

In "An Encounter," although it is most likely that neither boy has a girlfriend, while the narrator admits to having no girlfriends, Murphy claims to have "three totties" (Dub., p. 14). This is the winning attitude that ensures the success of the "Shaun brother." In Portmit, Cranly, with his "handsome face" and his "strong and hard" body, is a Sean brother, while Stephen is a Shem brother. In Ulysses, Boylan is a "Shaun brother," and he cuckolds Bloom, a "Shem brother," just as Mulligan usurps Stephen's place on a number of levels. Mulligan is attended to by the milkwoman, who all but ignores Stephen (U., p. 16).Mulligan takes the key to the tower. He is invited to George Moore's house as a promising young writer, and Stephen is not, in the same way that Gogarty was invited to Moore's literary evenings while Joyce was not (J.J., p. 135). Mulligan, with his nickname "Buck," usurps Stephen's relation to Joyce as the proud, lonely stag described in "The Holy Office" (P.+E.,p. 105). Mulligan first recites, and makes comical, the poem that Stephen sang for his dying mother (U., p. 9), and Joyce sang for both his dying mother and his brother: Yeats's "Who will go with Fergus" (J.J., pp. 94, 135). Mulligan even usurps the start of Ulysses, from both Stephen and Bloom, just as Simon does in Portrait. The struggle between these brothers repeats itself throughout Joyce, and at all times possesses a more or less sexual subtext. That these brothers may be found throughout history, in all relations of power, is underlined by the Viconian construction of Finnegans Wake. In Joyce's notes to Exiles, Robert, the Shaun brother, is described as a sadist, while Richard, the Shem brother, is described as a masochist (E.,p. 356).

THESUBALTERN POSITION: METAPHORICAL RELATIONS OF PARENT AND CHILD Gibson describes the way in which Britain's flogging system was given prestige by the public schools, and imitated elsewhere, the assumption being that what was good enough for public school boys was good enough for everyone else.38 The British flogging system was founded on the extension from the home, into the school, through the metonymical sidestep which enabled the schoolmaster to act in loco parentis. Gibson points out that:

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The English vice began in the home, spread to the home's most obvious extension, the school (particularly the boarding school), and thence to the courts, the prisons, the Army and Navy, the colonies-and the brothels. The British Empire, it might be argued, was founded on the lash." 39 He argues that, of the colonies, India suffered the most from this imperialistic flagellomania. For example, in 1878 alone 75,223 floggings were inflicted. "These floggings were habitually administered with a rattan or a cane to the naked buttocks in public." After the Morant Bay riots in Jamaica, in 1865, Governor Eyre's troops embarked on a three-week binge of hangings, torture, rape and floggings[. . . . ] It was the floggings inflicted on the negro women, however, wl~ichreceived most publicity in Britain, particularly when it emerged that they had been beaten on their naked buttocks, sometimes with piano wire (which cut their flesh to shreds).40 In the same way that the schoolmaster becomes a parent of the child, the colonial authorities act as parents to the colonized. Central to masochism is the sexualization of the subaltern position, described by Deleuze and Guattari as the minoritarian becoming. This is not to say that the individual members of a colonizing race are more likely to be sadistic than the individual members of a colonized race are to be masochistic. It is impossible to read the equation in these terms. Nonetheless, these political energies enter into sexuality, or they are sexual already. In Joyce's time, there existed a metaphorical relationship of child and adult between the Irish and the English. The terms with which Matthew Arnold describes the Saxon and Celtic spirits, or geniuses, and which have become insidious stereotypes, depict the Celts as impractical and unsuited to governing themselves, and so suggest that they, like children, should be governed by the more practical and mature Saxons. Arnold considers the English to be a blend of the Germans and the Celts. The predominant characteristics of the Germans are "steadiness with honesty," "freedom from whim, flightiness, perverseness; patient fidelity to Nature-in a word, science."41 The Celt, on the other hand, is childlike and impractical, in that he is "sentimental-always ready to react against the despotism of fact."42 Furthermore, as will become apparent in the discussion of the demonization of the masturbator, in chapter three, the terms used to describe the Celt are similar to those which are deployed to describe the masturbator: "the timidity, the shyness, the delicacy of the Celtic nature, its preference for the retired life, its embarrassment at having to deal with the great world."43 In "Circe," when Private Carr wins Cissy in triumph over Stephen, we see a micro-dramatization of the relationship between England and Ireland. Cissy delights in the sense that she has given herself to a high bidder, to an

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adult. She is thrilled to see this proven, when her lover exerts power over Stephen, by physically punishing him for approaching her. His victory is her victory: she participates in his dominion over Stephen. Stephen is left alone in his becoming Irish. The soldier's bullying of Stephen mirrors Boylan's domination of Bloom, which is a central theme of the chapter, and of the novel. A powerful male takes the girl, and degrades his rival, thereby proving himself to be an adult in relation to an impotent child. For Stephen, being punched is like being pandied as a "lazy idle little loafer," or being flogged for "smugging." Again and again he sees desire stopped in its tracks by physical violence. As well as between groups, the principles of i n loco parentis enter into every group. When Alleyn commands Farrington to apologize to him (Dub., p. 60), we are reminded of Dante commanding Stephen to apologize, and we see the employee being made into a child by the boss. Farrington's rebellion is even punier than Stephen's "peaching" on D o h , although just as with Stephen's rebellion, Farrington's peers gather round him to hear of his strike against authority (Dub., p. 62). When Farrington goes home, he redirects his rage against his son, mimicking the boy's excuses, just as Alleyn mimicked his, proving that, despite his frustrations and his degradations, he is an adult to his child (Dub., p. 65). The dispute between Alleyn and Farrington reaches its greatest intensity when there is a woman present to witness their relations of father and child (Dub., p. 60). The woman is "Jewish looking," and therefore oriental and foreign, as is typical of the Joycean object of desire. She represents a world beyond bounds, a world other than the world of this stifling office. Miss Delacour is an object of desire to Alleyn, and he displays to her his power over Farrington, like plumage or a mating call. Desire is political. He wants to prove himself a potent adult, in contrast to Farrington as an impotent child. That Farrington is a well-built man merely intensifies Alleyn's desire to be seen dominating him. He tries to use his power as an aphrodisiac on Miss Delacour. It is Farrington's awareness of Alleyn's motivations, and his similar, although futile impulse, that compels him to offer his token resistance to this domination. Later, when he loses an arm wrestle to the actor, Farrington is humiliated before the female gaze a second time. Although she is not present, the shock of the yellow gloves lingers. They turn to homosocial rites of conflict and dominance with the excitement she has left them. The actor, with his access to the exotic, to the oriental, to a world of flowing identities, is to Farrington what Gallagher is to Chandler. The actor, and the girl with the yellow gloves, the sort of girl who associates with actors, highlights for Farrington his own impotence and entrapment. The arm wrestle is a libidinal struggle. Beneath the struggle is the idea that women are attracted to the man who can defeat and humiliate another man, and so force him to become a child, with no access to the female. When Farrington loses the arm wrestle, the actor

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proves to be the Shaun brother, favored by the 'rainbow sister' with the yellow gloves. Farrington is not, like Bloom, aloof enough to take sexual delight from this defeat.

While some interpreters consider the child's relations to other males to be central to the development of masochism, others consider the relations to female figures to be key. As already mentioned, the Novicks consider the mother to be the pre-oedipal determinant, and the father to be the Oedipal determinant. Here though, the father influences the child through his weakness, or distance, and his inability to assist the child's development of a superego. This reading of the role of the masochist's father relates to Freud's description of Leonardo da Vinci's sublimation as resulting from the absence of a father figure, and his failure to develop a superego. The Novicks' explanation of the role of the father in the development of masochism is too schematic, being overly reliant on temporally defined phases. In Joyce, the female figure initially acts as a voice of authority, contributing to the development of a confused superego, and continues to influence the development of Stephen's masochism in other ways into his young adulthood. The situations in which both Rousseau and Masoch grew up could be considered as affective matriarchies. The Novicks describe families that produce masochists as follows: the others seemed to play no positive role in the family, showing undue dependence on the mothers. Conversely, the mothers were all described as powerful, domineering women, who ruled their families more or less overtly. There was also a high degree of parental collusion in the gratification of inappropriate wishes. Several of the children in this group were allowed into the parental bed until ages of 11 and 12; others were helped with toileting up to 7 or 8 years.44

Rousseau's mother died giving birth to him, and he had a peculiar relationship with his father, who cuddled and petted him, saying that the child was all he had left of his wife. When still very young, Rousseau was sent to stay with relatives. It was here that being beaten by a woman determined the nature of his desire for the rest of his life: As Mademoiselle Lalnbercier had the affection of a mother for us, she also exercized the authority of one, and sometimes carried it so far as to inflict upon us the punish~nentof children when we had deserved it. For some time she was content with threats, and this threat of a punish~nentthat was quite new to me appeared very terrible; but, after it had been carried out, I found the reality less terrible than the expectation; and, what was still more

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strange, this chastisement made me still more devoted t o her w h o had inflicted it [ . . . . ] I had found in the pain, even in the disgrace, a mixture of sexuality which had left me less afraid than desirous of experiencing it again from the same hand.45

After he left this home, Rousseau continued to enter l~ousel~olds in which he might act as a courtier to a powerful woman. Masoch also tells us that his masochistic nature was determined by witnessing the actions of a powerful female relative at a very young age: At the age of ten I already had an ideal woman. I yearned for a distant relative of my father's-let us call her the Countess Zenobia-the most beautiful and also the most promiscuous woman in the country [ . . . . ] I then lznelt to put on her gold-embroidered slippers. On feeling her tiny feet in my hands I forgot myself and lzissed them passionately. At first my aunt stared at me in surprise, and then she burst out laughing and gave me a little lziclz. [When playing hide-and-seek with other children, he hid in her bedroom, and while he was hidden, she came into the room with a lover. ] [Sluddenly the door was flung open and my aunt's husband rushed into the room accompanied by two friends [ . . . . ] Without a word, she rose, strode up to her husband and gave him an energetic punch o n the nose [ . . . . ] [Slhe picked up a whip and, brandishing it, showed my uncle and his friends to the dooc [Suddenly Masoch was discovered by his aunt. ] [Slhe had seized me by the hair and thrown me on the carpet; she then placed her knee on my shoulder and began to whip me vigorously46

What follows is a description of the nanny, the nymph and the mother as inhibitors of desire, and determinants of masochism in Joyce.

The Nanny Gibson writes that: In Victorian Britain, the beating of children typically began at a very young age. It was often the case that it was first administered by a nanny, or older female relative. In Jonathan Gathorne-Hardj's The Rlse and Fall of the Brztzsh Nann)', a British nanny is described: "She spanked us with the sole of her slipper on the bare back [read 'bottom'], beat us with her brushes, tied us for long hours to chairs in uncomfortable positions with our hands holding a pole or a blaclzboard behind our backs, shut us up in darlzness." This nanny seems to take creative delight in the exercise of physical and emotional cruelty: "She made me write a letter to the butler aslzing him to make a birch for me with wl~ichI was to be punished for lying, and requesting him to read it out in the servants' hall. When he came round one day with a letter and saw me standing in my red petticoat with my face to the

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wall on a chair outside the schoolroo~nand said, 'My you look like a Cardinal.' I could have died of shame. "4'

Although Dante's disciplinary measures are not as extreme, they are essentially of the same order. There is something ferocious and unforgiving about Dante. Her presentation suggests that the socializing functions of the superego may be established through a feminine proxy, as much as by a paternal voice. Her name, which is a pet form of "aunty," also alludes to Dante, his assemblage of retributions, and the creative cruelty with which he constructed his inferno. Such creative cruelty is evident in her threat that eagles will pluck out Stephen's eyes. Not only does this belong to the oedipal myth, and suggest castration, but also blinding feminizes in terms of the politics of sexuality, whereby the male is the subjective gaze looking onto the object of desire, the blind female body. We do not get the impression that Dante abused Stephen in ways either as cruel or as arousing as those in the above examples. Still, there are similarities in the demeanor and the disciplinary tone of Dante and Bello. Stephen pays particular attention to Dante's brushes, which are the most typical instruments of domestic castigation administered by a woman. These brushes are mentioned in the paragraph before Stephen hides beneath the table, and two paragraphs after reference to the wetting of his bed. Again, this is of importance because it appears on the first page of Portrait. Reik notes that the mother, or a stand-in for the mother, will tend to be the first to punish the infant, in order to teach it to control emissions. In demanding tidiness, she is the first to command him to restrain his urges and to seal himself, and to suggest that physicality is unclean, and body is corrupt. She installs his sense of shame, and insists on his classical closure, thereby encouraging his individuation and his dread of "otherness." As Stephen observes at the Christmas dinner, Dante is a fierce upholder of public morality. She is ruthless in denouncing Parnell for his adultery. Simon suggests that this is because she was a spoiled nun (Port. 43), and Ellmanil tells us that the woman from whom Dante was drawn intended to become a nun, before she met and married a man, who subsequently ran away to South America, taking with him all her money (J.J., p. 25). Like Mrs. Mooney of "The Boarding House," who also suffered a bad marriage, Dante is a staunch defender of the institution of marriage. This might account for the ferocity of Dante's response to Stephen's claim that he and Eileen intend to marry.

The Nymph The nymph denies access to the purported or normative object of desire. She may be called the nymph because she is always partly imagined by-or occluded by the imagination of-the subject of desire. In Joyce, men (and women) rarely if ever see women for what they are; instead, they participate

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in a social fantasy based on patriarchal premises. Between the polarities of the Madonna and the whore, women are seen as mothers, nannies, nymphs, or nymphs who have lost their power through marriage. Included in the category of the nymph are Eileen, E-C-, the birdgirl, Beatrice in Exiles, Gerty, the nymph in "Circe," and perhaps Milly Bloom. The nymphs carry the weight of being objects of desire, but they also make use of this weight. In Joyce's milieu, there were few opportunities for the nymph to be economically self-subsistent, and for this reason she needed to get married. In such a society, the male has to prove that he possesses power, of which she may partake, before the nymph will satisfy him. He must prove himself to be a potent father, or a Shaun brother, so that in their union she may feel her beauty and her desirability translate into and partake of his power. All sexual intercourse is prostitution in this society, that which is not considered prostitution more extensively so than that which is. Before he may gain access to the sexual object, the male must strike a deal: he offers to support the nymph financially, and she to allow him access to her body. Both sides find, more often than not, that what they have procured through the deal they have struck does not live up to their expectations, and that the social mores stand in contradiction to the nature of desire. The man often fails to support the woman and their offspring suitably. As the woman is no longer unobtainable, or in any way exotic or foreign, her power of enticement diminishes, and she is no longer a viable object of desire. They are, however, compelled to live on together in resentment and deceit. The social system, which compels each woman to find a man on whom she may be dependent, allows no viable second chance; although both man and woman may feel cheated, they are trapped. Their union is no longer a matter of renewable choice, no longer tempered by doubt and possibility, but an enclosure, a premature conclusion to the journeys of desire, a relinquishment of the Ideal. As Joyce shows in Exiles, an equitable marriage needs to be constantly renewed by the exercise of choice. Molly and Bloom's marriage is also founded on this principle. For most of Joyce's characters, the exercise of choice runs counter to the purported stabilities of the nuptial union. In the Joycean world, the nymph's power is dependent upon her ability to make herself desirable to males, to become for them an object of desire. The clever nymph realizes that her desirability rests, at least in part, upon her ability to convey the message that she is untouchable, except to the highest bidder, and therefore a prize to be valued. She bestrews herself with fetishes, with signifiers of the feminine, to tease and entice. From the admiration she provokes, she gauges cannily her market value. The societal system also compels her to appear untouchable, as it has restricted sexuality to the confines of marriage. The nymph is perhaps more desexualized than the young man, and thus more able to hide or deny desire. "They steal the body first from the gir1."48 She, however, holds the advantage because of this, and the onus of pursuit is placed on the male. We are told

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that Emma presumes Stephen's forbearance, but secretly despises him for it (S.H., p. 73). She believes he will admire her, and understands that this gives her power over him. When she says, "I expect you to obey me" (S.H., p. 160), she proves herself a forerunner of Bello. In "Araby," the boy believes that Mangan's sister has directed him toward the exotic, the foreign and the oriental. When he discovers, instead, that the bazaar is only a market place, he is disillusioned with his longing for the nymph. Despite her retreat, which suggests that she is sacred and otherworldly, she proves to be debased by association with the activities of the bazaar. The transformative and figurative ground between Mangan's sister and the bazaar turns to clay. She, and the shopgirls at the bazaar, are not of the high world of which he has dreamed, but of the materialistic, "preposterous, pragmatical pig of a world."49 This will come into play in the practicality, and the cool, detached scorn with which the t o r t u r e s meets the masochist's romantic idealism. At the bazaar, the boy is revolted by the shopgirl's coy, insipid flirtations. He feels that his admiration of Mangan's sister has been ill founded and delusory. Araby is not oriental, not mysterious and other, but a shop with a brightly painted facade, which seeks to entice him to purchase. Banality inheres to the heart of the exotic. He is ashamed by the paltry victory to be won by the expenditure of the childish sum in his pocket; these coins have more meaning and more power here in Araby than the intensity of his passion, or the single-mindedness of his devotion. In his presentation of masochism, Joyce intensifies to the point of parodying a predisposition toward romantic love and courtly devotion, as seen in "Araby," by forcing it to its most extreme implications. In this equation, the masochist is associated with desire, and she with chastity. Courtly devotion is implicitly masochistic, in that the courtier places himself below the lady's lowliness, her body and her immanence, which she herself has risen yet further above. In contrast to this, in sadism she is desire, a slut, and he is chaste and cerebral. The courtier is a slave to desire, and therefore a slave to the object of his desire, her lowliness and her wounded body, above which she has ascended. She despises him for this slavery, because she has been taught to admire power and forcefulness in a man, rather than obedience. Her own masochism makes her want a man who has seized and negated his own desire, and who will make her become desire itself. As Yeats puts it: "Never give all the heart, for love I Will hardly seem worth thinking of / To passionate women if it seem I Certain [ . . . . I " '0 The masochist craves such neglect, such a one sided relationship, in which he is desire, and she is distance and denial. Just as genital emission, the cancellation of desire, is made to seem to be the goal of desire, so marriage, another seizure of the process of desire, is considered to be the only legitimate arena for sexuality. Marriage, however, disrupts the momentum of ongoing desire. In "A Little Cloud," Gallagher's

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experience of freedom and the foreign makes Chandler acutely aware of his own entrapment. When Chandler looks at a photograph of his wife: "The composure of the eyes irritated him. They repelled him and defied him: there was no passion in them, no rapture. He thought of what Gallagher had said about rich Jewesses. Those dark Oriental eyes, he thought, how full they are of passion, of voluptuous longing!" (Dub., p. 55) This framed photograph, which presides on a table, and Chandler's reaction to it, contrasts sharply with Bloom's "slightly soiled [and] creased" photo of Molly, and Bloom's reaction to this photo (U., pp. 758-9). There is nothing vaguely foreign or exotic about Chandler's wife; he is confined to the familial, and cannot access the non-familial, "without which the libido would not assemble its desiring machines." Their marriage is an investment, a mutual business venture. They are not co-conspirators, but involved in a business transaction. He is entrapped, and he resents and hates his wife because of this. He has given up his life for her life and their child's life. When Chandler thinks that he would like to go to England for a holiday, and then remembers that he has yet to pay for the furniture, he understands his pathetic predicament (Dub., p. 55). He will always come second to his responsibilities. His freedom is of less weight than his sofa. The coyness of the nymph is a factor contributing to desexualization. In "Circe," after he has faced up to Bella and overcome her, Bloom confronts the nymph, and accuses her of hypocrisy, of shrouding herself in illusion. It is suggested that the nymph has always been behind Bella, and that she is responsible for Bloom's masocl~ism,or tied to its source. In Gincomo Joyce the phrase "the lady goes apace apace apace" (G.J., p. 8) follows Amelia riding. In "Circe" we get a fuller rendition of this song as Bello bounces up and down on Bloom's crouched back (U., p. 647). The nymph's hypocritical chastity, as much as the father's denying authority, has desexualized him. She conspires with the father to make him see her through a Lilliputian lens. The nymph pretends she is free of desire, so that the man must pursue. Bloom suggests, however, that this purity is a lie, and that the nymph is as human as the man, who must grovel against her feigned or inauthentic indifference. She has tricked him into taking his ideals, his desires and his intensities, the parts of himself that he feels are most valuable, to her stall in Araby fair, and committing simony, in exchange for the moment of discharge. He accuses her of being coolly mercenary, suggesting that she merely lets on to have no animal desires, so that he must pay her for pleasure, instead of simply exchanging pleasure for pleasure. Just as the nymph in "Circe" claims: "We immortals [ . . . ] have not such a place and no hair there either. We are stonecold and pure. We eat electric light" (U., p. 660), so Gerty does not like to be seen eating, and wishes that we could eat "something more poetical like violets or roses" (U., p. 458). In Gincomo Joyce, Amelia Popper also enters the constellation of the untouchable, disembodied virgin: "Her body has no smell. An odorless flower" (G.J., p. 13).

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In "Circe," Bloom uncovers this hypocrisy, and deflates the nymph: her plaster cast cracks, and a "cloud of stench" escapes (U., p. 662). He sees through the illusions she has perpetuated. The nymph, not Bella, is Circe, turning men into pigs in contrast to her non-bodily nature, her transcendence. His masochism is a parody of her chastity, and of Romantic disembodiment. He parodies the nymph, by overturning the conception of the virgin as passive and the whore as active, and manufactures the active virgin.

The Mother For the Novicks, the initial determinant of masochism is the relation of the mother to pain in the first months of the infant's life. This initial association is then reiterated as it is applied in subsequent situations. This finding corresponds with Bersani's argument in T h e Freudian Body, in which he considers the tautological principle to be central to masochism, and the factor that links masochism and a certain type of art. For the Novicks, the child's association of the mother with pain is due not o