Joyce, “Penelope” and the Body
EUROPEAN JOYCE STUDIES 17 General Editor: Fritz Senn Associate Editor: Christine van Boheemen
JOYCE, “PENELOPE” AND THE BODY
Edited by
Richard Brown
Amsterdam - New York, NY 2006
The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence”. ISBN: 90-420-1919-0 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam – New York, NY 2006 Printed in The Netherlands
CONTENTS Acknowledgements
7
Bibliographical Note
9
Introduction Richard Brown
11
Joyce’s Answer to Philosophy: Writing the Dematerializing Object Christine van Boheemen-Saaf
31
The Body Writing: Joyce’s Pen Derek Attridge
47
Molly Inside and Outside “Penelope” Valérie Bénéjam
63
Verbal or Visual?: “Penelope” and Contemporary Psychology John Smurthwaite
75
Spinning with “Penelope” Finn Fordham
85
“Penelope” Without the Body Maud Ellmann
97
Body Words Richard Brown
109
Jack the Ripper and the Family Physician: Gynaecology and Domestic Medicine in “Penelope” Vike Martina Plock
129
“Indifferent Weib”: Giordano Bruno and the Heretical Mode of Vision in “Penelope” Gareth Joseph Downes
145
From the Confessional Hole to the Techno-Erotic: “Penelope” and Finnegans Wake. Andrew Norris
157
Beyond Masochistic Ritual in Joyce and Deleuze: Reading Molly as Non-Corporeal Body James Davies
171
The Geography of the Body in “Penelope” Paul O’Hanrahan
189
Contributors
197
Index
201
Illustration
170
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS A book like this one represents a significant effort on the part of all of its contributors and, for me, the rewarding opportunity to work with them in bringing this effort to fruition. As their essays will show, this particular group of contributors has been a privilege to work with. I’d like to acknowledge that and I hope that everyone whose work appears in this book can take some pleasure and satisfaction from their participation in it. My own interest in Joyce, I might note, goes at least as far back as to Sir Stephen Spender, at University College, London who first taught me a class on Ulysses and I’d like to thank him for beginning to suggest quite how much fun reading that book might be. It was Michael Mason at University College who supervised my Ph.D. research and helped to define some of its more recurrent themes. Academic study of Joyce’s work has taken me in intellectual directions which I would not have anticipated then but this book is one outcome I hope they might have been able to excuse or even, at times, enjoy. I’d especially thank my James Joyce Broadsheet co-editors Pieter Bekker and Alistair Stead and members of James Joyce Research Group in the School of English at the University of Leeds and its “Penelope” episode Reading Group and my other colleagues at Leeds who have shown interest in and support for Joyce studies there. I want to thank all those who came to the “Penelope” conference itself and especially those who contributed such interesting papers to it and to this volume and who have been loyal, patient, responsive and enthusiastic during the editing process. I want to thank Christine van Boheemen and Fritz Senn, the General Editors of European Joyce Studies and Marieke Schilling at Rodopi. I would like to thank Patricia Waugh for an invitation to talk on the theme of the body to the English Department at Durham University which fed my interest in some ramifications of the theme. As well as the work of well-known experts on Joyce from around the world, it is the enthusiasm and intelligent curiosity of my students at Leeds, undergraduate and postgraduate, some of whom have developed their interest far enough to become contributors to this volume themselves, which remains fundamental to the continuation of my reading of Joyce and I especially hope that they find things that engage them intellectually in this volume. I’m not least lucky to have a loving, patient and supportive family who let me stay out late doing scholarly work and trek off to conferences in far flung places to talk about James Joyce and even friends who don’t spend so much time reading James Joyce as me and who do a lot to help me to put into some kind of context the fact that I do.
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BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE In line with the conventions of this series, the following editions of Joyce’s works have been used unless where additional or alternative editions have been cited in the essay concerned. The following standard abbreviations for parenthetical textual references have been used.
CW
James Joyce, The Critical Writings of James Joyce. Ed. Ellsworth Mason and Richard Ellmann.New York: Viking Press, 1959.
D
James Joyce, Dubliners: Text, Criticism and Notes. Ed. Robert Scholes and A. Walton Litz. New York: Viking Press, 1969.
E
James Joyce, Exiles. Harmondsworth and New York: Penguin, 1973.
FW James Joyce, Finnegans Wake. London: Faber, 1939. JJA The James Joyce Archive. Ed. Michael Groden, et.als. in 63 volumes. New York and London: Garland, 1977-79. JJII Richard Ellmann, James Joyce. Revised Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982. LI, LII, LIII James Joyce, Letters of James Joyce. Volume I, ed. Stuart Gilbert. New York: Viking Press, 1957. Volumes II and III, ed. Richard Ellmann. New York: Viking Press, 1966. P
James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. New York: Penguin, 1993.
SH James Joyce, Stephen Hero. New York: New Directions, 1963. SL
James Joyce, Selected Letters of James Joyce. Ed. Richard Ellmann. New York: Viking, 1975.
U
James Joyce, Ulysses. Ed. Hans Walter Gabler. New York and London: Garland, 1986.
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INTRODUCTION RICHARD BROWN How’s the body?
“How’s the body?” (U 5.86). M’Coy’s apparently casual everyday question that he asks Leopold Bloom when they encounter each other just after 9.00 o’clock in the morning outside the Post Office in Westland Row in the “Lotos-Eaters” episode of Ulysses may well strike the contemporary critic of Modernist literature as an unignorable invitation to explore the representation of the body in the book.1 Bloom’s equally apparently thoughtless and conventional response, “Fine. How are you?” (U 5. 87), may, in its strictly mimetic context, be read as suggesting his personal frustration at that moment with M’Coy’s interruption of his thoughts. But, in the wider context of a contemporary critical debate about the representation of the body throughout Modernist literature and the arts, it might also be generalised to remind us that our identity itself can sometimes be construed in terms of the physical body and its wellbeing or otherwise and that Joyce’s Ulysses is a text which frequently calls our attention to that phenomenon. It might also remind us of the way that Modernist representations may more often than not come down to questions of modality, to the question of “how?”. For Ulysses, the book of eighteen episodes and many more than eighteen different styles, in which symbolic parts of the body are freely and widely dispersed throughout the various episodes, as well as for our own varied collection of essays upon it, this may be especially the case. In recent years the body has become a rich, inevitable and significant site of discussion in the fields of the humanities, especially in the visual arts and in contemporary continental philosophy and theory of gender, as well as in its traditional places in the physical sciences and these essays on the “Penelope” episode of Ulysses participate in this discussion. Indeed, I think it is fair to say, that they both apply and extend it in a variety of intriguing ways. This is perhaps no more than one might have expected from studies of a book whose author announced it to be an epic “of the cycle of the human body”,2 who had himself attempted and abandoned the study of 1. James Joyce, Ulysses (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), p.60. Hereafter episode and lines numbers are used to refer to Ulysses. 2. James Joyce, Selected Letters of James Joyce (London: Faber, 1978), pp. 2701. Hereafter SL.
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medicine and who prominently presents several doctors and medical institutions in his work. It is a discussion that one might especially expect to emerge from close attention to the “Penelope” episode of that book, in which the body and more specifically (though not exclusively) the woman’s body may be thought to be highlighted more prominently than in any other. Perhaps remarkably, “body” itself was not one of the “keywords” chosen by Raymond Williams, in his collection of the key terms that has come so familiarly to define a materialist approach to the study of culture. Williams’s list of terms jumped straight from “behaviour” to bourgeoisie”.3 Neither does it appear in one updated version edited by Julian Wolfreys which leaps from “Aporia” to “Carnivalesque” apparently denying significance to any words beginning with “B” at all, though it does finally appear in another updated version.4 With its complex range of connotations for the physical sciences, for politics, for culture and aesthetics and indeed for the very idea of materia or the material itself, “body” would obviously appear to qualify as such a key word, indeed even to challenge to be the keyword amongst all the keywords of our contemporary critical discourses, one to whose ramifications we seem inevitably to return. It is, as contemporary gender theorists have been at pains to point out, the body which matters in more senses that one, though as Judith Butler argues it may be that the mechanisms by which one body may come to matter more than another that should concern us.5 One might say that the body has become a term that is central to the paradigm shifts of the criticism of the new age. It was certainly in the new French feminism of the 1960s and after in those key early statements of theorists like Julia Kristeva and Hélène Cixous the body that was at the centre of the project of discussing writing. “Isn’t the final goal of writing to articulate the body?” asked Chantal Chawaf.6 Most of the perceptions in the essays that follow here emerge directly from detailed close readings of the text of this episode but they are frequently also suggestive of these broader intellectual contexts. Indeed it might be thought that they inevitably do so since the discussion of the body hinges upon and returns to the very origin of the discourses of the arts as forms of mimesis. In one influential book in this sphere to have appeared in recent years, Body Work by Peter Brooks, that mimetic function and its central role within literature as well as in such cognate fields as the visual
3. Raymond Williams, Keywords (London: Fontana, 1976), p.45. 4. Julian Wolfreys (ed), Critical Keywords in Literary and Cultural Theory (Basingstoke: Palgrave, Macmillan, 2004), p.24. Tony Bennett, Lawrence Grossberg and Meaghan Morris (eds), New Keywords, (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), pp. 15-17. 5. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter (New York: Routledge, 1993). 6. In Elaine Marks and Isabel de Courtivron (eds), The New French Feminisms (Brighton: Harvester, 1980), pp. 245-264.
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arts are elegantly and profitably explored.7 Brooks begins, as does Mimesis itself, with Homer’s Odyssey and with Odysseus’s scar that is itself an identifying mark of the body. This point of origin was, significantly, the one that was also taken as a starting point by Eric Auerbach in his classic study of Mimesis in literature, which remains a general historical paradigm of great range and force for the study of early twentieth-century Modernism, even if Auerbach gave Ulysses itself a cautious critique.8 Brooks surveys the modes and manners of representation that begin with the history of the novel as a transgression of the newly created bounds of domestic privacy that emerged in the eighteenth century and he continues through to the nineteenth century and such “hyperrealistic” modes of representation as he finds in the fiction of Emile Zola and the painting of Gustave Courbet. Such “hyperrealistic” modes he sees as bound up within the terms of the so-called “phallic gaze”. For him, as for Auerbach, early twentieth-century Modernism is especially important as a historical moment of crisis in representation and it is for other critics of the arts too, such as William Ewing who, looking at the art of photography, boldly labelled the twentieth century The Century of the Body.9 The early twentieth century and its artistic exuberance and innovation can be construed in many ways but this is surely among the more suggestive and convincing of them. In Brooks’s history, the representations of Tahiti in the work of Gauguin and Sigmund Freud’s work in “voicing the body” of the hysteric through psychoanalysis are taken as particularly important aspects of this development of or break within mimetic tradition. One might equally profitably take many Modernist literary texts, not least Ulysses, where the bold choice of the Homeric structural analogy and the definitive literary example of a Modernistic experimentation with medium and form can be found alongside each other. Brooks does mention Joyce in his history alongside D.H.Lawrence and the Marquis de Sade in the context of a discussion of the censorship of the representations of the body in these texts that confirms his sense of the profound cultural challenge of this moment in history for his narrative account. He’s barely, though, able to touch on the extent to which and the variety of ways in which Joyce’s text and this episode in particular may raise issues of representation beyond the mimetic frame in more than in the censorship debate. A suggestive part of this debate may be that it reveals the extent to which our discourses in this area are to some extent inevitably bound by (or else
7. Peter Brooks, Body Work (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard, 1993), p. 286. 8. Eric Auerbach, Mimesis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953). 9. William Ewing, The Body (London: Thames and Hudson, 1998) and The Century of the Body: 100 Photoworks, 1900-2000 (London: Thames and Hudson, 2000).
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may be construed as a struggle to overcome) the distinction between subject and object that defines the mimetic tradition as well as it might define the enlightenment philosophic tradition that emerges from and is associated with Descartes. Brooks ends by saying of the body that “Its otherness from ourselves, as well as its intimacy, make it the inevitable object of an everrenewed writing project.” It might also be thought that this project, at least since Nietzsche and since Freud, can be partly defined in terms of an attempt to think beyond the subject-object distinction that this formula still implies. This distinction, in different ways across the different intellectual disciplines which conceive and govern the body, may be thought to tend to objectify and control and to see the body in terms of its diseases or to “pathologize” it in ways that make our modern civilisations modern but at the same time may make them uncomfortable or even potentially uninhabitable cultural environments for our full bodily selves. Beyond the primarily “epistemological” desire of knowing the body from some supposedly superior other site of consciousness or being, a more contemporary postCartesian project to which Joyce’s Modernism and the “Penelope” episode might be thought to contribute, may emerge as an “ontological” project: one of being the body. At least they might attempt to resist the unwitting endorsement of ways of conceiving of being that deny the body in the sense that these Cartesian traditions of thought may almost inevitably tend to a denial against which Freud and Nietzsche and, we might add, Joyce’s modernising creativity rebelled. Discussions might at any rate be informed by an engagement with the debates about the body that run through contemporary continental philosophy and might be approached, for example, through a recent collection of essays edited by Donn Welton. In The Body, he includes key extracts from phenomenological and postmodern psychoanalytical and feminist thought: Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Lacan, Foucault, Kristeva and Irigaray, arguing that, beyond attempts to use concepts of the body to contest such dualisms in Hegel, Marx, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, it was especially in phenomenology that the challenge to Cartesian dualism took place.10 His companion volume Body and Flesh contains essays by fifteen contemporary writers such as contemporary feminists like Judith Butler and Susan Bordo who continue to refigure the debate about the body in terms of the politics of the constructions of gender and of culture.11 It will, however, be for many critics that representation of the role of the body in the formation of the thinking subject and his or her entry into
10. Donn Welton, The Body: Blackwell Readings in Continental Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), p. 3. 11. Donn Welton, Body and Flesh: A Philosophical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998).
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15
linguistic and symbolic experience that was so memorably defined by Jacques Lacan in his concepts of the “mirror phase” and of the body in pieces (le corps morcelé) from which it constructs itself, that most powerfully haunts deep modern conceptions of the bodily in the twentieth century and this will, no doubt, remain especially true for critics of Joyce since Joyce formed such an important symbolic presence in Lacan’s own work.12 Lacanian theory makes the experience of the body linguistic (and vice versa) and thoroughly opened to interpretation and above replaces the experience of the body in the centre rather than at the peripheries of being, being a process of self-fashioning in relation to the body and its ideal image of itself. Joyce’s Ulysses might be seen as being fully immersed in such debates. It appeared at a pivotal, perhaps terminal, moment in the history of representation. It is defined by its subversive explicitness in the representation of the body. It contains representations of contemporary medical practice and practitioners. It offered itself as an “epic” of the body. Its author provided elaborate “schemae” in which particular episodes are connected to particular organs and each episode by virtue of its differences of style may be said to represent the body in its distinctive way. The “Penelope” episode of Ulysses, as several of these essays that follow may suggest, is undoubtedly a style as well as a representation and indeed at times can seem a way of talking from, as well as about, the body. A number of questions are raised. What are the various ways in which analysis might explore the complex relations of the body to Joyce’s text here? Whose bodies (those of the author, the characters, the audience?), if any specific body at all, might be the most appropriate subject of our investigation? How might the idea of the body cross over with the phenomena of gender as it does so conspicuously here? In terms suggested by Brooks, might not the character of Molly Bloom, for example, provide a model of the “talking body” that goes a little beyond the talking body of Freud’s Dora in voicing the perspective of an other that may lie both within and beyond the territorial frame of the masculine gaze? Might not the bodiliness of Molly Bloom with its constructed perspective and language of gender and its explicit attempt to make a style out of bodily words, that are not so much representational as they are built into the discourse of 12. Jacques Lacan, “Le stade du miroir comme formateur de la function du Je” in Ecrits I (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1966), pp. 93-7. Translated in Philip Rice and Patricia Waugh, Modern Literary Theory: A Reader, 3rd edn. (London: Arnold, 1996), pp.126-131. Welton includes a relevant extract from Lacan’s essay “Some Reflections on the Ego”, first published in 1953, and an essay on the body in Lacanian theory by Charles Bonner. See The Body, pp. 213-251. For the role of Joyce in the work of Lacan see Jacques Aubert, Joyce Avec Lacan (Paris: Navarin Editeur, 1987).
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representation, enable us to re-ask substantial philosophical and culturaltheoretical questions of our time in productive and potentially novel ways? The following essays are thoroughly embedded in the experience and details of the episode in question. Meanwhile relevant theorists of the body from a variety of intellectual traditions who are invoked by them include Giordano Bruno, Freud, Nietzsche, Francis Galton, George Tyrrell, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Jean Laplanche, Adam Phillips, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Slavoj Žižek, Terry Eagleton, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Paul Virilio and Michael Bakhtin to name but one range of references. Much of the discussion of the body in literary and cultural theory owes a debt of allegiance to psychoanalytic thought but often goes hand in hand with a turn in psychoanalysis towards the social sphere. Steve Pile’s The Body in the City: Psychoanalysis, Space and Subjectivity reveals this kind of mix of the inner and outer realities that compose the modern environment.13 In many such discussions, the body is invoked as a location of being and also as a site of political contention. In that respect it may be useful to suggest among the many alternative ways of construing the body that arise here, a surviving kind of alternation not so much between psychoanalysis and sociology as between post-psychoanalytic paradigms that we may associate which Michel Foucault on the one hand and Maurice MerleauPonty on the other. What we may call the Foucauldian historical paradigm at once took and transformed our sense of the cultural progression from the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries as a progression from repression to liberation of the body. For Foucault the “discursive explosion” of modernity is more precisely one of discourse in which the body becomes the central focus of a new epistemology but may thereby be all the more tied up within the problematics of epistemology: the object or victim of a system of knowing that may constrain as well as liberate. Pleasure becomes subject to the operations of power. The possibility that the body may be a site of liberatory agency or resistance in itself beyond the constraints of its discursive subjection becomes less of a possibility in such classic poststructuralist positions and a sense of entrapment and anxiety may be the result. To that extent such discourses may leave certain effects of this subject-object distinction unwittingly in place. By contrast the phenomenological tradition of thought may be thought to have offered an important opportunity for a resistance to the Cartesian objectification of the body in which the body becomes definable as a site of being rather than as one of knowing and this may help us to articulate alternative ways in which the representation of the body in the “Penelope” 13. Steve Pile, The Body in the City: Psychoanalysis, Space and Subjectivity (London: Routledge, 1996).
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episode plays with and against ideas of representation and of distinctions between subject and object that may underpin them. In The Phenomenology of Perception, for example, Maurice MerleauPonty defines a concept of bodily or “embodied” being in which the materiality of the body is no longer either taken for granted or denied but instead becomes the grounding of a materialised notion of being. The objective status of the body within what Merleau-Ponty calls mechanistic physiology and classical psychology is challenged by his thought on the spatiality of the body, its modes of sense and perception, its relation to the natural and to temporality, its inevitably sexual being-in-the world, and these may become defining grounds of this new cogito.14 The approaches to the body in the thought of Merleau-Ponty and Foucault may perhaps then serve as contrasting examples in which ontology and epistemology, being and knowing, play out a contemporary dialectic through which as varied and problematic a literary text as Joyce’s Ulysses can usefully be re-imagined. In that respect the hard physical work of these essays that follow can be construed as a good deal more than just the routine work of examining a previously unexamined detail of a well-known (or even already overanalysed) literary text within yet another new intellectual paradigm. We might instead claim that together they represent a textually-grounded opportunity to invite us to explore long-standing assumptions about the nature of artistic representation and indeed to re-think our being in ways that glimpse a space beyond the Cartesian and the subject-object divides. On the other hand neither Foucault nor Merleau-Ponty might be thought to offer theories of the body which quite do sufficient justice to the potential for the exuberant celebratory comedy, undefinability and unpredictability of bodiliness as it appears throughout a book like Ulysses. It is therefore no surprise that some critics here openly demonstrate a profitable dependence on or else a return to the work of Mikhail Bakhtin and what he called in Rabelais and his World “the material bodily principle in grotesque realism” which has become a recognised basis of much of the study of the body in literature.15 One problem of the instrumental thinking which governs our everyday conceptions of the body is that it defines this body as a series of “organs” each of which is understood in terms of a certain function or a functional relation to the whole and/or its pathology. Bakhtin certainly helps us see beyond this but may not perhaps help us to recognise how deeply we may be constrained by it. As a number of critics have demonstrated, Michel
14. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception (Routledge Classics, 2002, Gallimard, 1945). 15. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), pp. 18-19.
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Foucault voices one critique of this subordination of the human body to the notion of function in the discursive sphere that is particularly strongly political.16 Amongst the contemporary theories which attempt to plot directions beyond Foucault and to turn such organicist and functionalist thinking radically inside out, the concept of a “body without organs”, that recurs in the thought of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, especially, for example, in A Thousand Plateaus and in Deleuze’s reading of the painting of Francis Bacon, can be a particularly striking one.17 In such a theory of the body Deleuze and Guattari draw rather upon their reading of the Ethics of Spinoza, in which the hitherto unexplored possibilities and capabilities of the body and the body’s being-in-the-world become indeed the basis of a radical theorising of it, producing an ethics or “ethology” in which “the relations of speed and slowness, of the capacities for affecting and being affected” may be the basis for a new understanding of ethics.18 It may be no coincidence in this respect that Joyce has his Molly Bloom name Spinoza of all philosophers during this episode (U 18.1115) since it is frequently towards the tradition of Spinoza that theorists have been encouraged to turn. On the other hand the reading of Spinoza in itself may not quite be sufficient to account for the kind of linkage between Bakhtinian and Lacanian conceptions of the body that might be seen in a Deleuzian process of eternal “becoming”. Whilst it may not necessarily imply that each of these organs should only be defined in terms of its pathology, Joyce’s stated division of his book into episodes, each of which has a “certain organ” which is “interconnected and interrelated in the somatic scheme of the whole” would appear to gesture towards precisely such a combination of the separation of the body into functionally-defined organs, each with a specified connection to the whole which can be found in the conventional organic notion that underpins much medical discourse. Yet it does so in an exaggerated almost arbitrary way that questions the extent to which this organic scheme may be assumed to be a natural order and to call the basis of such assumptions into question. In the essays that follow, the capacity of Joyce’s text to revisit and subvert many 16. See for example Moira Gatens, “Through a Spinozist Lens: Ethology, Difference, Power” in Paul Patton (ed.) Deleuze: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), pp. 162-187 and Moira Gatens, Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power and Corporeality (London: Routledge, 1996). 17. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W. Smith (London: Continuum International, 2004), see especially Chapter 6 “Painting and Sensation” and Chapter 7 “Hysteria” where Deleuze defines and appropriates the notion of the non-organic body from Artaud, pp.34-43 and 44-55. 18. Gatens in Patton, pp. 167-8.
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such conventional assumptions is continually in evidence and the attempt to see the body both in the centre of being and in a process of becoming may be evidenced throughout.
Joyce’s and Modernism’s Critics of the Body That critics of Modernist literary texts and of Joyce in particular have been aware of and attentive to Joyce’s representations of the body is not itself in question. Indeed from the earliest of those who objected to the book on various grounds of obscenity or defended Joyce despite such supposed weakness as what H.G.Wells called Joyce’s “cloacal obsession” the presence of the body in his work has been an issue. Some recent readings of Modernist literature which are based on its distinctive presence there include Tim Armstrong’s Modernism, Technology and the Body and Christine Froula’s Modernism’s Body: Sex, Culture and Joyce.19 Katherine Mullin’s James Joyce, Sexuality and Social Purity has demonstrated the urgency of placing Joyce’s treatment of the sexual body in an engaged cultural-political context. The problems of the trans-gendered or anomalously gendered body as they surface in the modernist period and beyond have been explored by such critics as Jay Prosser and Tracy Hargreaves.20 In the argument of Allison Pease, it is through its radical and subversive strategies of representing the body that literary and artistic Modernism makes its bold gambit to cross over the cultural divide between popular and elitist art and many of our Modernist-inspired established academic strategies for the disinterested representing this literature, not least our training of readers to ask not so much “what?” as “how?” may be understood as a part of this complex negotiation.21 It was in a couple of articles in some of the earliest issues of the James Joyce Broadsheet back in the early 1980s that some of the abiding contemporary issues relating to the body and language in Joyce were voiced. Colin MacCabe explored the relation between the language of Finnegans Wake and the body that might perform or comprehend such
19. Tim Armstrong, Modernism, Technology and The Body (Cambridge University Press, 1998). Christine Froula, Modernism’s Body: Sex, Culture and Joyce (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). 20. Katherine Mullin, James Joyce, Sexuality and Social Purity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Jay Prosser, Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003). Tracy Hargreaves, Androgyny in Modern Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). 21. Allison Pease, Modernism, Mass Culture and the Aesthetics of Obscenity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
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language as well as the body that may be suggested within it.22 David Lodge made a direct analogy between Bakhtin’s theory of the Rabelaisean body and that of the character of HCE in Finnegans Wake, which he described as “a body defined by the organs of self-transgression, the bowels and the phallus, mouth and anus, a body perpetually in the process of becoming, eating and defecating, copulating, giving birth and dying at the same time, through the displacements and condensations of carnival and dream”.23 A Bakhtinian approach has often underpinned some of the most distinctive close and contextual studies of the treatment of the body in Joyce. R. Brandon Kershner’s well-known essay “The World’s Strongest Man: Joyce or Sandow?” takes the book Physical Strength and How to Obtain It by the well-known turn-of-the-century body-builder Eugene Sandow that is mentioned by Leopold Bloom in Ulysses and provides a detailed description of its contents with photographs.24 According to Kershner both Bloom and Sandow are engaged in kinds of advertising culture typical of the time and the contrast between Bloom’s flabbiness and lack of success and Sandow’s physical prowess and greater success is drawn, though perhaps the opportunity to discuss the body as such here is not fully taken. The spectacle of women’s bodies as well as those of men was much used in the popular culture of that time. Several of the essays in the 1993 special issue of the James Joyce Quarterly in which Kershner’s essay appeared, including another substantial and also amply illustrated article and introduction by the volume’s special editor Garry Leonard, can help to demonstrate the importance of the representation of the body in that culture, even if the primary focus is on a Lacanian analysis of commodity culture rather than on the body as such.25 It is perhaps among those Joyce critics whose treatment of Modernist literature relates to their understanding of Modernist painting rather than those who draw connections with Joyce’s interests in music who most tend to discuss his texts in relation to representations of the body. In his book on 22. Colin McCabe, “Joyce and Chomsky: The Body and Language”, James Joyce Broadsheet No. 2, (May 1980), p. 1. 23. David Lodge, “Double Discourses: Joyce and Bakhtin”, James Joyce Broadsheet No. 11 (June 1983), p. 1. 24. R. Brandon Kershner, “The World’s Strongest Man: Joyce or Sandow?” James Joyce Quarterly Vol. 30, No. 4 (Summer 1993)/ Vol 31, No.1 (Fall 1993), pp. 667694. 25. Garry Leonard, “Joyce and Advertising: Advertising and Commodity Culture in Joyce’s Fiction”, James Joyce Quarterly, Vol. 30, No. 4 (Summer 1993)/ Vol. 31, No. 1 (Fall 1993), pp. 573-592 and Garry Leonard, “Power, Pornography and the Problem of Pleasure: The Semerotics of Desire and Commodity Culture”, pp. 615666.
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Modernism and the visual arts, Daniel Schwarz, for example, “reconfigures” Modernism according to classic Modernist visual texts such as Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907); and in his discussion of “Penelope” in Reading Joyce’s “Ulysses” he follows Richard Ellmann in understanding the representation of Molly’s menstruation and other bodily processes as Joyce’s insistence on the everyday process of the body as opposed to the abstract or categorising tendencies of the mind.26 One notable exception to this music/visual arts, mind/body distinction is Zack Bowen’s discussion of the different contradictory associations of fatness and thinness in Joyce that is one of the most enjoyably communicative as well as being one of the most directly body-centered approaches to the text which have appeared so far.27 Within those areas of Joyce criticism which are more influenced by materialist cultural theory not all critics invoke Bakhtin as explicitly as Kershner does. Other critics may push more towards theoretical engagements with Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Antonio Gramsci, Terry Eagleton and Gayatri Spivak. Some of the interests and some of the complexities that may result from taking the body as a political and aesthetic metaphor in the light of such kinds of materialist theory may be observed in Patrick McGee’s treatment of the body in his book Joyce Beyond Marx, especially in the section on “Ethical Desires” and “Ulysses as ‘Profane Illumination’”. For McGee, the “monumental act of indiscretion” that is Joyce’s masterwork can be defined in terms of his cultural constructions of the body according to which a clear difference may be established between Stephen’s and Bloom’s relations to the body, but in which the project of the book itself can be defined as the construction of an aesthetic that is also an ethical and political body that is yet to come into being.28 It is indeed intriguing to think of the Joycean body as a community that is yet to come fully into being but it might also be appropriate to see the extent to which that body both is and has long been in a process of such becoming and indeed would inevitably always be in such a process. Essays in this volume might be thought to develop further our knowledge of the cultural-physical encyclopaedia that is Joyce’s text whilst frequently 26. Dan Schwarz, Reconfiguring Modernism: Explorations in the Relationship Between Modern Art and Modern Literature (New York: St. Martin’s 1997), pp. 137-141 and Reading Joyce’s “Ulysses” (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987,2004), pp. 266-7. 27. Zack Bowen, in a paper delivered at the James Joyce Foundation North American Conference at Victoria University Toronto, June 1997. 28. Patrick McGee, Joyce Beyond Marx (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001), pp. 112-130.
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responding to or connecting with, in both explicit and implicit ways, such theoretical potentialities. Reading “Penelope” It may have taken the concerted efforts of some high-powered feminist critics both from Continental and the Anglo-American traditions amongst others to replace the “Penelope” episode in the centre of our conception of Ulysses as Joyce’s “clou” or star–turn rather than as a kind of “coda”, or even afterthought. In what was, before the present volume, the only collection of essays to be devoted entirely to the episode, Kathleen McCormick gave a “revisionist” history of the criticism of the episode beginning with some of the more remarkably dated and negative readings of Molly’s character from critics of the 1950s and even 1960s such as Darcy O’Brien and Mitchell Morse; and McCormick shows the value of that reclamation by feminists publishing in the 1980s like Bonnie Kime Scott and Suzette Henke and Ellen Carol Jones. Many of the essays in that valuable but relatively little-known volume mark the transition and the impressive range of contemporary approaches that may emerge from what has been an exciting North American take on cultural studies and gender studies, led by Cheryl Herr and Kimberly Devlin on femininity and performance, by Garry Leonard and Jennifer Wicke on commodity culture, and with a colonial and postcolonial dimension in, for example, Susan Bazargan’s essay on Molly’s Gibraltar. One pair of essays is presented as representing Molly as “Bodied” and “Embodied” and this has pieces by Margaret Mills Harper on “drapery” in the episode as well as Ewa Ziarek’s essay on the competing interests of the organic and the technological in Molly’s erotic imagination.29 Critics have been reading the episode now for more than eighty years and the transition even between the kinds of reading practised during the past twenty or so years is striking, especially as regards the treatment of the body. An essay on “Penelope” by Father Robert Boyle S.J. was included in Hart and Hayman’s 1977 collection of essays on single episodes from Ulysses.30 In it, Boyle placed the episode in a tradition of Shakespearean and Chaucerian representations of female character and offered what must have seemed a common-sensical account of Molly’s character as it appears 29. Richard Pearce, Molly Blooms: A Polylogue on “Penelope” and Cultural Studies (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994). 30. Robert Boyle, “Penelope” in Clive Hart and David Hayman, James Joyce’s “Ulysses”: Critical Essays (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), pp. 407-433.
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in the text, including an account of her love-life and current sex-life with Bloom and of the structure of the eight sentences of which the episode is composed, castigating an earlier piece of his own, which he says was too moralistic and negative about her. Reconceiving the idea of the volume of essays, one on each episode, in 1999 with a specific gender-revisionism in mind, Kimberley Devlin and Marilyn Reizbaum include a chapter by Christine van Boheemen which is more fully informed by gender theory and a self-consciously gendered perspective and she begins by contextualising the episode rather within the tradition of the “speaking vagina” that she finds in Diderot’s Bijoux Indiscrets. For Boheemen it is the construction of gender by the male author that is at stake, rather than any judgement on the female character, and that act of construction is to be understood as a complex psychological and cultural process which constructs a “heavenly” or “astral” body out of writing and textuality that may speak as much to the absence or lack of actual body as to its presence. Indeed she suggests that the “Molly” so constructed by the episode may now even emerge as a code for a gay man’s expression of his sexuality, as it does, in the example of a recent personal ad she quotes from an issue of The New York Review of Books.31 Many of the above essays were among the useful points of critical reference for us in the extended group reading of the “Penelope” episode that began in the School of English at Leeds in 1997 and proceeded meticulously at a pace of some thirty lines in each two-hour session over a number of years, culminating in the November 2002 conference on Joyce, “Penelope” and the Body at which most of the essays which follow were presented. As well as such inspiring and sophisticated critical and theoretical work, we frequently had recourse to any number of the vital specialist reading tools to which the Joycean reader can turn, such as the annotations of Don Gifford and Robert Seidman and others, the detailed textual histories available from Hans Gabler’s full-edition of the text and the relevant Garland Archive volumes, the chronology of Molly’s fictional life in John Henry Raleigh The Chronicle of Leopold and Molly Bloom, the list of identifications of Molly’s third person masculine pronouns and of so many other named characters in Bernard and Shari Benstock’s Who’s He When He’s at Home. We also visited recorded performances of the episode most regularly listening to the Radio Telefis Eireann 1982 radio broadcast of
31. Christine van Boheemen, “Molly’s Heavenly Body and the Economy of the Sign: The Invention of Gender in ‘Penelope’” in Kimberley J. Devlin and Marilyn Reizbaum (eds.) Ulysses: En-Gendered Perspectives (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999), pp. 267-281.
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the whole of Ulysses in which Peg Monahan reads the part of Molly Bloom.32 Many Joycean and/or merely curious readers of the episode from the University of Leeds and from nearby Universities, such as York and often from further afield joined us during this extended period of detailed close reading of the text and several of these contributed papers to the conference and for subsequent publication. We were especially fortunate in having the regular and committed contributions of my colleagues Pieter Bekker, Alistair Stead and Katie Wales without whose enthusiasm neither the Reading Group nor the conference would have been possible. David Pierce from the College of Ripon and York St. John was another regular contributor to the Group who brought to it a range of invaluable cultural expertise. Though none of these last mentioned did, in the event, contribute papers to the conference or for publication, the depth of their knowledge and scholarship and intelligence are felt throughout. I’d like to thank Sharron Kyriacou and Léonie Drury who were among those who generously helped me in the organisation of conference. We were especially fortunate in having a distinguished group of panel chairs both to direct and to contribute to our discussion. These included Andrew Gibson, Edward Larrissy and Katy Mullin alongside these already mentioned contributors. It goes without saying that we were also delighted to have the invitation of European Joyce Studies to present this volume of essays on the episode to this invaluable specialist series that has now been established for some fifteen years and to which I have felt especially attached since I contributed to the very first of the issues on Joyce, Modernity and its Mediation. Several of the contributors among them, of course, Christine van Boheemen and Fritz Senn have helped speed and make more agreeable in various ways the progressing of the editing of the volume and I am grateful to them.
32. Don Gifford and Robert J. Seidman, “Ulysses” Annotated: Notes for James Joyce’s “Ulysses” Annotated New and Revised Edition (New York: Dutton, 1988). James Joyce, “Ulysses”: A Critical and Synoptic Edition. Edited by Hans Walter Gabler in 3 volumes (New York: Garland Publishing, 1984). Wolfhard Steppe, A Handlist to James Joyce’s “Ulysses” (New York: Garland, 1985). Shari and Bernard Benstock, Who’s He When He’s at Home (Evanston: University of Illinois Press, 1980). John Henry Raleigh, The Chronicle of Leopold and Molly Bloom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977). James Joyce, Ulysses: Complete Recording of Original 1982 RTE Radio Drama Production (Dublin: RTE, 1982 etc.).
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Where’s the body? Of the essays that are included in this volume Christine van Boheemen’s opening essay “Joyce’s Answer to Philosophy: Writing the Dematerialising Object” offers what may be among the most intellectually ambitious of the claims made for this extraordinary episode as being a reply by literature to the tradition of thought since Plato which may have attempted to marginalise its claim to truth and a deconstruction of the history of thought in terms of the body. Van Boheemen here asks a series of highly-pointed questions about the text and its representations of both gender and the body and reiterates and extrapolates upon its imagery of flowers and flow before embarking on a fruitful contrast between Joyce’s speaking Penelope figure and an analogously voluble “Penelope” figure that she discovers in the character Flora Finching, first love of Arthur Clennam from Dickens’ Little Dorrit. Boheemen pointedly compares Clennam’s return to his now-ageing Flora with a cultural anxiety about women’s ageing and the menopause as a loss of flow to which, she argues, Joyce’s “Penelope” responds, thereby clarifying and extending aspects of her influential notion of the figure of Molly as an astral or heavenly textual body. Joyce’s use of the abbreviation “Pen” in notes, drafts and text as a shorthand for the character, as well as for the episode as a whole, confirms and extends the notion of the episode as one in which sexuality is fetishistically transformed into textuality in these terms. Since the body itself and the relationship between the body and writing is made to seem so metaphorical in many uses of these terms by recent critics and theorists, it is especially refreshing to see them deployed with a new materiality and a new literalism, as well as in a conceptually original way, in Derek Attridge’s essay here. The question of “how” is in part, as I began this introduction by saying, a question of modality – but it can also be a question of practicality or even capability. How in these latter senses, Attridge asks, did Joyce actually write the “Penelope” episode? Taking his lead from the concept voiced by Jacques Derrida, that of “le corps écrivant”, he asks in what physical circumstances, what rooms, what furniture, with what kinds of pen or pencil, what writing implements, on what kinds of paper, facing which kinds of problems and constraints did Joyce write? How much or little we know about these kinds of questions from the biographical sources, from letters, from the surviving artefacts of the manuscripts and typescripts becomes newly evident here. To attempt to answer such questions is to reconstruct a vivid scenario of Joyce’s life of exile and of travel, a family life and a writing life which was often hampered by the constricted spaces of his shared living accommodation, its bedrooms and by the most incapacitating of bodily ailments for the writer – that of near
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blindness. This essay provides a new appreciation of the achievement of Joyce’s writing and a new way of studying the material circumstances of writing that may be said to be found both inside and outside of the text itself. That such an exploration is conducted both inside and outside the text may forge a link between Attridge’s essay and that of Valérie Bénéjam, which focuses on the figure of Molly Bloom as she appears both inside and outside of the “Penelope” episode. Benejam sees Molly’s body as being represented from "Calypso" onwards in synecdochic fragment, like Van Boheemen fetishistically, here in the sense that it appears in parts and by associations with her discarded clothing and possessions. The intriguing suggestion that this discarded book may establish a certain associative link between literature and the body is glimpsed here, as the argument proceeds to define Molly's body by its absence, an absence that ensures the reader's desire at the same time as it ensures that all the reader can hope to attain is the body of the book. If Molly’s body is primarily a textual or linguistic body rather than one which exists in some physical substance somewhere beyond the text, we may still need to clarify where and in precisely what kind of textuality it may reside. John Smurthwaite’s essay examines “Penelope” in the context of some contemporary ideas in the field of cognitive psychology, with particular reference to the concept of the categorization of individuals as “verbal” or “visual” thinkers, which was developed in the work of Sir Francis Galton. Do we see the episode as “spoken” or “written” language; is it language or thought? By means of these questions and in this context, a common conception of “Penelope” as a “mentally spoken” monologue is challenged and here it is cleverly proposed that it might rather more precisely be described as a “mentally visualized” written text. In what other ways, might we be able to define the location of this symbolic Molly in the text? Finn Fordham offers another extremely imaginative and original kind of answer which may touch closely with the contemporary suggestion that occurs in Deleuze and Guattari of an ethos that might be seen in terms of speed. With an appropriate sense of history, Fordham’s essay takes its acknowledged point of origin from the Futurist fascination with speed and the velocities of composition and performance which can empirically define a text as being in motion rather than as at rest. By contrast with Marinetti, Joyce, Fordham says, prefers to inhabit the slownesses of the body, “its stumblings, compressions and openings”. The body may be that which registers socio-economic forces but this essay also claims that, in this episode, Joyce departs from simple naturalism and its accompanying social critiques, requiring an attention on the part of the reader to a new dynamics or a “kinematics” of reading which may have to draw at least part of its terminology from classical physics.
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In her remarkably fresh and original essay, Maud Ellmann sees Molly Bloom as no more trapped by a literal kind of fleshliness than does Fordham. Indeed her newly imagined picture of the role of the character in the episode does much to help us re-situate our readings of it in terms of the Modernistic crisis of representation that is a crisis of representation of the body. The language of the episode and Molly’s apparently voiced desire for escape from it are defined here as desires that are not so much a desiring for the flesh as for a “disenfleshment” into what Ellmann calls “an undiscovered country of intensities, scorched by the flightpaths of desire”. Critics may hitherto have failed to take the opportunity to more fully explore the character and meaning of the kiss. But Ellmann here goes well beyond the suggestive model that she finds in the work of Adam Phillips, towards a new understanding of the relationship between kissing and language, between kissing and the naming of libidinal places, like Molly’s Gibraltar, for example. Her essay explores a kissing that rehabituates the previously gendered, individuated erogenous zones of the body of the earth, into “a terra incognita, blazed with kisses”. It is of these new geographies and of this new burning Penelopean version of the kiss that Ellmann writes. Modernism may be configured in terms of its representations of the body and Postmodernism no less actively engaged in an attempt to voice and resituate the body in language. In this broad cultural context, the unique strategy of the episode’s attempt to make a logic of “sense” that is in excess of the conventional constraints of the “sentence” is discussed by Richard Brown, who offers a reading of the four “body words” that Joyce used in the process of its composition. These words, it is suggested, provide more than a euphemistic or coded implantation of the conventionally obscene. They offer rather an alternative kind of syntax and punctuation, one that provides a strategy for the defining of its rhythms and the association of its senses and ideas. In what senses may the “yes” of the body language of the episode become another term for Molly’s female body part or else that part become a “yes”? In what senses may “because” become a “breast” or the “breast” become “because”? In exploring these unexpected identifications that were announced by Joyce, we may open into other dimensions of Joyce’s body language than linguistic reference as such. The words may provide an alternative, non-instrumental and non-referential form of sensitivity to the erotic places of the woman’s body and to its need to express its libidinality both in and in despite of a conventional linguistic form. The language of the body existed in a potentially repressive contemporary institutional context, a context which required the courageous intervention of the women of the time, and this history can be illuminated by detailed contextual research as is valuably demonstrated here in the essay by Vike Plock on two important medical subtexts for “Penelope”, Molly’s Family Physician and the moralistic discourses that surrounded the case of
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the notorious contemporary criminal Jack the Ripper. Nineteenth-century gynaecology and popular domestic medicine both worked to control acceptable female social conduct in ways that Molly’s awareness of them can expose. For these reasons the contradictory and subversive aspects of Molly’s feminine identity should be understood as an engaged attempt on Joyce’s part to question the controlling aspects of such institutions. Joyce both embraces and transforms the contemporary image of the voluptuous woman in order to build a more complex and enabling image of women for his work, this essay claims. Joyce’s representations of the body in general and of the gendered body in particular may, as Gareth Downes demonstrates, also be understood as being staged in a heretical dialogue with other contemporary authorities, such as the neo-scholasticism of contemporary Ultramontane Catholicism and its ontological prescriptions. Joyce’s heresy is purposeful, coherent and consciously avowed and it depends most of all upon the work of the heretic Giordano Bruno, who Joyce so admired, and his development of the doctrine of the coincidence of contraries, which Downes sees as connected to Molly’s logic of apparent self-contradiction. He sees Bruno’s “immanentist mode of vision” as being present behind Molly’s celebrations of nature and of the body and to further develop his sense of the importance of such contexts, he enlists the Irish Jesuit George Tyrrell who wrote that “A heresy is only a rejected variation; but the principle of heresy is a principle of progress and life.” The body is construed in terms of the practice of confession in another of the essays here, written by Andrew Norris. His is an essay that also places Joyce’s text in an implied dialogue with his education and early cultural context but also one that works by close reading of the letter “O” in the episode and one which forges strong links between Joyce’s representation of the body and those in a contemporary work of fiction like J.G.Ballard’s Crash or in the biotechnological fantasies of the Chapman Brothers of contemporary British avant-garde art. The body in Molly’s monologue, says Norris, is full of holes, a vessel which must be regularly filled and emptied, but the refusal to confess which Joyce’s writing also embodies may work to disrupt such dynamics and such flow. It may be understood as an attempt to take full responsibility upon oneself and thereby to be condemned to hesitate, like Bloom, between resistance and despair. Molly’s monologue is a style that anticipates the contemporary in that, within it, the secular is confused with the sacred and the body flows into and around itself and with others. Joyce’s choice for it of the temporal label “None”, defines an eternal present in which desire may encounter itself in itself and in every other. That the “when” of the body in the episode may sit as a question alongside its “how” and its “where” is confirmed in Jim Davies’s essay.
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This is the essay that most explicitly and systematically depends upon a particular theoretical model, derived in this case from the work of Deleuze and Guattari. Davies brings to the episode such concepts or anti-concepts as Deleuze and Guattari’s “symptomatology” and “schizoanalysis”, their notion of the “rhizomatic”, of “masochism”, of “becoming” and of the “body without organs”. By these means he is able to construct a complex picture of the relation of the text to its futurity which also invokes and inverts the medical concept of health. According to Davies, beyond the masochism of our socially-construct selves, Joyce’s language offers us: ‘Health as literature, as writing” one which “consists in inventing a people who are missing. It is the task of the fabulating function to invent a people.” The “where-ing” of the body in the episode and the various ways in which its locations might be explored makes for an itinerary that runs through almost all of these essays. Paul O’Hanrahan’s essay “On the Geography of the Body in ‘Penelope’” offers an evocative description of the Dublin environment which Joyce creates for Molly, “cold, repressed…mired in economic necessity” and this is contrasted with the “beautiful, open vistas” and warmth, freedom and sensuality of her Gibraltar. O’Hanrahan begins to reveal how images of geography and of the body are interlinked in the episode and contrasted between these two locations. The images of the fires inside the body in Molly’s Dublin and those of the external environment in her Gibraltar are given as examples. He suggests that, in this respect, the episode anticipates the identification between character and landscape that is one of the core concepts of Finnegans Wake. We are reminded here that Molly associates sexual activity with high places. The similarities between the Mrs Rubio of Molly’s Gibraltar and the Mrs Riordan of her Dublin are explored and the essay has an imaginative grasp of Molly’s character which at times envisions an almost theatrical performance of her role. A sophistication of argument and approach runs through these essays. They also reveal newly researched and imagined contexts for reading Joyce’s episode in detail. Each of the essays contains more by way of argument, analysis and information than can be suggested by this summary, though the act of summarising can reveal the extent to which they productively return to a debate around key points concerning the relation of the body to representation, to language and to gender in the episode. Some emerge closely from the critical traditions and debates that surround Joyce’s texts and Modernist literature and art. A number display a genuine originality of treatment and approach that may indicate possible new directions for new generations of our critical endeavour. All, in different ways, may be said to reaffirm the necessity for our literary and cultural discourses to engage with and transform conventional representations of the body. In the excitement and energy of their responses to the text they may
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provide a reading of the body or bodies that are represented therein or else of the body of the text or of the kinds of reading body that are envisioned or created by Joyce’s extraordinary proliferance. With the many challenges and ambiguities of these texts that seem to require us to read as groups and communities, the processes of this reading may indeed be said to bring such bodies into being. Amongst many other things, these essays take into their compass the visual arts from Picasso to the Chapman Brothers, fiction from Dickens and Ellen Wood to J.G.Ballard, figures from criminal history like Jack the Ripper and Florence Maybrick, as well as psychology from Freud to Laplanche and philosophers from Plato to Spinoza and Nietzsche and beyond. Above all perhaps the essays begin to map and name some different bodies and some different kinds of body that might be conceptualized in Joyce’s text: the astral body, le corps écrivant, the body without organs, the body as a geographical location or as a site of consumption and evacuation, the body of words and the body which reads those words. These are then indeed an extraordinary group of essays which demonstrate an exceptional degree of investment in a single part of a single literary text and in such a concentrated point of entry into it. I feel pleased to have had the opportunity to work with the authors in putting together this volume and would acknowledge that my own reading of the episode has undergone many complications and transformations during this process. Such contributors, the conference and the work of the “Penelope” Reading Group undoubtedly deserve the outcome of a published volume and it is to a great extent their volume though, of course, the deficiencies that will no doubt appear should not be attributed to them so much as to the editor. University of Leeds
JOYCE´S ANSWER TO PHILOSOPHY: WRITING THE DEMATERIALIZING OBJECT CHRISTINE VAN BOHEEMEN-SAAF Abstract: “Penelope” may be understood as Joyce´s response to Western philosophy and its dematerialization of the body. Not just an “earth goddess” but the fertility of nature, the figure of Molly Bloom on the chamberpot is here read as a redemptive objectification of the lost primal object. Thus Joyce´s text may demonstrate a typically modern anxiety about the dissolution of our bond to Mother Nature. In a reading of the difference between Dickens’s Flora Finching and Joyce´s Molly, the particular modernity of Joyce´s rendering is also explored. The discipline of philosophy has a long history of commentary on its sister discourse, literature. Since Plato, philosophy has been seen as the serious and prestigious discipline concerned with the articulation of truth. Literature, on the other hand, is stereotyped as the merely ornamental, all too inventive and therefore deceptive use of language. As Genevieve Lloyd has shown, this relationship was, although implicitly, gendered and hierarchical.1 In line with the traditional patriarchal division of labour, over the millennia, philosophy has not hesitated to proclaim about the nature of literature. Literature, in the silent feminine role, appears to have been much less concerned to defend itself against insinuations about its lack of truth value, its perniciously seductive power, its playfulness or performativity, and so forth.2 The curious situation is not only that philosophy speaks about literature, but also that it repeatedly takes examples from literature to corroborate its concepts. Literature becomes the passive 1. Genevieve Lloyd, The Man of Reason: “Male” and “Female” in Western Philosophy (London: Methuen, 1984). 2. Especially the second half of the previous century seems characterized by repeated, especially French but also German and American attempts to proclaim the nature and the difference of literature: Sartre´s Qu´est que c´est la littérature, Adorno´s Notes to Literature, Derrida´s extensive writings on a wide range of authors collected in Acts of Literature, Martha Nussbaum´s plea for the educational value of literature, Deleuze´s essays on “Minor Literature” and on the “’Superiority’ of Anglo-American Literature”, Jean-François Lyotard´s Le Postmoderne expliqué aux enfants, Alain Badiou´s Beckett: L’íncrevable desir, and so forth.
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matrix, the resource from which philosophy can draw to make its abstractions concrete. Literature provides the material example which gives abstractions body. In this paper I address the way in which Joyce uses the representation of the female body to give concrete shape to an abstract concept. Is there a parallelism between the way in which Joyce speaks about and for the female, and the way in which philosophy speaks about and for literature? In addition to being a highly realistic representation of the shockingly intimate musings of a Dublin housewife, the “Penelope” episode, may also be understood as Joyce´s answer to philosophy. As I shall argue, Joyce´s strategy of representation expresses the “structure of feeling” of the early twentieth century, when technology, among other factors, instigated a general anxiety about the species and its bond with the perpetual fertility of Mother Nature. Considered unspeakably obscene when first published, and censored and forbidden until, in 1933, Justice John M. Woolsey pronounced the text “emetic” rather than pornographic, the chapter is still controversial. Feminist critics do not find Joyce´s portrait flattering. Although given the status of an Earth Goddess, Molly Bloom seems too vulgar to qualify for that role. Is Joyce, who seems to reduce the female to flesh and sexual drive, a fetishist writer saving himself from the fear of loss of masculine power by means of the pen?3 Does Joyce unwittingly reveal the sadomasochism of heterosexual marriage in twentiethcentury culture, as Christine Froula maintains?4 In this essay, I want to suggest a new way of understanding Joyce´s avant-garde in “Penelope” in the light of what Jean-François Lyotard in “Defining the Postmodern”5 and Gilles Deleuze in Kafka:Toward a Minor Literature6 suggest as the special function of literature. It can bring into collective consciousness, into discourse and the public sphere, what may have been crystallizing at the edge of culture as a feeling or intuition which has not yet found articulation and response. I am not talking about our most individual and intimate personal emotions, or new sexual practices and perversions, I am thinking of a general cultural and collective affect – what Raymond Williams called a “structure of feeling”. My suggestion is that the hyper-real (but counter-sublime) physicality of Joyce´s “Penelope” embodies a response countering the Enlightenment construction of the bodiless 3. Christine van Boheemen, Joyce, Derrida, Lacan, and the Trauma of History: Reading, Narrative, and Postcolonialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 4. Christine Froula, Modernism´s Body: Sex, Culture, and Joyce (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). 5. Most easily accessible in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (W.W. Norton & Co.: New York, 2001), pp. 1612-15. 6. Gilles Deleuze, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986).
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subject.7 It may even betray the “unthought known” of early twentieth-century culture: the fear of dematerialization and the loss of a natural relationship to the body.8 Rhetorically, the eighteenth episode in Ulysses presents itself as a response. It begins: “Yes because” (U 18.1). The episode also concludes with the word “yes”. It begins and ends, as Joyce wrote to Frank Budgen, with the “female word yes” (SL 285). Yes introduces an affirmative answer to a question, a demand. Philosophy has taken note of Joyce´s emphasis on affirmation.9 But if there is an answer, must there not also be a question? What is the question underlying Molly Bloom´s over-emphatic physical stylization? Let me repeat Joyce´s familiar words regarding “Penelope”: “It turns like the huge earth ball slowly and surely and evenly round and round spinning, its four cardinal points being the female breasts, arse, womb and cunt expressed by the words because, bottom (in all senses bottom button, bottom of the class, bottom of the sea, bottom of the heart), woman, yes. Though probably more obscene than any preceding episode it seems to me to be perfectly sane full amoral fertilisable untrustworthy engaging shrewd limited prudent indifferent Weib. Ich bin der [sic] Fleisch der stets bejaht.’ (SL 285). Joyce translates the keyword of the chapter, “yes”, into “cunt”. Molly´s menstruating sexual organ is the concrete expression, the visual evidence and guarantee of affirmation. We see and, perhaps, even smell the proof, but to which “unthought-known” anxiety is this the affirmative response? What is the underlying insecurity or doubt?10 At first sight the answer seems close at hand. According to Arthur Power, Joyce made a claim for his text as a “new way” of writing, comparing himself to “prophets” like Tolstoy and Dostoievski: As for the romantic classicism you admire so much, Ulysses has changed all that; for in it I have opened the new way, and you will find that it will be followed more and more. In fact, from it you may date a new orientation in literature – the new realism [....] [T]he modern theme is the subterranean forces, those hidden tides which govern everything and run humanity counter to the apparent flood: those poisonous subtleties which envelop the soul, the ascending fumes of sex.11 Joyce seems to have understood his modernist calling as the revelation of the 7. Samuel Todes, Body and World (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2002). Descartes, of course, worked with a Christian blueprint. 8. The term derives form Christopher Bollas, The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known (New York; Columbia University Press, 1987). 9. Derrida`s “Ulysses Gramophone: Hear Say Yes in Joyce” in Bernard Benstock (ed) James Joyce: The Augmented Ninth (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1988), pp. 27-77. 10. Jean-Michel Rabaté, Joyce Upon the Void: The Genesis of Doubt (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1991). 11. Arthur Power, Conversations with James Joyce (London: Millington, 1974), p 54.
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power of sexuality.12 When Joyce wrote Ulysses, he could think of sexuality as an unconscious force, a “hidden tide.” Today, the fumes of sex, commodified and mediatized, are almost unavoidable aspects of our everyday waking life. Perhaps we are now in a position to question the rationale of Joyce´s emphasis on sexuality. Was he engaged in social reform? Trying to redress the censorship of bourgeois morality? Or was his obsession with speaking about the body perhaps the expression of a more fundamental or philosophical anxiety? Joyce suggested that Harriet Weaver should not understand “Penelope’ as the rendering of a human figure, but as the concretization of “the earth which is prehuman and presumably posthuman” (SL 289). Penelope may not then be an earth goddess, as she has often been said to be by Joyce critics, but rather the earth itself. The earth which will be there after the human race has disappeared, and which was there before it arrived on the scene. “Penelope” stands for the material stage which supports the human race, and which will outlive it. She represents materiality or physicality as a timeless presence: Mother Nature -- not as one goddess among many, but as the unique, material support of human life. She is its alpha and omega. In what follows, I shall, by taking a detour via Dickens´s nineteenth-century creation of Flora Finching, try to argue that Joyce´s rendering illustrates an underlying modern, unconscious fear of the detachment from the material. Christine Froula cites the feminist artist Dorit Cypis´s retort to Freud´s perennial question “what do women want?”: “simply ‘Mr Freud, we want our bodies back.’”13 Joyce´s aggressive spotlight on Molly´s corporeality warrants Cypis´s demand. Joyce places the menstruating woman on the chamberpot and makes her exclaim “O patience above its pouring out of me like the sea” (U 18.1122-23). It is curious that in a chapter of interior monologue which penetrates the most intimate recesses of privacy, Molly is not rendered as experiencing her own fertility. The magnitude and force of the tidal flood of her monthly flow also comes as a surprise to her: out of proportion and beyond control. Its exaggerated scope and seemingly autonomous agency stage the flow of menstrual blood as a transcendent tide of fertility, which becomes visible and materially present as it flows from the body into the chamberpot. It may be important here not to try to neutralize the powerful impact of Molly´s menstrual blood by framing it in the Christian framework of the Holy Grail.14 The power of
12. Richard Brown, James Joyce and Sexuality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), Chapter 4: “Sexual Reality”. 13. Christine Froula, Modernism´s Body, p. 253. I want to express my debt to Froula´s work. Although we always reach different conclusions, our argument often touches on the same quotations, examples, and ideas. In this paper I shall discuss Molly´s roses and thus I retrace part of the itinerary of her text. 14. Richard Ellmann, Ulysses on the Liffey (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972).
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the flow, the gigantism of the event are itself the meaning of Joyce´s conception. Pre- and posthuman, the tide of fertility is transcendent to humanity, the eternally flowing force which neutralizes the limitations which time has placed on human existence. Elsewhere in Ulysses, menstruation is rendered as a “female tepid effluvium” which “leaks out from” a woman´s body (U 15.2116). Joyce can, literally, see menstruation differently, then; but in “Penelope” it must be a force which cannot be stopped or controlled. Leopold Bloom has surrendered to the superior stature of that force: “Woman. As easy stop the sea” (U 11.641). My suggestion in this paper is that Molly´s flood, mythically profuse and unstoppable or controllable, may contain a clue to the true impetus, the unconscious “subterranean tide” of Joyce´s creativity. One circumlocution which Ulysses offers for menstruation is “roses”. “Having one´s roses” was a euphemism current at the time. The expression relates to the visibility and color of blood, and it offers itself as a figure, a flower of rhetoric, for the idea of female fertility. In “Penelope” and throughout Ulysses women are seen as flowers, often roses. Molly herself gives testimony: “[F]lowers of the mountain yes so we are flowers all a womans body yes” (U 18.1576.). She wants to have the whole place swimming in roses. Mrs Breen´s eyes are seen by Bloom as “Flowers her eyes were” (U 8.910); in the ballad “My Irish Molly, O” Molly is described as the primrose of Ireland,15 and the name Flora, as in Flora McFlimsy, is offered as a generic Christian name for the lightweight female of the species. Here again, it does not rain but it pours. When Bloom in “Circe” (himself feminized by his surname; and because he suffers from menstrual cramps) thinks of a “womancity”, the stage directions mark the place thus: “Mammoth roses murmur of scarlet winegrapes. A wine of shame, lust, blood exudes, strangely murmuring” (U 15.1327-30). The flow of menstrual blood is transmuted into wine and with the lingering aftertaste of lust and shame. The wine, in turn, is not mute as an object should be. It murmurs, murmurs strangely. The scarlet flow of fertility is one of Joyce´s speaking objects.16 It does not speak clearly but rather it murmurs the vague speech of bodily desire and instinctive process. The color scarlet, flow, roses, and strange murmuring combine to denote the magical secret of female fertility. In his Joyce Effects, Derek Attridge admits to being tired of the metaphor of “flow” in speaking of the style of “Penelope.”17 Since I may have been one of 15. Don Gifford and Robert J. Seidman, Notes for Joyce: An Annotation of James Joyce´s “Ulysses” (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1974), p. 245. 16. Steven Connor, “’Jigajiga...Yummyyum...Pfuiiiiiii!...Bbbbbllll blblblblobschb!’: ‘Circe’s’ Ventriloquy” in Andrew Gibson (ed), Reading Joyce´s “Circe”: European Joyce Studies 3 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994), pp.93-143. 17. Joyce Effects:On Language,Theory, and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
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those responsible for introducing the term,18 I shall return to this and speak in this essay of the “language of flowers” (U 11.298) to denote the complex of images (flowers, menstrual blood, the sea and its tides, the river, in combination with mute speech or murmuring) with which female fertility is identified in Joyce. In dealing with women, words are useless, Leopold Bloom concludes (U 8.477), and he may be speaking for his author. Because Ulysses associates women with concrete presence and immanent methods of communication, the conventional mute “language of flowers” may be an appropriate shorthand label to denote Joyce´s practice of reducing the female to the material.19 Penelope, a homebody, a stay-at-home who is as rooted and territorialized as a plant, radiates powerful affect. Traditionally, the language of flowers is a language of affect: each flower denotes a mood, desire or emotion. The language of flowers is also an instrument of seduction, a song without words (U 11.1093). Most importantly, it is a “body language”, as when Molly asks Bloom with her eyes “to ask again yes and then he asked would I yes to say yes my mountain flower” (U 18.1605-7). In other words: she does not speak but rather her eyes speak. The body speaks directly, circumventing the need for language. Nature speaks without need of Culture. What is at stake here? Joyce is, apparently, trying to reduce the gap between culture and nature, matter and language, body and mind. Similarly, “Penelope” tries to present sexuality as style and the body as concretely graphic convention, such as in the notorious capital letter “O” which denotes Molly’s sexual organ. Joyce turns the dualism of Western thought into a monism of writing and material graphic presence. But, in contrast to poststructuralist theory, he does not do so because textuality is the only province of meaning. For Joyce, who has made the figure of “Penelope” into the prehuman and posthuman guarantee of generativity, the ultimate province of meaning is precisely what cannot be spoken: the supreme power of the tidal flow of generativity and fertility – the drive. And what drives him to write is not a desire to illustrate its nature or 18. The Novel as Family Romance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), p.183. 19. See Jacqueline F. Eastman, “The Language of Flowers: A New Source for ‘Lotus Eaters’” in JJQ 26 (Spring 1989), pp. 379-96; and John O’Hanlon, “In the Language of Flowers”, A Wake-Newslitter 16,1 (1979), pp. 9-12. Also note Ramon Saldívar, Figural Language in the Novel: The Flowers of Speech from Cervantes to Joyce (Princeton, Princeton University Press: 1984).
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operation, but his anxiety about his, and our, relationship to that drive. At issue is Mother Nature´s fertility and the threat of its ending. When Stephen Dedalus, the would-be post-adolescent poet gives a speech on Shakespeare, he mentions George Fox. Stephen, conflating Shakespeare and George Fox, imagines him in New Place, which was Shakespeare´s residence in Stratford-on-Avon. The Penelope involved here is described as “a slack dishonoured body that once was comely, once as sweet, as fresh as cinnamon, now her leaves falling, all, bare, frighted of the narrow grave....” (U 9.339-42, italics added). The aging waiting wife is seen as a rose whose leaves have fallen. The idea of the end of female fertility, the dropping of the rose´s petals (though it may for many women be a moment of liberation from the tyranny of tampons and cramps) brings to Joyce´s speaker visions of death. The menopause, the end of the flow of menstruation, is portrayed as if it were death itself. In order to bring out the distinctiveness of Joyce´s recourse to the “language of flowers”, I want to turn to another flower, another Penelope who has waited for the return of her beloved, namely Flora Finching in Dickens’ Little Dorrit.20 Flora´s discursive profusion is so remarkably similar to that of Molly that she may be considered her avatar: “In Italy is she really?” said Flora, “with the grapes and figs growing everywhere and lava necklaces and bracelets too that land of poetry with burning mountains picturesque beyond belief though if the organboys come away from the neighbourhood not to be scorched nobody can wonder being so young and bringing their white mice with them most humane, and is she really in that favoured land with nothing but blue about her and dying gladiators and Belvederas though Mr. F himself did not believe for his objection when in spirits was that the images could not be true there being no medium between expensive quantities of linen badly got up and all in creases and none whatever, which certainly does 20. The resemblance between Flora and Molly was first pointed out by Fred Kaplan, “Dickens’ Flora Finching and Joyce’s Molly Bloom”, Nineteenth-Century Fiction 23, 3 (1968), pp. 343-46. Kaplan points to “stylistic and thematic parallelism” and suggests that the “murkiness” of Dublin and the “gloom” of London are laid to rest by the flowery presence of these women. Also see my “The Dream of a Common Language” in De Joyce à Stoppard: Écritures de la modernité, ed. Adolphe Haberer (Lyon: Presses Universitaires Lyon, 1991), pp.147-63.
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not seem probable though perhaps in consequence of the extremes of rich and poor which may account for it.” Arthur tried to edge a word in, but Flora hurried on again. “Venice Preserved too”, said she, “I think you have been there is it well or ill preserved for people differ so and Maccaroni if they really eat it like the conjurers why not cut it shorter [...].” 21 Like Molly, Flora is a rambling rose. She shares Molly´s peculiar punctuation, “never once com[ing] to a full stop” (92). The text remarks on her “disjointed volubility” “running on with astonishing speed, and pointing her conversation with nothing but commas, and very few of them” (193). The reader may also note the “inconsistent and profoundly unreasonable way in which she instantly [goes] on” (195), her orientalizing clichés, her unintentionally irreverent attitude to high culture, and her down-to-earth practical humor when calling up the image of the Italians eating “macaroni” (she means spaghetti) like conjurors: “why not cut it shorter.” Dickens´s creation of Flora may have inspired Joyce, but here, however, my purpose is not to point to literary influence, so much as to the different ways in which these two authors handle the threat of the loss or fertility of the female Other. I also want to point out that the uncontrollable flow of female speech in Dickens and Joyce, although it may seem comparable, has greatly different connotations. Arthur Clennam, after an absence of some 16 years, returns home like Odysseus to find his Penelope totally changed. “Flora, always tall, had grown to be very broad too, and short of breath.”(191). Flora, who had seemed the enchanting epitome of feminine perfection stands revealed as diffuse and silly. It is especially interesting that the difference between the present Flora and “the Flora that had been” (197) is itself articulated in the language of flowers, as if it related to something unspeakable, and could only be signified concretely: “Flora, whom he had left a lily, had become a peony” (191). The pale and virginal young woman has changed into the flushed and wide open flower of middle-age. More pertinently yet, Flora´s flush, added girth, and shortness of breath point to menopause, the end of menstruation, the mother of all unmentionables. Arthur´s image of Flora is brusquely shattered: “Clennam´s eyes no sooner fell upon the subject of his old passion than it shivered and broke to pieces.” (191)
21. Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit (Dent: London, 1965), p.509.
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The “subject” shivers and breaks to pieces. Does Flora shiver and break to pieces? How does subject relate to object here? Although the text seems ambiguous to the twentyfirst-century reader, it is not Flora herself who shatters. It is Clennam´s imago, based on his recollection of Flora´s figure, her shape and physical appearance, which is shattered. Seeing her aged by 16 years, Clennam´s idolized mental portrait shivers and breaks to pieces, as if it were a mirror which he had held up to the self. The ambiguity about the meaning of the word “subject” in “subject of his passion” is pertinent, however. The subject which shivers and breaks is the image of Flora, it is true, but that image has been lifesustaining during his stay of absence abroad. Its shattering implies that Clennam´s self-image, too, is under threat. Later in the novel, after Clennam has rejected Flora, there is an out and open reference to the approach of middle age. He wonders at Flora´s persevering flirtatiousness, “now, when the stage was dusty, when the scenery was faded, when the youthful actors were dead, when the orchestra was empty, when the lights were out.” (197) Thus Flora is portrayed as an actress who fails to realize that the performance has long since ended. It is never clear, however, whether Clennam accepts that he, too, is involved in the desolation of that scene. The text associates images of death and decay with Flora, but never with Clennam, who remains outside, the spectator of Flora´s change. Why not? In a patriarchal culture, the masculine ego is saved from too close a confrontation with the ‘sense of an ending’ because there is always a younger partner waiting in the wings. Women vie in protecting men from the confrontation with their bald patches and pot bellies. Especially in Dickens, it is women´s function to bear the symbolic weight of the grim realities male egos wish to shun. Not surprisingly, Clennam´s ego is saved by Flora: This is Flora! “I am sure,” giggled Flora, tossing her head with a caricature of her girlish manner, such as a mummer might have presented at her own funeral, if she had lived and died in classical antiquity, I am ashamed to see Mr Clennam, I am a mere fright, I know he´ll find me fearfully changed, I am actually an old woman, it´s shocking to be found out, it´s really shocking!” He assured her that she was just what he had expected and that time had not stood still with himself. “Oh! But with a gentleman it´s so different and really you look so amazingly well that you have no right to say anything of the kind, while, as to me, you know–oh!” cried Flora with a little scream, “I am dreadful!” (192) Flora, assuming the burden of dreadfulness, does what is expected of a good woman. Calling him unchanged, she opens the way for what follows in the chapter, which Dickens entitled “Patriarchal”. It ends with the following scene. Reviewing his afternoon with “Poor Flora”, Clennam asks himself, “’what have
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I found!?’” His door was softly opened, and these spoken words startled him, and came as if they were an answer: “Little Dorrit”’ (207). The presence of Little Dorrit seems a response to Clennam´s query. Just as Joyce in Finnegans Wake splits the female figure into an older and a younger form to deal with the problem of death and ending and provides his text with a return to the beginning, Dickens splits the female to allow his Odyssean protagonist rejuvenation or “repristination” (U 17.518) -- to take a term from “Ithaca”. Flora´s linguistic profusion, then, is not, as in Ulysses, the marker of the impossibility of controlling the female or the sea. It is the marker of the pathology of the continuation of flirtation after the end of youth and fertility. Flora´s change of shape marks a difference not just in physical appearance, but in her function with regard to the self-constitution of the masculine subject. Menopausal females are a threat to masculine self-regard. In other words, masculine subjectivity seems closely intertwined with the imago, the mirror reflection, of young, flowing femininity. The rose must not have dropped her petals. Joyce handles the threat of an ending differently in Ulysses. Although linguistic and menstrual profusion are closely linked, Molly´s self-admitted approaching middle age does not become a reason for her disavowal. Molly´s avalanche of blood and words seem, on the contrary, a protection against the idea of “the threat of an ending”. The linguistic resemblance between the names of Molly and her daughter Milly might at first seem to point to a similar strategy of splitting reduplication in Ulysses as we noted in Little Dorrit. Yet that does not seem to be so. Molly Bloom´s “ardent perfumed flower life” (Exiles 153) is as yet not threatened by the onset of her daughter´s menstruation. On the contrary, her female shape, generally commented on, seems the support of her husband´s masculine ego when finding himself precariously positioned in a homosocial group. Sitting in the carriage with fellow-mourners, Mr Dedalus bends over to greet Blazes Boylan in the street. Bloom tries to hide his embarrassment and anxiety: Mr Bloom reviewed the nails of his left hand, then those of his right hand. The nails, yes. Is there anything more in him that they she sees? Fascination. Worst man in Dublin. That keeps him alive. They sometimes feel what a person is. Instinct. But a type like that. My nails. I am just looking at them: well pared. And after: thinking alone. Body getting a bit softy. I would notice that: from remembering. What causes that? I suppose the skin can´t contract quickly enough when the flesh falls off. But the shape is there. The shape is there still. Shoulders. Hips. Plump. Night of the dance dressing. Shift stuck between the cheeks behind. He clasped his hands between his knees and, satisfied, sent his vacant glance over their faces. (U 6.200-210) Bloom knows that his Penelope is getting on in years, but the vital ingredient of his primarily visually oriented appreciation remains functional. The female form, Molly´s shape, what we would call her figure, is undiminishedly shapely.
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When Bloom recalls his visit to the museum with the intention to inspect the posteriors of the Greek goddesses, this notion of “female form” is defined as the “splendid proportions of hips, bosom” (U 16.892). Its essential features are boobs and buttocks. What makes the female form the “form endearing”(U 11.665) is the combination of symmetry and proportion. To Bloom, it seems, a woman is primarily a shape, a figure, a curve, a Gestalt, which functions as the stimulus or signal to trigger off instinctual patterns of response. She is: “the counterattraction in the shape of a female” (U 16.930-31, italics added). I emphasize the noun “shape”, because Molly Bloom is never a living, breathing, embodied woman. She is always already a shape, a figure, an image, a simulacrum, restricted to what Lacan has called the visual materiality of the Imaginary order.22 She is always already written as a figure, the round shape of the letter “O”, symbolizing the operation of the drive, the natural principle of “counterattraction”. It was Joyce himself who contributed the association with the graphic symbol of the lemniscate, the figure 8 lying down, for our better comprehension of “Penelope”. The figure symbolizes eternity, and the composition of this episode (which is divided into two parts revolving around a turning-point) iconically enacts the shape of the lemniscate as if it were the figure of eternal female flow itself. Das Ewig Weibliche which “Penelope” was meant to express, according to Joyce´s letter to Frank Budgen cited earlier, the flesh which is the counterpart to the masculine spirit and the spirituality of the male, is not perishable meat or cyclical fertility, but shape. Not body, but ink. The figure eight may be associated with the form endearing of the female breasts or the female buttocks, or to breasts and buttocks, according to the reader’s preference. But at issue here is that shape and form do not belong to the same ontological order as flesh. The curve of the smile of the Cheshire Cat lingers after his body is gone. Dorian Gray stays in shape while his picture grows flabby and wrinkled. Shape is an abstraction, a visual form which may live on in modern print-culture although fertility has gone. The current obsession with “staying in shape” testifies to the general cultural desire to keep one´s shape even after youth has gone. The refiguration of Penelope as Gestalt, separating her flabby flesh from her shape, is a strategy which contains the threat of the end of fertility within an imaginary economy of graphic representation, writing or écriture. The rose, once traced on paper, will blow forever, and, in the words of Joyce´s notes to Exiles: “Roses gr[o]w then a sudden scarlet note in the memory which may be a dim suggestion of the roses of the body” (E 169). The pen, finally, which, staining the page with 22. J. Laplanche and J-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis (London: Hogarth Press, 1983), p. 210.
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the flow of red ink traces the figure of the rose of the form endearing, blossoms into the “Penrose” – a name or concept which occurs five times in Ulysses. As several critics have suggested, Joyce's figuration of Molly Bloom seems implicated in the economy of fetishism.23 First of all, the threat of castration is disavowed by the phallic attributes or qualities of the heroine. She seemingly denies the lack which patriarchy projects upon women. As “heavenly body” or “star”, Molly, indifferent, autonomous to the point that she can talk back to her creator and throw coffins at him in Joyce´s dream, stands as “token of triumph over the threat of castration and as protection against it.”24 The crucial question is: How can a piece of writing, an episode, textuality itself, function as fetish? In his notes for “Penelope”, also in Ulysses itself, Joyce had the habit of referring to Molly as “Pen”.25 In “Aeolus” the Ithacans vow “PEN IS CHAMP” (U 7.1034). In the passage following, the text refers to “a book ... which [takes] away the palm of beauty from Argive Helen and hand[s] it to Penelope” (U 7.1038-40). Since Helen was not only the incarnation of beauty, but the instrument of massive death, the shift from Helen to Penelope as “PEN” suggests that Joyce transfers his authorial favor from the beauty of mortal, hence lethally threatening, female flesh to form: textuality, graphic inscription material formation, shape. The “clou” of “Penelope” is that it shifts the object of representation from the image which it creates to the process and act of writing itself. It favors style over message, textuality and code over a referent, the sign over the body, the masquerade of gender over the ontological difference of chromosomal sex, the endless flow of the fertile pen over the placing of the period which marks the end. In addition to notes like “Pen-stupid” or “Pen-remote” we find “odyss of Pen”, as if the “true” epic plot of Ulysses were not the homecoming of its hero, but the transformation of the image of the heroine into a “pen” -- mightier than the sword, and victorious over all the author's rivals. It is this “pen” which produces the flowers of rhetoric which let the text “Bloom” and which generates the flow of textuality which in its endless circular movement guarantees immortality.
23. Mark Shechner was probably the first. See Joyce in Nighttown: A Psychoanalytic Inquiry into “Ulysses” (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974). 24. I take the words from Freud's essay “Fetishism”, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XXI (London: Hogarth Press, 1964-74), p.154. 25. Phillip Herring, Joyce's Notesheets and Early Drafts for “Ulysses”: Selections from the Buffalo Collection (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1971), pp. 17 and 79; and Joyce's “Ulysses”: Notesheets in the British Museum (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1972), pp. 494 and 504. Jean-Michel Rabaté, Joyce upon the Void, also makes this point.
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In a curious but not incomprehensible displacement, Joyce transferred the libidinal cathexis from sexuality onto the flow of writing, or, at any rate, refused to channel his energy solely as sexuality. Writing and sex are closely related throughout the oeuvre not only in the “amplitudinously curvilinear” episode “Penelope” (L I 164). Bloom thinks of sex as writing: “Blank face. Virgin should say: or fingered only. Write something on it: page” (U 11.1086-87). In A Portrait the flood of language and soft liquid joy of sexuality are indistinguishable. The conflation of textuality and sexuality in Finnegans Wake needs no illustration. Even the pen is rendered in sexual terms as a “selfraising syringe and twin feeders” (FW 188.30), and the text is constructed as double entendre. The notoriously obscene letters to Nora are not only the substitute for her absence, they are also an expression of the sexiness of writing itself.26 My paper has traced the work of the mechanisms of the primary process, displacement and condensation, in Joyce´s overdetermined construction of the female body as shape and figure. Although Joyce claimed to Power and Budgen that he was writing about sexuality and the flesh, his true subject was the anxiety about being a body. Freud showed us that the logic of the dream exhibits a constant sliding of meaning. Because “Penelope” is staged in between dream and waking it seems appropriate to me to approach it as if it were a dream. As Laplanche and Pontalis point out: “It was also the model of the dream which caused Freud to postulate that the aim of the unconscious process was to establish a perceptual identity by the shortest available route–i.e. by means of the hallucinatory reproduction of those ideas upon which the original experience of satisfaction has conferred a special value.”27 Taking Freud as our model, we may read Joyce´s transposition of female flesh into shape and figure, his language of flowers, as a desire to reproduce that which had, originally, given valuable satisfaction -- as that which has been lost. Remembering Joyce´s insistence that his writing ought to be seen as the representation of a truth about human existence and modern life, we may come to understand it as the expression of the modern anxiety about the relationship to the body. The drive to visualize the original object of satisfaction may have been the impetus behind Joyce´s desire to write from a very early age on. With this notion in mind, we may wish to reconsider Joyce´s aesthetic theory as he articulated it in Pola in 1904: Sensible objects, however, are said conventionally to be beautiful or not [...] by reason of the nature, degree and duration of the satisfaction
26. Philip Kuberski, “The Joycean Gaze: Lucia in the I of the Father,” Substance 46 (1985), pp. 49- 67. Kuberski argues that “Joyce's desire for Lucia and his writing in the Wake is part of a refusal to segregate the energy of language and sexuality, to obstruct its libidinal exercise” (58). 27. Laplanche, pp. 339-40.
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resulting from the apprehension of them and it is in accordance with these latter merely that the words “beautiful” and “ugly” are used in practical aesthetic philosophy. It remains then to be said that these words indicate only a greater or less measure of resultant satisfaction[....](CW 148). The term “satisfaction” occurs 5 times in this passage which concludes a meditation on Thomas Aquinas`s “Pulchra sunt quae visa placent”. What provides satisfaction answers a desire, and that desire is always for visual apprehension. What is the drive motivating the desire to apprehend visually? That is the desire to visualize the primal object: the female breast, the female figure. How is that primal object to be given perceptual identity? As shape or “curve of emotion”. That is: as an “epiphany” since Joyce´s own definition of the epiphany, four days after the death of his mother, on January 7, 1904, spoke of it as the “curve of an emotion”.28 In other words, Joyce´s aesthetic theory hints at the fact that its object was from the beginning the visualization of a lacking object: the female shape. Such a visualization constitutes the object in its ultimate, overdetermined state of territorialization, of immutable presence and identity of the same. The term “satisfaction” recurs in “Ithaca”: In what final satisfaction did these antagonistic sentiments and reflections reduced to their simplest forms, converge? Satisfaction at the ubiquity [...] in all habitable lands [...] of adipose anterior and posterior female hemispheres, redolent of milk and honey and of excretory sanguine and seminal warmth, reminiscent of secular families of curves of amplitude...expressive of mute immutable mature animality (U 17.2228-30). The satisfaction of the visual, always already sexualized though nongenital, consists in its visual concretization of the curves of amplitude. These, in turn, express the purely animal presence of a female body which does not lose its shape and fertility, and which does not whither or die. Mature sexuality fuses with infantile desire to satisfy the need of the “childman weary” for presence and affirmation (U 17.2318).
28. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: Text, Criticism, and Notes, ed. Chester G. Anderson (New York: Viking Critical Library, 1976), pp. 257-8.
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How perverse this may seem, there is more to it than just fetishism. Firstly, another term may be more suitable. Ernest Jones, reviewing the concept of the castration complex, introduced the term aphanisis.29 This is not the fear of the possible loss of the male organ and the social prestige that organ entails. It is a more fundamental fear: the apocalyptic fear of the disappearance of sexual desire, life itself. According to Jones, as mediated by Jean Laplanche, it is a fear even more profound than the fear of “ideas of death”. Perhaps aphanisis is best understood as the fear of detachment from the fantasmatic structure which preserves the linking attachment to the primal object. My suggestion is based on the fact that it has long been noted that in Ulysses there seems little or no shade of a castration complex. Bloom´s comments, when seeing a neutered horse (“gelded too”) implies that he unflinchingly regards his own impotence a form of castration. In fact, Joyce´s text flirts with the ideas of castration and gender mutation. Secondly, to return to the beginning of this talk, Joyce´s strategy is more properly understood if we view it as part of a general cultural anxiety. For the student of the Modernist period, for instance, there is a curious resemblance between Joyce and Picasso. For Picasso painting was like sexual intercourse, the activity and rhythm of artistic expression would eventually even take the place of sexual expression. A painting like "La Pisseuse" (1965) which gives us the shocking frontal image of a urinating woman, is the impotent product of his declining years. Thus these Modernist geniuses, if I may use the term, shared the drive to give the female body presence, as shape and writing or paint and form, as if it were to make up for the loss of that very body. The text and the canvas supplement what has been lost in history: the natural relationship to the body, the idea of the immanence of the body, the materiality of the primal object. Joyce and Picasso demonstrate a fundamental cultural anxiety of the beginning of the twentieth century about the relationship to the materiality of the body. The power of modern technology to rewrite the concept of the body, lending it a power and extension it had never had before, also brought anxiety concerning of the loss of attachment. An old-fashioned, unexamined, relation to the materiality of the body dissolved under the weight of new discourses and new inventions, and the drive to reassert its presence began. What nature was to Romanticism always already lost but endlessly talked about - the body became to Modernist
29. See Laplanche, p.40.
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and Postmodernist art and culture: a general obsession. Now, almost one hundred years later, the body has become a rather popular topic of scholarly writing and historical research and we have accepted the fact that we can only know the body as always already written. Thus we speak of gender instead of sex. Perhaps we are now able to read Joyce´s obscenity not as an individual characteristic, but as the expression of the unconscious anxiety of his age, and as his fantasmatic attempt to rematerialize the body as the shape and figure of the primal object: a Penelope mythically fertile (blood pouring out from her like the sea), patiently awaiting our return. University of Amsterdam
THE BODY WRITING: JOYCE’S PEN DEREK ATTRIDGE Abstract: In this essay the author enquires into the working practices and methods by which Joyce operated as a writer during the time he wrote “Penelope”. Taking the lead from a comment by Jacques Derrida about “le corps écrivant” and the almost “fetishistic” aspects of this private situation, he enquires into the physical situation of the writing during the process of composition, in a thorough empirical assembly of facts derived from biographical sources and passages in letters and even the texts where many aspects of the process are revealed. I begin with a question: how did Joyce write “Penelope”? I don’t mean: how did a single artist manage to capture the multifarious operations of the human mind and body in such detail and with such humour that all previous fictional engagements suddenly seemed reticent and straightlaced, to depict with such scope and precision a time and a place that Dublin on June 16 1904 is etched in consciousnesses around the globe, to exploit the resources of the English language and literary tradition with such comprehensiveness that the very form of the novel would never be the same again. That is an unanswerable question. Nor am I asking: what were the successive stages of note-taking, drafting, revision, and proof-annotation that culminated in the text we read in our editions? This is a fascinating and important topic, and much energy has been, and no doubt will continue to be, devoted to it by manuscript scholars and textual geneticists. But my interest lies elsewhere. I mean: how did Joyce write the last episode of Ulysses? Did he sit at a desk, recline on a sofa, lie on a bed, walk about the room and dart from time to time to the manuscript on a table? Did he use a pen requiring frequent dipping in an ink bottle, a fountain pen that needed only occasional refilling, a well-sharpened pencil? Did he start early in the day, after lunch, or in the evening? How many hours a day did he work? How much composing did he do in his head, and how much on paper? Did he prefer silence or sounds around him as he wrote? I started formulating these questions to myself while I was reading an interview that Daniel Ferrer conducted with Jacques Derrida, published in
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Genesis, the journal of ITEM – the research group in Paris devoted to the study of modern manuscripts.1 They were, in fact, among the questions which Ferrer put to Derrida about his own working practices. In his response, Derrida began with some comments about what he was being asked to do: You are requesting of me a gesture that is quite indecent, a gesture that some would interpret as narcissistic, exhibitionist, even nudist. What it entails is talking about the most secret, the most intimate, part of our lives: what we do in solitude, at home, at the moment when, in a highly eroticized space – I would say almost auto-eroticized – we prepare, with all sorts of instruments and supports, something that is already an exhibition: a publication…The most appropriate word in this context would be “fetishism”. The objects and things about which I am going to talk are, for us, objects with a heavy fetishistic investment. (“Entre le corps” 59, my translation) Derrida goes on to provide evidence for that heavy fetishistic investment in his own writing tools and procedures. We learn that for a long time he wrote only with a pen dipped in ink, never a ball-point. He was able to write his early works only on large pages with such a pen.2 He then went through a succession of Olivetti typewriters before succumbing to the computer, which he came to treat as fetishistically as he did that pen. Derrida also tells us that his interest in writing has always included an interest in the question of the body writing (“le question du corps écrivant”), of whether, for example, one writes best lying, sitting, or standing. He himself experiences an “interminable hesitation between writing while lying down, while sitting, and while upright” (60). Although, like all of us, he writes for the most part sitting, he does so with the feeling that nothing of great importance happens at these times. The things that matter come to him most often when he is walking or, when he used to take this form of exercise, running. On his runs he would carry a piece of paper in his pocket so he could stop to scribble a note if he needed to. What of Joyce, then? Unfortunately, there was no Daniel Ferrer to pose these questions to him, and the evidence of his actual working methods that survives, in letters and reminiscences of others, is not extensive. It’s not at all unlikely that Joyce felt about his writing practices as Derrida did about his, and was even less willing to expose that private part of himself. (Derrida, after all, waited till he was seventy.) We do have some intriguing glimpses,
1. Jacques Derrida, “‘Entre le corps écrivant et l’écriture’: Entretien avec Daniel Ferrer”, Genesis 17 (2001), pp. 59-72. 2. The example reproduced in the journal, a page from a student essay of 1953 or 1954, has an intriguing Joycean suggestiveness: the essay is on Berkeley and the Theory of Vision.
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however. We know from Budgen’s much-cited account about the little blocks of notepaper that Joyce, when he was in Zürich during the First World War, kept in his pocket to scribble on “at lightning speed” as the need arose, rather like Derrida, and the big orange-coloured envelopes that he sorted them into.3 In 1917 he sent a postcard to his typist Claud Sykes asking him to change a word, explaining, “The reason I trouble you so often is that I make notes on stray bits of paper which I then forget in the most unlikely places, in books, under ornaments and in my pockets and on the back of advertisements.”4 It’s quite possible that Joyce too had his most creative moments while upright. Budgen remarks that “He was a great believer in his luck. What he needed would come to him” (Budgen 176), and this chimes with Derrida’s statement that thoughts and ideas “come to him” (“me viennent”) when he is doing something other than sitting and trying to write, whether it be walking, driving, or running (“Entre le corps” 61). We have little evidence of Joyce simply writing an initial draft and then continuing to re-read and revise it, as I assume most of us do when we compose. Given the appearance of the few apparently initial drafts we have, they must be either fair copies of lost, messier, drafts, or the result of Joyce’s more or less word-perfect first-time composition – and the latter possibility is strengthened by Budgen’s comment that “the words he wrote were far advanced in his mind before they found shape on paper” (Budgen 175).5 Later, when it became necessary for him to use an amanuensis on account of his failing eyesight, his capacity for composing in the head would have stood him in good stead.
3. Frank Budgen, James Joyce and the Making of “Ulysses” (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), pp. 176-7. 4. L I 415. Where possible I refer to the Selected Letters (see note 9 below), otherwise to the three-volume edition of the Letters. 5. Gabler comments on the drafts as follows: There is always in the appearance of the drafts some suggestion of a descent from pre-existing text. At times, the appearance is surely deceptive, for the probability is strong that, for example, the “Cyclops” manuscript V.A.8, or the “Nausicaa” copybooks Buffalo V.A.10/Cornell 56, are themselves first drafts. What this suggests is a manner of composition by which Joyce thought out at length, and in minute detail, the structures and phrasings of whole narrative sections before committing them to paper... To all appearances, his compositions were conceived and verbalized in the mind, as well as extensively, it seems, committed to memory, before being written out in drafts. (“Joyce’s Text in Progress”, in Derek Attridge (ed), Cambridge Companion to Joyce [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990], p. 224.) See also Gabler’s description of Joyce’s “manner of literary composition” in his edition of Ulysses (New York: Garland, 1986), vol. 3, p. 1861.
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So it seems quite likely that an important part of Joyce’s verbal creation indeed occurred when he was not sitting at a desk or table with his writing instruments at hand. We recall that Stephen Dedalus, in both A Portrait and Ulysses, composes verses in his head. In the former book, he is depicted lying in bed while he composes the first three stanzas of a highly-wrought villanelle, and then, in one of those extraordinary puncturings of mood characteristic of A Portrait, we read: ‘Fearing to lose all, he raised himself suddenly on his elbow to look for paper and pencil. There was neither on the table; only the soupplate he had eaten the rice from for supper and the candlestick with its tendrils of tallow and its paper socket’.6 He gropes in the pocket of his coat and finds a pencil and a cigarette packet, on ‘the rough cardboard surface’ of which ‘he began to write out the stanzas of the villanelle in small neat letters’ (P 184). We hear no more of the cigarette packet as Stephen completes the villanelle, but Joyce has already provided a vivid image of both mental composition and the necessary practicalities of inscription.7 A similar two-stage process is observable in the “Proteus” episode of Ulysses, when Stephen composes a four-line Gothic stanza while walking on Sandymount Strand. He thinks of Hamlet reaching for his tablets to record the ghost’s injunction, and searches his pockets for something to write on. The first paper he encounters is useless – it’s his pay from the school he has just left – but he then finds the letter about foot-and-mouth disease Mr Deasy has given him for the purposes of newspaper publication: Paper. The banknotes, blast them. Old Deasy’s letter. Here. Thanking you for the hospitality tear the blank end off. Turning his back to the sun he bent over far to a table of rock and scribbled words. (U 3.404-7) We can perhaps deduce one of Joyce’s own sources of note-taking material – at least until he started carrying blocks of notepaper – from the next thought that crosses Stephen’s mind: “That’s twice I forgot to take slips from the library” (U 3.407). We aren’t, in fact, given the final poem until the “Aeolus”
6. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, edited by Jeri Johnson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p.184. Hereafter P. 7. Ellmann tells a story related to him by Myron Nutting that is almost a parody of this scene. Nutting visited Joyce after an eye operation in 1924 when the latter was lying on his back, his eyes completely covered. Before greeting his visitor, however, Joyce remained silent for a while, then pulled a composition book and pencil from beneath his pillow, wrote something by touch, and replaced them. In response to his friend’s puzzlement, he took out the book again and showed him the words “Carriage sponge” (JJII 566). This story of recumbent inspiration and anticlimactic outcome is rendered somewhat dubious by the fact that Joyce had already used the phrase “carriage sponge” in the “Circe” episode of Ulysses (U 15.3771).
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episode, when Stephen hands over the letter to the editor of the Evening Telegraph and notices the “bit torn off” (U 7. 519-25).8 It’s worth noting, too, that Stephen’s mental compositions are highly literary – one of them, “The Parable of the Plums”, being presented as an actual literary work. But however much of Joyce’s initial composition went on in his head, he must have spent a significant proportion of the time he devoted to Ulysses (his own estimate is that it took him 20,000 hours)9 in some kind of sitting posture, since much of his composition of the book consisted of a laborious process of working between his large accumulation of notes and successive drafts or proofs. What do we know about the conditions under which he did this? Partly, no doubt, because of exigencies of space in the rooms and small flats which he and Nora occupied, beds and bedrooms often figure in references to Joyce at work during the earlier part of his career. The example of Stephen in A Portrait suggests that composition in bed might have been more than just an unavoidable necessity. On the other hand, the quality of Stephen’s literary production – the trite villanelle – is hardly a good advertisement for bed verse. We get a vivid sense of the constraints under which Joyce laboured at this time from the abrupt ending of a letter to Stanislaus written from their first home in Pola in 1904: “I really can’t write. Nora is trying on a pair of drawers at the wardrobe. Excuse me” (SL 44). In Trieste in 1920, now well into Ulysses, he writes to Pound, “I spend the greater part of my time sprawled across two beds surrounded by mountains of notes” (SL 253). Later in his life we hear less of beds, but Joyce frequently appears recumbent in the recollections of visitors and helpers. Robert Reid reports that when he called on Joyce in 1928 the author, “who was wearing a housepainter’s white coat and navy blue trousers, lay on a couch,”10 and Stuart Gilbert complains in a diary entry of early 1930, “He is curled on his sofa, while I struggle with Danish or Rumanian names, pondering puns.”11 Jacques Mercanton finds Joyce, in his last years, “half stretched out in his
8. Leopold Bloom also experiences the need for an emergency writing surface: considering a joint literary effort by himself and Molly, he thinks: “Time I used to try jotting down on my cuff what she said dressing” (U 4. 519-20). 9. Letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver, 24 June 1921 (SL 282). 10. E. H. Mikhail (ed), James Joyce: Interviews and Recollections (London: Macmillan, 1990), p. 112. 11. Thomas F. Staley and Randolph Lewis (eds), Reflections on James Joyce: Stuart Gilbert’s Paris Journal (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993), p. 21.
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armchair” or “curled up in an armchair, almost lying down.”12 Nino Frank, working with Joyce in 1937 on the Italian translation of “Anna Livia Plurabelle,” describes him “stretched out on the divan in his dressing gown” (Potts 96). Budgen, reporting on Joyce in Zürich in 1918-19, generalizes: “Joyce, when not standing or moving, prefers to lie down but will accept as a workable compromise a sprawl in an easy chair” (Budgen 190). This has echoes of the description provided by one of Joyce’s Trieste language pupils: he used to sit “on one chair while using four others to rest his arms and long legs.”13 We can guess at Joyce’s preferred time of day for working from the comment recorded by Budgen: “Don’t you think that early afternoon is the time of greatest brain activity?” (109). We know that he enjoyed a night out, and was undoubtedly not at his best the morning after. As for writing instruments, there isn’t much evidence for the kind of fetishism that is a feature of many authors’ attitudes, including Derrida’s. Joyce’s basic instrument would have been a steel nib in a wooden penholder that he dipped frequently in a bottle of ink. The “cold steel pen” that functions as the symbol, and weapon, of the artist in Ulysses is undoubtedly an implement of this kind. Dipping pens come up frequently in Joyce’s work. To take one example, Bloom decides to write to Martha in the Ormond Hotel, rather than in the Post Office, where the quills are “chewed and twisted”. (I think we must assume that these are wooden penholders, not parts of feathers, even though the OED doesn’t include this definition under “quill”.) He therefore asks Pat the waiter for “a pen and ink” (U 11.821-2). There are also “twisted quills” in Shem’s house, called, readers of Finnegans Wake will remember, “The Haunted Inkbottle” (FW 183.21). Joyce complains occasionally about the pen he is using to write a letter: “A very dreadful pen!” (to Harriet Shaw Weaver, 1917; LI 110); “I can’t write with this spade of a pen” (to Frantisek Shaurek, 1920; LIII 11); “(I must continue with my daughter’s pen)” (to Weaver, 1924; LI 216). There are suggestions that Joyce had no particular favourite implement, but looked for whatever could be located when he needed one, just as Stephen gropes for a writing instrument to jot down his verses. In the famous announcement to Weaver that he has written his first pages “since the final Yes of Ulysses,” for instance, he states, with odd explicitness, “Having found a pen, with some difficulty I copied them out…” (SL 296). Pencils were also, of course, very important to Joyce, though again without the kind of fetishistic demand for
12. Willard Potts (ed), James Joyce: Portraits of the Artist in Exile (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1979), pp. 208 and 223. 13. Letizia Fonda Savio, quoted in McCourt, The Years of Bloom: James Joyce in Trieste (Dublin: The Lilliput Press, 2000), p. 209.
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length and sharpness many writers make. If anything, he disliked length and sharpness. Morrill Cody, visiting him in late 1923, writes of the “thick, stubby pencils” with which he jotted down notes on “scraps of paper, menus, bus tickets and the margins of newspapers” (Mikhail 92). The surviving manuscript materials indicate a variety of writing instruments, including of course the coloured pencils and crayons Joyce used in sorting and transcribing his notes. He doesn’t seem to have minded switching from pen to pencil. He tells John Quinn that the draft of Exiles has “marginal corrections – in pen and pencil” (LII 396), and this mixture is explained in a letter to Linati a few years later: “Since the ink and paper didn’t suit each other, I corrected the last part in pencil” (LII 463). He didn’t go in search of different ink or paper, as a true pen fetishist would have done. Fountain-pens were no older than Joyce – Lewis Waterman patented the first successful fountain-pen in 1884 – and would have been fairly uncommon during the composition of Ulysses. Only during the 1920s did they become the standard writing implement in the West. In 1924 Joyce tells Weaver that, under medical orders to rest his eye, he has stopped labouring at Work in Progress: “hence this fountain pen which I bought when I had left off writing” (LI 214). The implication is that he wouldn’t dream of using a fountain-pen for his creative work, though it’s acceptable for correspondence. (Not that his correspondence was carelessly written; on the contrary, it was generally much neater than his note-taking and drafts.) Perhaps he became more comfortable with fountain pens in due course, because when Adolf Hoffmeister visited him in the late 1920s he noticed on the left elbow of Joyce’s white flannel coat a number of ink lines converging in a large blot – the result, Hoffmeister claims, of Joyce’s continually cleaning his fountainpen there (Potts 127). In the Wake the fountain pen provides Joyce with a modern variant of the old pun on pen and penis, stressing the latter’s, and perhaps also the former’s, generational powers, when young Jerry’s wetting of his bed is described as follows: “And he has pipettishly bespilled himself from his foundingpen as illspent from inkinghorn” (FW 563.06). What about the typewriter, so important to Pound’s poetic innovations, as Hugh Kenner liked to observe? In 1917 Joyce tells Quinn, “I cannot dictate to a stenographer or type. I write all with my hand” (LII 396). So when, for instance, he writes on a Christmas card to Pound on December 20 1920, “Circe finished this morning at last. Will revise, type and forward soon” (LIII 34), he is not, contrary to appearances, suggesting that he will do the typing himself. However, at some date he did learn to type, if only with two fingers. Giorgio informed an interviewer of this fact in 1935, and added that his father used the typewriter - described by Frank as a special one with “enormous characters” (Potts 88) - only for correspondence, never for manuscripts (Mikhail 157). Something of the effort involved in unskilled typing comes
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across in Joyce’s vivid description of Mr Deasy in the act of completing his foot-and-mouth letter: He peered from under his shaggy brows at the manuscript by his elbow and, muttering, began to prod the stiff buttons of the keyboard slowly, sometimes blowing as he screwed up the drum to erase an error. (U 2.296-8) Even Martha Clifford, probably much more practised at the typewriter than Deasy, can’t avoid adding an extra letter by mistake, or through a Freudian slip, in the course of her missive to Henry Flower: “I called you naughty boy because I do not like that other world” (U 5.244-5). Perhaps Joyce found that the typewriter (like the fountain-pen) deprived him of that intimate connection between body and words on the page that traditional pens and pencils gave him. A hint of his attitude towards the typewriter can be heard in the sardonic comment he made in a letter of 1905 to Stanislaus: “I think Gogarty must use a typewriter: I do not think he could write consecutively enough for an article without some mechanical aid” (SL 58). If not fetishism, a certain degree of investment in the materiality of the writing process seems evident. Let us try to imagine Joyce at work at the most characteristic and yet most mysterious stage of his creative work. He has on the one hand a sheaf of notes, garnered from a host of different sources,14 and on the other the draft of an episode or part of an episode, or one of the series of proofs on which he worked, continually adding more and more material. Composition at this stage is a matter of transferring notes to the draft, elaborating and extending it by working in the words of the note or words suggested by it. Much of Ulysses (and virtually all of Finnegans Wake) appear to have been written in this way. The notes, on large sheets organised according to episode, are the result of the sorting and copying of the original heterogeneous collection written on scraps of paper or noteblock sheets (which do not survive)15 or in some cases in notebooks (four of which survive).16 In our imaginary scene, the notes are, perhaps, spread out on the bed, the draft is on a table, and Joyce
14. Budgen gives an entertaining account of this note-collecting process: I have seen him collect in the space of a few hours the oddest assortment of material: a parody on The House that Jack Built, the name and action of a poison, the method of caning boys on training ships, the wobbly cessation of a tired unfinished sentence, the nervous trick of a convive turning his glass in inward-turning circles, a Swiss music-hall joke turning on a pun in Swiss dialect, a description of the Fitzsimmons shift. (176) 15. Joyce told Myron Nutting that the unused notes for Ulysses weighed 12 kilograms (JJII 545). 16. See Gabler, Ulysses vol. 3, p. 1861, for an account of these notebooks.
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is sitting on a chair between them, his long legs extended as he swivels from side to side, peering closely – on account of his poor eyesight – at the written words. As he goes through the notes, he has a coloured pencil in his hand, and when he decides that he is going to use a note he crosses it out, puts down the coloured pencil, moves across to the table, picks up the pen he is using for the draft, finds the appropriate place, and enters the words he has just crossed out on the notesheet, or a phrase that they have suggested. He then puts down the pen, turns back to the bed, picks up the coloured pencil, and continues to work through his notes. Sometimes he reads through the draft, looking for places where he might weave in material he remembers from the notes, as a preliminary to this back-and-forth procedure. Extraordinarily, he never forgets to put down the pencil and pick up the pen, nor to put down the pen and pick up the pencil again – at least, this is what the evidence of the surviving notebooks and drafts suggests. Another possibility is that he enters a batch of notes on the draft, and then crosses them out on the notesheet in one go, although the batches would have be relatively small to avoid errors. This is the laborious process Joyce goes through thousands of times as he composes Ulysses, and even more frequently in the writing of Finnegans Wake (with, of course, a great deal of re-reading and searching with no outcome in a transferred note). Something that students of Joyce’s manuscripts have struggled to explain is his use of a different coloured pencil for each trawl through his notes – the surviving notesheets for the later episodes of Ulysses, for example, use four different colours.17 In some cases the different colours indicate that a single sheet has been used as a resource for more than one episode;18 but this is still likely to reflect two different stages of note-harvesting. Why should it matter that a particular note was transferred on a particular day, as long as it was crossed out to guard against being used twice? Why further complicate an already demanding procedure? Here, if anywhere, is evidence of a fetishistic investment in the material processes of composition, an excess of attention to the physical properties of the writing instrument and the written text.19
17. See Philip Herring, Joyce’s “Ulysses” Notesheets in the British Museum (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1972). 18. A.Walton Litz, The Art of James Joyce: Method and Design in “Ulysses” and “Finnegans Wake” (London: Oxford University Press, 1964), p.11. Litz mentions a sheet used primarily for notes for “Ithaca” – crossed out in blue when actually incorporated in the draft – which also contains two notes used in earlier episodes and crossed out in red. 19. The best explanation I have heard is John Paul Riquelme’s (personal communication): that the conditions under which Joyce wrote meant that he had to be
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The focal point of this volume is “Penelope”: a highly appropriate subject for this essay, given the importance of the body and writing in the final episode of Ulysses. Richard Ellmann tells us that Joyce at first “thought of constructing the chapter out of a series of letters written by Molly Bloom” (JJII 501), an intriguing comment that is unfortunately undocumented. Joyce’s abbreviation for the chapter in his notes was consistently “Pen”, and when, in an exorbitantly facetious headline in “Aeolus”, he writes “ITHACANS VOW PEN IS CHAMP” (U 7.1034), we can’t help hearing a cheer for the writing instrument as well as for the Odyssean character and the episode named after her. On December 10, 1920, Joyce wrote to Budgen, looking ahead to what remained to be done on his book: “I am going to leave the last word with Molly Bloom – the final episode ‘Penelope’ being written through her thoughts and body Poldy being then asleep” (SL 274). This, at least, is what Gilbert transcribes (LI 152), and Ellmann follows suit (SL 274) – a comment almost too good to be true as a text for an essay in a book on “Penelope” and the body. There is, however, some reason to exercise caution before laying too much weight on it. A. Walton Litz, who presumably also had access to the holograph letter, quotes the whole phrase as follows: “the final episode being written through her thoughts and tired Poldy being then asleep” (Litz 3). I’m not in a position to make a judgement about the accuracy of these rival transcriptions, both of which seem plausible, but whether or not Joyce actually put it in these terms himself, it does seem accurate to say that the episode is written not just through Molly’s thoughts but also through her body – including her body writing. More than one commentator has remarked that, although the episode is usually read (not inaccurately) as a remarkable evocation of untrammelled thought processes, it relies heavily on writing. One can point, for instance, to the closeness of its unpunctuated and uncapitalised style to the letters of many of Joyce’s female correspondents, to the dependence of the illusion of flowing syntax on the visual presentation of the words, and to the many effects that can be appreciated only on the page, like the cancelled h in “symphathy” and w in “newphew” that have given printers so much trouble (U 18.730), or the unsystematic use of capitals.20 More than is the case in any other episode, what Joyce is writing is closely related to how he is writing. Again Derrida gives us a hint of what this might entail: “When I write, I observe myself. And this observation forms part of the experience. I observe
prepared for constant interruption, and the use of different colours enabled him to go back to the notes and see immediately where, on that particular trawl, he had reached. 20. For further discussion see Derek Attridge, Joyce Effects: On Language, Theory, and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), chapter 8, “Molly’s Flow: The Writing of ‘Penelope’ and the Question of Women’s Language”.
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my body, the position of my body” (“Entre le corps” 60). Could Joyce, in writing a chapter so deeply involved with the body writing, not have observed his own writing body? A body, moreover, that perhaps did some of its writing while lying down? “Penelope” began, typically for Joyce in his later work, as a short draft and a large collection of notes. He mentions the former in a letter to Quinn in November 1920, the year he moved with his family from Trieste to Paris: “I must have a few months’ leisure after January to write the Ithaca and Penelope episodes which, however, have been sketched since 1916” (L III 31).21 We hear about the latter when he writes to Ettore Schmitz (Italo Svevo) in January of 1921 asking if his Triestine friend can locate in Stanislaus’s bedroom a briefcase containing notes for the last two episodes of Ulysses (SL 275-7), written – and this is quite characteristic, as we have seen – “with a pen and at times with a bleistiff when I had no pen”.22 He estimates the weight of the notes at 4.78 kilograms, jokingly no doubt, but perhaps not straying too far from the truth. These were no doubt the equivalent of the random notes Budgen saw being stuffed into orange envelopes rather than the product of organisation and transcription, since Joyce told Quinn in the same letter that before leaving Trieste he had sorted the notes “for all episodes up to and including Circe”. One of Joyce’s first tasks would have been to copy the contents of the scribbled-on pieces of paper to the large notesheets, arranged according to the episode he deemed appropriate for them, for easier use when composing. Schmitz delivered the notes in March 1921. By April 3 Joyce could report to Weaver that “Ithaca” and “Penelope” were under way (LI 161). He seems to have concentrated at first on “Ithaca”, since it’s not until August 7, four months later, that he could tell her: “I have also written the first sentence of ‘Penelope’”, going on to explain that this consists of some 2,500 words (LI 168). The chapter progressed well thereafter, with earlier sections going to Robert McAlmon for typing while Joyce continued to write the later sections. Within seven weeks – on September 24, after a twenty-day effort that produced the final “sentence” – he is reporting to Valery Larbaud that “Penelope” has gone to the printers (LIII 49; see also Gabler, U vol.3 1887). “Ithaca” took another month to complete. Of course, there remained five sets
21. Herbert Gorman, however, reports that “preliminary sketches for the final sections” date from early 1914 (James Joyce: A Definitive Biography [London: The Bodley Head, 1941]), p. 222. 22. Ellmann notes that this is “the usual Italian mispronunciation of the German word for pencil, Bleistift” (SL 276, n. 4).
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of proofs on which to further elaborate and expand his text – as we know, Joyce hardly ever deleted anything – before publication. While writing “Penelope”, then, Joyce was also working on “Ithaca”. In addition, he carried out extensive revisions to most of the earlier episodes during this period. It was a time of intense creative activity – shortly before embarking on “Penelope” he tells Schmitz that he has “not gone to bed before 2 or 3 o’clock in the morning for months and months” (SL 277). He tells Linati: “I am working like a convict until 3 or 4 in the morning” (LIII 38-9), and he tells Budgen that he is “up every night till 3 or even later writing” (SL 278). In a letter to Larbaud some time that summer he makes the revealing slip: “Je travaille dix jours par jour” – “I am working ten days a day” (LI 169). On August 7 he writes to Weaver: “I write and revise and correct with one or two eyes about twelve hours a day I should say, stopping for intervals of five minutes or so when I can’t see any more” (LI 168). This comment reminds us of the eye troubles that constantly hampered his work during these six months, the worst bout being an attack of iritis in early July that laid him up for five weeks, and delayed the completion of “Penelope”. Any consideration of Joyce’s body writing has to take into account his struggle with poor eyesight and painful ophthalmic illness. The strain of this almost frenzied pace of composition eventually proved too much, and on August 26 he collapsed at the Alhambra music hall (JJII 518). The draft of “Penelope” that he was writing – preserved in what is now known as the “Rosenbach Manuscript”23 – shows a change to a somewhat less neat hand at the beginning of the sixth “sentence” (folio 15) that Gabler suggests may be the result of this collapse (Uvol.3 1887), though the writing remains neater than that in many of the final drafts of earlier chapters. After this alarming episode, his letters are full of a resolve to moderate his furious activity: thus four days later he writes to Robert McAlmon, “I have given up the 16 hours a day work on Ulysses. I will do 5 or 6 or, later on, 8 hours” (LI 170). It’s not surprising that he begins the letter to Larbaud in which he announces that “Penelope” has gone to the printers – this is now a month after the reduction in his working day – “I am nearly dead with work and eyes” (LIII 49). In one respect, however, Joyce’s working conditions were more favourable than usual during the composition of “Ithaca” and “Penelope”. If we go back to the family’s first week in Paris in July of 1920, we find them lodged in a private hotel, found for them by Pound, in the rue de l’Université, after which they moved to a small fifth-floor servants’ flat – two bedrooms, a
23. James Joyce, Ulysses: A Facsimile of the Manuscript, introd. Harry Levin and Clive Driver (London: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975).
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storage room, and a minute kitchen – lent to them by Ludmila BlochSavitsky, the French translator of A Portrait. It’s hard to imagine Joyce getting on with Ulysses under these conditions, but he did. “Circe” was then in progress. He was presumably working, not for the first time, in a bedroom, though he was able to borrow a table to write on from Jenny Serruys, the translator of Exiles. The flat was available for only four months. Having failed to find another one, after what Joyce describes, perhaps with some slight exaggeration, as “an entire month of flathunting, out every morning and back at night” (LIII 27), they moved reluctantly back to the hotel, where conditions were even worse than in the little flat. Although Joyce, writing to Pound, refers to “the room” (LIII 27) as if all four were together, Gorman states that Joyce “worked in a bedroom where three slept without a desk and without books” (278). Presumably Giorgio, now fifteen, slept in a separate room, as he must have been in the flat.24 Shortly after leaving the hotel, Joyce gives a vivid picture of the body writing in a letter to Pound: “I had no ease in the cold sitting writing about tiresome Bloom with Mrs Pound’s shawl round my head and Miss Serruys’ two blankets round the rest of my body” (LIII 32-3). Unable to sustain this existence – apart from anything else, Joyce feared for his eyes – the couple decided to take a six-month lease on a larger flat in the Boulevard Raspail at a rent higher than they could afford, starting in December, 1920. Joyce writes of its “100 electric lamps and gas stoves” (SL 274). So, by the time the notes for “Penelope” had arrived from Trieste the following March, courtesy of Schmitz, Joyce was, for once, well established in a comfortable, warm, well-lit flat, with plenty of space for his books and notebooks. We hear no complaints, apart from grumbles about the expense. It would seem that Joyce’s prodigious creative effort during his stay in the Boulevard Raspail was partly made possible by the more congenial material conditions under which he was working. Joyce tells Budgen soon after they have moved in: “I rarely leave the house” (SL 275). The lease expired at the beginning of June, however, and Joyce could not afford to renew it. “Ithaca” and “Penelope” were not in a state to go to the printer, although Joyce with typical optimism had already signed a contract which implied that the book was all set to go to press. But his luck held. Valery Larbaud, convinced of Joyce’s greatness as a writer, offered him his own flat in the rue du Cardinal Lemoine while he was away for the summer.
24. Brenda Maddox says of this period that Joyce “wrote sitting in an armchair with a suitcase propped over the arms for a flat surface” (Nora: A Biography of Nora Joyce [London: Hamish Hamilton, 1988], p. 237), though she may be thinking of a later letter of Joyce’s which mentions this mode of work (see below).
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“O this moving job!”, wrote Joyce to Budgen on May 31 (LIII 42). The family moved in at the beginning of June and soon he was writing a grateful letter to Larbaud, commenting: “A more favourable place for the peaceful ending to such a tumultuous book could not be imagined” (LIII 43). At the same time he expressed his delight to Francini Bruni: “It is unbelievable. Behind the Pantheon, ten minutes from the Luxembourg, a kind of little park, with access through two barred gates, absolute silence, great trees, birds (not, mind you, the sort you’re thinking of!), like being a hundred kilometers from Paris” (SL 280). The fullest description of Larbaud’s flat comes from Arthur Power, who visited it much later with Joyce to pick up some books the latter had left there.25 The flat, Power tells us, contained “a room specially designed for writing,” a room shaped like a ship’s cabin with a table down the middle and easily reachable shelves at arm’s length on either side. It was sound-proofed and draught-proofed. But Power was surprised to learn that Joyce – whatever he might have said to his benefactor – did not enjoy working in it. “‘I don’t like being shut up,’ he said. ‘When I am working I like to hear noise going on around me – the noise of life; there it was like writing in a tomb’” (Conversations 91). Whether Joyce’s ability to write under conditions that would distract most writers was the product of an unavoidable mode of life, or whether a preference for such conditions – either innate or acquired at an early age in the crowded circumstances of the Joyce household in Dublin as it reconstituted itself in smaller and smaller houses – led him to live as he did, we can’t know. In any event, his response to the conditions in the Larbaud flat provides a revealing insight into his creative practices. In this respect as in many others, Joyce seems the polar opposite of another great Modernist writer in Paris at this time, Marcel Proust. Not that Joyce thought himself better off than Proust. Ellmann reports the following comment, recorded in Helen Nutting’s diary: “Proust can write; he has a comfortable place at the Étoile, floored with cork and with cork on the walls to keep it quiet. And, I, writing in this place, people coming in and out. I wonder how I can finish Ulysses” (JJII 509). Joyce may have preferred to write within earshot of the noise of life, but this wasn’t going to stop him from using the conditions under which he worked to attract sympathy and admiration. The intense pace of Joyce’s writing continued in Larbaud’s flat, until the collapse at the Alhambra in August, and then the work continued at a slightly slower rate until, as we’ve seen, “Penelope” went off to the printer in late September and “Ithaca” in late October. But by early October the summer’s
25. Arthur Power, Conversations with James Joyce, edited by Clive Hart (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), pp. 90-91.
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unwonted luxuries were over, and the family were back – this time for an entire year – in the “damned brothel” of the hotel in the rue de l’Université (JJII 518). A letter to Weaver shortly after their arrival there gives us a good sense of the writing apparatus that had to be carted from address to address, and of the importance of those coloured pencils: “A few lines to let you know I am here again with MSS and pencils (red, green, and blue) and cases of books and trunks and all the rest of my impedimenta nearly snowed up in proofs and nearly crazed with work” (LI 172). Yet it was here in this small bedroom shared with his wife and teenage daughter, that Joyce, against all odds, brought Ulysses to completion in time for his birthday on February 2 1922. Or perhaps one shouldn’t say “against all odds”? Perhaps he really did work more easily in a bedroom crammed with two or three beds, and with family life going on noisily all around him? Two years later, in another Paris hotel, with Work in Progress now underway, he wrote to Harriet Shaw Weaver: “The wild hunt [for a flat] still continues in the Paris jungle, stampede of omnibuses and trumpets of taxi-elephants etc and in this caravanserai peopled by American loudspeakers I compose ridiculous prose writing on a green suitcase which I bought in Bognor” (17 Sept 1923; L I 204). To a genius, apparently intolerable material conditions may be portals of creativity. So the question remains: how did Joyce write “Penelope”? I’m aware that the facts I’ve assembled don’t, in the end, throw a great deal of light on what went on in those various rooms in Paris in 1921. If, as Derrida claims, the physical act of writing creatively is “the most secret, the most intimate, part of our lives”, it’s not surprising that the evidence for this aspect of the writer’s activity is often slender, and always seems to fall short of what we want to know. But it’s perhaps in its very failure to explain the act of creation that an examination of this activity is, finally, valuable. Joyce devised – or it might be more accurate to say, found himself adopting – a mechanical basis for his acts of composition, whose physical laboriousness was compounded by his poverty and his nomadic mode of existence, but it would surely be wrong to say that his artistic genius lay in what he managed to achieve in spite of the systematic labour of notation, collation, and transcription. Numerous writers have provided testimony to the somatic dimension of the creative process, to the inadequacy of assuming that it is the brain working alone that produces inventive art. To read “Penelope” with an awareness of the physical process that produced its simulation of a physical process – the body writing the body writing – in addition to an awareness of the mind thinking the mind thinking is, I believe, to add a further dimension to the already multidimensional experience of the star turn of Ulysses. Joyce’s genius lay in his discovery of a way to deploy the physical capabilities of his body and the material resources of his environment that would allow unprecedented, inventive art to come into being. He could not
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have explained how this happened any more than we can. There will always be something mysterious at the heart of the extraordinary act of creation that produced Ulysses, which I like to think of not only as an act but also as an event, as something that happened to Joyce during those years in Trieste and Zürich, and, perhaps most remarkably of all, during that hectic summer in Paris26 – and in happening to Joyce happened also to Western culture, and therefore to all of us who read him, and to many who don’t. University of York
26. I explore the remarkable “act-event” of artistic invention in The Singularity of Literature (London: Routledge, 2004).
MOLLY INSIDE AND OUTSIDE “PENELOPE”
VALÉRIE BÉNÉJAM
Abstract. This essay focuses on the figure of Molly Bloom as she appears both inside and outside of the “Penelope” episode. Bénéjam sees Molly’s body as being represented, from “Calypso” in parts and by fetishistic associations with her discarded clothing and possessions, intriguingly suggesting that her discarded book may establish a certain link between her body and literature. Finding analogies for her “optics of seduction” in Flaubert and Marilyn Monroe, she proceeds to define Molly's body by its deferral and absence, an absence that ensures the reader's desire at the same time as it ensures that all that desire can hope to attain is not the represented bodily object but the body of the book. The question of Molly's body in Ulysses seems to me best emblematized by the famous photograph by Eve Arnold of Marilyn Monroe reading Joyce's book. At the close of his well-known analysis of this photograph, Richard Brown encourages Joycean critics to “imagine what we might do with Marilyn as a reader of Ulysses,” claiming that this is “one of the most exciting, challenging, and complete tasks that we, as teachers and theorists of the literary text, can perform.”1 This advice and injunction I have decided to use as the starting-point for this paper. Unaware of the circumstances of the photograph (Arnold explicitly stated that Marilyn Monroe was carrying the book with her, and had opened it while she was waiting for the photographer to get her camera ready),2 one may, with the help of a few sexist stereotypes, wonder whether Marilyn was actually reading Ulysses, or had just opened it to pretend that she was. In any
1. Richard Brown, “Marilyn Monroe Reading Ulysses: Goddess or Post-Cultural Cyborg?” in R. B. Kershner (ed), Joyce and Popular Culture (Miami: University of Florida Press, 1996), p. 79. 2. This information is provided by Richard Brown in his article (ibid., p.174).
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case, the photographer made sure that the title and author would be legible to the viewer. If one looks closely, it appears that Marilyn is reading the very end of the book—the “Penelope” episode. Is this only to show (or to pretend) that she has almost finished the book? At least it reminds us that “Penelope” is only reached at the end of a rather long and difficult book. One may decide to start with the reputedly dirty bit and go straight to the monologue, but clearly Joyce did not choose to place it as an opening. Besides, as Richard Brown has shown, Marilyn was indeed reading Ulysses—and in this precise instance, reading Molly's monologue. One may wonder what the sex-symbol from cinema thought about the sex-symbol from literature, what particularly struck her imagination. This may be impossible to assess, or even beside the point. But for a while, I would like to toy with the idea—which bears an obvious connection with the visual arts of photography and cinema—that she may very well have noticed Molly's exceptionally fine awareness of the optics of seduction, as well as her detailed, backstage knowledge of how to show, or rather stage, one's body in order to produce desire. This is what I propose to study here, and before getting inside “Penelope”, I believe that the topic requires a detour by way of the question of Molly's body outside the episode. It might first be convenient to make the distinction between Molly Bloom and “Penelope”. Critics have too often posed an equivalence between the two, between the textual and the fleshly body, whereas Molly's arrival in the book takes place a long time before the final episode itself. Until “Penelope”, Molly is only seen, or rather presented, indirectly.3 In “Calypso”, where she is first mentioned, the viewpoint from which one sees her is consistently Bloom's. And throughout the rest of Ulysses, up to the end of “Ithaca”—with very few exceptions which I shall analyse—readers get little but Bloom's vision, fantasies, or recollections, combined with occasional comments from other characters. This polyphony around and about Molly obviously prepares us for the final aria or clou of her unmediated voice in the end. I shall first consider the orchestration of this diva's arrival, because I believe that the question of Molly's body in “Penelope” can only be adequately assessed in relation to this preliminary stage. After all, Bloom is an ad-canvasser, and he might very well serve as his wife's advertising agent before her “show”. Besides, Leopold Bloom's favourite route is always circuitous and roundabout, and it is only fitting, in this instance as in most of
3. We may ask whether she could ever be seen directly? Certainly not in the sense that we can see Marilyn Monroe's body in the photograph. Even in the case of a photograph, few people would agree to speak of a strictly unmediated vision. The notion of presentation seems better suited than that of direct vision, and the question may be raised again when we come to the final episode.
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the book, to follow him, reaching Molly from behind, as he does, rather than from the front. What first started me working on Molly Bloom was the discovery of the excesses and contradictions in the greatest part of the criticism concerning her.4 I chose to consider this as a symptom and, following Derrida's suggestion that our reactions to the book had been carefully programmed within the text itself,5 I set out to unravel the program that could produce such severe symptoms, even in experienced—one might say immunized— readers. For the purpose of this article, I shall restrict this question to the rôle of Molly's body in this programming. *
*
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From “Calypso” onwards, and mainly through the mediation of Bloom's viewpoint, one can observe a double strategy of dissimulation and replacement of Molly's body. The two main techniques used are synecdochic fragmentation and metonymic fetishism. In other words, we never see Molly's whole body, only body parts, and those body parts are very often replaced by the corresponding pieces of clothing. This is very clear from the outset in “Calypso” when Bloom first walks into the bedroom, and successively notices Molly's “tousled head”, “the curve of her knees”, “her elbow”, and later “her stripped petticoat, tossed soiled linen” (U 4.247-56). The process is repeated the second time he enters the room, carrying the breakfast tray, and the climax probably occurs with the eerie closeup on Molly's “polished thumbnail” (U 4.338), as she points to the word “metempsychosis” in the book she is reading. Significantly, just before then, as he had been looking for the book on the floor following the pointing of her finger, Bloom had taken up in turn almost every single piece of clothing she had left lying there: “a leg of her soiled drawers”, “a twisted grey garter looped round a stocking: rumpled, shiny sole”, “other stocking”, “her petticoat” (U 4.321-25). At last he finds the book “sprawled against the bulge of the orangekeyed chamberpot” (U 4.330).
4. The list of all the outrageous, excessive opinions which critics have ventured about Molly is too long to be quoted here. Good summaries may be found in several places, including Kathleen McCormick's “Reproducing Molly Bloom: A Revisionist History of the Reception of ‘Penelope’, 1922-1970” (in Richard Pearce (ed), Molly Blooms: A Polylogue on “Penelope” and Cultural Studies (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994), as well as in David Hayman's “The Empirical Molly” (in Thomas Staley and Bernard Benstock (eds), Approaches to « Ulysses » (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1970). 5. See Jacques Derrida, “Ulysses” gramophone : Deux mots pour Joyce (Paris: Galilée, 1987), pp. 96-98.
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One might note in passing that the link, or at least the proximity, between Molly's body and literature is definitely asserted from the start.6 It might be objected that Molly's soft porn reading concerns only a specific kind of literature, but it is precisely by having Molly read such books, together with the love letters which are another favourite of hers, that Joyce reinforces a certain link between the body and literature. In the meantime, cut up into disconnected pieces or replaced by garments as it is, the body we are reading about is not one that might be synthesized or imagined easily: the tone is thus set early in “Calypso”, and up to the end of “Ithaca”, the fragmentation and fetishization of Molly's body is systematic through the mediation of Bloom's consciousness. The psychological or psycho-analytical implications of these features concerning Bloom are too long to detail here, but one may just mention in passing that fetishism, linked as it is for him with masochism, will take its full dimension in “Circe” in the many references to the Severin character of Sacher-Masoch's Venus in Furs.7 This also comes with a degree of sensuous delicacy and subtlety in Bloom's appreciation of women's clothing—something which appears for instance in “Nausicaa” when he mentions the perfume women leave on the clothes they remove: It's like a fine fine veil or web they have all over the skin, fine like what do you call it gossamer, and they're always spinning it out of them, fine as anything, like rainbow colours without knowing it. Clings to everything she takes off. Vamp of her stockings. Warm shoe. Stays. Drawers… (U 13.1019-23) In fact, the only time Bloom seems to see Molly's body whole and naked is when he is peeping through the keyhole in “Circe”, watching her consummating her adultery with Boylan, and the fantasmatic staging of this scene of adultery places this on a different plane altogether. Besides, what is described for the reader there is not Molly's body in action, but the Nighttown prostitutes' chorus commenting on the act, as well as Bloom's masochistic excitement (U 15.3738-824). Thus the reader is still not presented with a complete picture of Molly's body, not even when Bloom's voyeurist film is being played. *
*
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6. Not to mention the link between reading and defecation, but that obviously will be confirmed in the end of the “Calypso” episode. 7. See Frances L. Restuccia, “Molly in Furs”, in Novel, Vol.18, No. 2, Winter 1985, as well as James Joyce and the Law of the Father (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).
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As for the rest of what one reads about Molly before "Penelope," it mainly comes from the (essentially male) Dubliners' gossip, and the process of dissimulation and replacement is even more patent in those instances, corresponding quite accurately to Freud's analysis of sexual jokes.8 The words, far from revealing anything, seem to hide and veil the female sex and body. According to the nameless narrator in “Cyclops”, for example, Molly is “a fat heap” or “nice phenomenon”, with “a back on her like a ballalley” (U 12.503-4). The most significant instance occurs in “Wandering Rocks”, when Lenehan boasts of having pawed Molly in a car where he was sitting next to her facing Bloom (U 10.545-83). There again the body or body parts are never mentioned: Molly has “a fine pair”, or “a good load of Delahunt's port under her bellyband”; she is “a gamey mare and no mistake”; and all Lenehan was doing was “tucking the rug under her and settling her boa all the the time. Know what I mean?” Accompanying his words are gestures which expose the hollowness of his tale: “his caved hands [held] a cubit from him” or “mould[ing] ample curves of air”. In this process, Molly's breast and hips have apparently vanished into thin air. The only exception to be found to the indirect presentation of Molly is somehow even more symptomatic. It occurs in “Wandering Rocks”, when, on two occasions, readers get to glimpse Molly's arm, throwing a coin to the lame sailor who is singing beneath her window. In the second section of the episode, the following anonymous gesture is described: “a generous white arm from a window in Eccles street flung forth a coin” (U 10.222-23). The sentence is expanded in the following section, and becomes: “The blind of the window was drawn aside. A card Unfurnished Apartments slipped from the sash and fell. A plump bare generous arm shone, was seen, held forth from a white petticoatbodice and taut shiftstraps. A woman's hand flung forth a coin over the area railings” (U 10.250-53). Then later on, just before Lenehan's tale, we get more useful precision: "A card Unfurnished Apartments reappeared on the windowsash of number 7 Eccles street" (U 10.542-43). The precise address allows us, retrospectively, to identify with certainty the arm as Molly's. In this instance, one can notice how the double technique of fragmentation (Molly's arm and hand) and fetishization (her petticoat bodice and shift straps) is present even without a focalisation from a male character’s perspective in the text. This sudden and disconnected double emergence of Molly's arm in “Wandering Rocks” may put one in mind of two similar instances in 8. The link between gossip and sexuality was first suggested to me by Freud's Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious (Standard Edition, Hogarth Press,), Vol. VIII and by the chapter “Psychoanalysis: Gossip, Telepathy and/or Science?” in John Forrester, The Seduction of Psychoanalysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
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Flaubert's work, with which, as we know, Joyce was so familiar. The first is a famous scene in Madame Bovary, when Emma meets her second lover, Léon, in Rouen, with the supposed intention of sending him away. She has actually written a letter to this effect, which she intends to give him before leaving. But Léon convinces her to get into a coach with him, and instead of describing the sexual intercourse between the characters, Flaubert follows the long course of the coach journey, jerking and bouncing through the streets of Rouen.9 The only body part unveiled for the readers in this scene is Emma Bovary's hand, as it stretches out of the window, and drops the torn pieces of the letter.10 Another related scene may be found in the “Hérodias” tale from Les Trois Contes, Flaubert's version of the story of Salomé. Flaubert conceived of Salomé as a creature brought up and gradually exhibited by her mother Hérodias to seduce Hérode, the Tetrarch, so that he is eventually compelled to order the beheading of Jean-Baptiste. The gradual unveiling of Salomé to the Tetrarch's eyes (but also to the reader's imagination) is what the tale is really about. The final dance of the seven veils, a little like Molly's monologue, is the purple patch of the work. Before it comes an essential scene, when the Tetrarch gets to see, or rather to guess at, a young woman dressing up behind a curtain, letting only an arm wander around, dancing in the air, as it looks for a tunic she has left lying on a stool. This double instance of female hands or arms leads me to see a clear connection with the way in which Molly's arm and hand appear in "Wandering Rocks", and to suggest that Joyce may very well have borrowed from Flaubert the idea of such a minimal and metonymic scene of seduction. Finally, as we reach the end of “Ithaca” and the threshold of “Penelope”, Molly's body becomes, like that of others, a heavenly body, whilst her real body seems to have disappeared behind the abstract music of philosophical and latinate terminology. In the end of the episode, when Bloom reaches Molly's body (from behind, as we might expect), he repeatedly uses the word “hemispheres” (U 17.2229, 2232, 2242), as well as a polysyllabic abstract
9. The vocabulary used here may also be connected to the semantic network of bouncing and jerking which is associated with Molly and Boylan's sexual intercourse throughout Ulysses. 10. This scene became especially famous, because it was publicly read by Flaubert's lawyer, during the trial where the writer was accused of obscenity and immorality over Madame Bovary. Needless to say, the complete absence of explicit detail, or of any mention of bodypart, but the hand, is precisely what turned the jury in Flaubert's favour. For the complete text of the trial and judgment around Flaubert's novel, see “Appendice: Le Procès”, in Madame Bovary (Paris: Livre de Poche, 1972), pp. 413502.
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vocabulary which takes us very far from what could be thought of as a concrete image of Molly's bottom: Satisfaction at the ubiquity in eastern and western terrestrial hemispheres, … of adipose anterior and posterior female hemispheres, redolent of milk and honey and of excretory sanguine and seminal warmth, reminiscent of secular families of curves of amplitude, insusceptible of moods of impression or of contrarieties of expression, expressive of mute immutable mature animality. (U 17.2229-36) The mention of blood and sperm is carefully flooded in a maze of abstract terms, and the general effect of such fallacious descriptions is to end up dissimulating what it professed to portray. The irony is perceived by the readers precisely when they realize that Molly's posterior is what is meant behind the conceptual, non-representational terminology. What is left of the invisible body, as we are about to enter “Penelope”, is but the empty envelope of clothing which Bloom contemplates, and which only seems to demand being fleshed out : A pair of new inodorous halfsilk black ladies' hose, a pair of new violet garters, a pair of outsize ladies' drawers of India mull, cut on generous lines, redolent of opoponax, jessamine and Muratti's Turkish cigarettes and containing a long bright steel safety pin, folded curvilinear, a camisole of batiste with thin lace border, an accordion underskirt of blue silk moirette … (U 17.2092-96) *
*
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When we reach “Penelope” it may be that our first impression is that we are now given the view from the wings of the stage of her performance, or from the dressing-rooms. However, there may not be a complete opposition between “Penelope” and what has come before in these terms since Molly's monologue may be thought to correspond almost perfectly to the preliminary advertisement of what we may call her show. “Penelope” retrospectively explains the preparation of Molly's body: a preparation which works on the inside as well as on the outside in a different sense. Food is the input which Molly turns into her fleshly charms, and she often insists on the effect it bears on her body appearance, either making her thinner (“my belly is a bit too big Ill have to knock off the stout at dinner” [U 18.450]), or conversely bigger (“Ill take those eggs beaten up with marsala fatten them out for him” [U 18.547-48]). To some extent, we might consider Molly's kitchen as the workshop where her body takes shape, and the process is even carried a little further, since she defines the female character as “such a mixture of plum and apple” (U 18.1535). As for the outside, Molly is also concerned with clothes and how they adorn and embellish her body. She gives many details about her shopping for
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clothes, her choosing hats, or dresses. Perhaps influenced by her appearances on stage, she is convinced that costume means everything, for without a good costume, as she claims, “the men wont look at you and women try to walk on you” (U 18.472-3).11 Like a good costume-maker, she will also recycle old clothes and try to make do with what she already has in her wardrobe,12 all the time complaining about how little money she has to fund her show. Disclosed retrospectively and to the reader only, all this preparation constitutes what I like to call the view from backstage. Such staging of the body, as several critics have noted, reveals Molly's rare awareness of the desiring male gaze.13 The optical system which is thus constructed, with the female object as the unique focus and center of multiple male stares, is actually modulated and rendered more complex through a series of precise allusions to eyes and gazes. The male gaze, although there are several instances of it, always seems unique, and therefore always replaceable, as well as starkly direct and unsubtle in its intentions. Molly seems particularly aware and critical of such male looks when she encounters them: “his boiled eyes of all the big stupoes I ever met and thats called a solicitor” (U 18.43-44), “therell be the usual idiots of men gaping at us with their eyes as stupid as ever they can possibly be” (U 18.368-70), “the lord Mayor looking at me with his dirty eyes” (U 18.428-29). The only man to make an exception, which definitely gives him superiority in this game, is Bloom. In several instances, the men's eyes are directly associated with the phallus, the combination thus producing a sexually penetrating gaze: no I never in all my life felt anyone had one the size of that to make you feel full up he must have eaten a whole sheep after whats the idea making us like that with a big hole in the middle of us or like a Stallion driving it up into you because thats all they want out of you with that determined vicious look in his eye I had to halfshut my eyes (U 18.149-53) Another obvious instance is to be found with Molly's amazingly true-tolife image of the male sex as she first discovers it with Mulvey: I made him blush a little when I got over him that way when I unbuttoned him and took his out and drew back the skin it had a kind of eye in it (U 18.814-16)
11. See Margaret Mills Harper, “’Taken in Drapery’: Dressing the Narrative in the Odyssey and ‘Penelope’”, in Molly Blooms, pp.237-63, as well as Gary Leonard, “Molly Bloom's ‘Lifestyle’: The Performative as Normative”, ibid., pp.196-234. 12. “cutting up this old hat and patching up the other” (U 18.472), “only I felt rotten simply with the old rubbishy dress that I lost the leads out of the tails with no cut in it but theyre coming into fashion again” (U 18.513-15). 13. See for instance Richard Pearce's “How Molly Bloom Looks Through the Male Gaze,” in Molly Blooms, pp.40-62.
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This both realistic and highly symbolic fusion of the gaze and of the phallus as symbol for sexual desire, besides corresponding pretty accurately to what psychoanalysis had and has since been telling us, is an impressive representation of the male desiring gaze as directed at Molly's body. While this cyclopean phallus is one aspect of the optics of seduction in “Penelope”, the woman's halfshut eyes provide another. To quote again from Molly's memory of her recent sexual intercourse with Boylan, her thought “I had to halfshut my eyes” is a counterpart to “that determined vicious look in his eye”. In fact, despite Molly's accurate descriptions of the several instances of the male gaze, the woman's eyes never take a direct look at the man. While pretending she does not see, the woman is constantly checking on the reaction produced by the staging of her body. Furthermore, the woman is always hiding her own excitement: “O Lord I wanted to shout all sorts of things fuck or shit or anything at all only not to look ugly or those lines from the strain who knows the way hed take it you want to feel your way with a man” (U 18.588-90); “how did we finish it off yes O yes I pulled him off into my handkerchief pretending not to be excited” (U 18.809-10). Much of the time, she will pretend that she does not see, while still remaining in good control of the situation: “I could see his face he couldnt see mine of course” (U 18.116). This may be why her eyes often remain halfshut and in a posture of apparent sexual surrender which may only be a trick to peer at the man from beneath her eyelashes. The woman's halfshut eyes are a recurrent motif in “Penelope”: “when we met asking me have I offended you with my eyelids down” (U 18.320-21); “he didn't recognise me either when I half frowned at him outside Westland row chapel” (U 18.708-9); “I had to wink at him first no use of course” (U 18.1259); “close my eyes breath my lips forward kiss” (U 18.875). The half-closed eyelids and eyelashes, function like a half-drawn stage curtain, complete with a rent in the material that allows the actors to watch how numerous or enthusiastic their audience might be. A highly relevant image is to be found in the setting of the song “In Old Madrid”, where the Spanish girl, her body partly hidden, and also necessarily fragmented, by the lattice-work, looks onto her passionate lover. Molly makes several allusions to this song: “two glancing eyes a lattice hid Ill sing that for him theyre my eyes” (U 18.1338-40) and “Ronda with the old windows of the posadas 2 glancing eyes a lattice hid for her lover to kiss the iron” (U 18.1594-95). Moreover, there is a fascinating alteration from the original of the song as Joyce quotes it. Whilst the original text mentions the girl's “sparkling eyes”,14 with the emphasis on what those eyes look like from the lover's viewpoint, Joyce has Molly change this to “glancing eyes”, the
14. As quoted by Don Gifford in his Ulysses Annotated (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), p. 303.
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emphasis now being on the woman's eyes as subjects, rather than objects of perception, as well as on the furtiveness of her gaze.15 The lattice-work corresponds closely with Molly's halfshut eyelids. For me, the optics of seduction in “Penelope” operate between these two poles of the cyclopean phallus and the Spanish lattices. The space between these two images is where the body, or rather the attempt at seeing the body, is staged. Lattices do not allow a complete, uniform vision of the woman's naked body, and this corresponds exactly to Molly's technique of seduction. She is a singer, used to performance, and consequently especially aware of the necessity for the staging of her charms, as well as for the rhythmic progression required for such staging to be successful:16 I know what I'll do Ill go about rather gay not too much singing a bit now and then mi fa pieta Masetto then Ill start dressing myself to go out presto non son piu forte Ill put on my best shift and drawers let him have a good eyeful out of that to make his micky stand for him (U 18.1506-10) Joyce's strategy works in the same way. The closer we think we are getting to Molly's body, or to finally seeing this body, the more subtle the illusion becomes. Her underwear for instance, seems to promise nakedness and her fascination with it effectively corresponds to Bloom's fetishism.17 Yet that promise is never fulfilled and what comes into view eventually is still a theatrical illusion: 15. Molly's mistakes with songs are often symptomatic. When she quotes the Don Giovanni duet with Zerlina, she says “voglio e non vorrei”, instead of “vorrei e non vorrei”, thereby asserting a firmer will and desire than the character in Mozart's opera. This point has acquired even more weight, given the information recently uncovered about the new manuscript for “Penelope” in the Dublin Library, where Joyce visibly changed his first choice of a conditional to a present tense for Molly's final “yes I will Yes”. Here, as with the Don Giovanni quote, the change from conditional future to indicative present tense is what makes the whole difference. 16. For an extensive study of theatricality in “Penelope”, see Kimberly J. Devlin, “Pretending in ‘Penelope’: Masquerade, Mimicry and Molly Bloom”, and Cheryl Herr, “’Penelope’ as Period Piece” (both in Molly Blooms). I also find it significant that when Frank Budgen mentions Molly Bloom, he uses this same word: “Her very isolation (she is alone on the stage while all the rest sleep) gives her the scale and proportion of a giantess.” James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), p. 269 (italics mine). 17. Bloom's obsession with drawers is well echoed in “Penelope” where Molly mentions “my garters the new ones” (U 18.86), “the second pair of silkette stockings” (U 18.443), “one of those kidfitted corsets Idwant advertised cheap in the Gentlewoman with elastic gores on the hips” (U 18.446-47), “my petticoat bodice” (U 18.765), “the little bit of a short shift I had” (U 18.919), “my old pair of drawers” (U 18.1096), “my short petticoat” (U 18.1379), “my best shift and drawers” (U 18.1509) and so on.
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if he wants to kiss my bottom Ill drag open my drawers and bulge it right out in his face as large as life (U 18.520-21) The theatre of Molly's arse is here complete with drawers as curtains, a spectacular entrance, and a patently realistic, naturalistic even, intention. So what is fascinating may not so much be the garment or the body, as the limit between the two, and how this limit, in the form of the hem, signals and points to the potential presence or disappearance of the body. The hem, the border, the limit are what counts, together with how much they may cover or unveil. Clothes do for the body what the eyelids and eyelashes achieve for the eyes only. Everybody has noticed Molly's obsession with the low cut of necklines and the length of skirts.18 Molly herself repeatedly plays on what she may show of a leg, an arm, a neck, in order to seduce, manipulating the hems and the limits of her garments: “I know plenty of ways ask him to tuck down the collar of my blouse or touch him with my veil and gloves on going out” (U 18.189-90). She is well aware that what counts is what the clothes reveal in spite of apparently covering it: “my blouse open for his last day transparent kind of shirt he had I could see his chest pink” (U 8.799-800). She keeps her garments half opened in a state of eternal suspension: "he was looking at me I had that white blouse on open in the front to encourage him as much as I could without too openly" (U 18.787-89). The oxymoronic cut of Molly's blouse, “open… without too openly”, sums up her seductive tactics. She also uses the transparency and incomplete texture of lace: “Ill change that lace on my black dress to show off my bubs” (U 18.900), and she plays on the ceaseless movement of her fan (“Ill yes by God Ill get that big fan mended make them burst with envy” (U 18.901-2]) to create an endless succession of appearances and disappearances of her breast.19 Thus staged by the opening and closing motions of clothes used as theatre curtains, Molly's body may only be partially and intermittently imagined, in a maddening succession of “now you see me”, “now you don't”. If Marilyn Monroe may make a sudden quick reappearance here, one may remember two famous scenes in her filmography: a particularly well-known one, with Marilyn's dress suddenly flying up in The Seven Years' Itch, as well
18. “God help the world if all the women were her short down on bathing suits and lownecks” (U 18.9-10); “those brazenfaced things on their bicycles with their skirts blowing up to their navels” (U 18.290-91); “her tongue is a bit too long for my taste your blouse is open too low she says to me the pan calling the kettle balckbottom and I had to tell her not to cock her legs up like that on show on the windowsill before all the people passing they all look at her like me when I was her age of course” (U 18.1033-36). 19. One should also mention the scene of her seduction of Boylan at the Dublin Bread (or Bakery) Company, which is too long to quote here, but where the showing of her foot plays an essential part (U 18.246-60).
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as another in The Misfits, as the characters reach the house in the desert, and she plays at going back and forth across the threshold, appearing and vanishing back in turn, in front of her lover's fascinated eyes. Obviously, the trick is one well-mastered by sex-symbols. In fact, Molly's body is never shown or seen directly. The book ends on a kiss, the promise of some further consummation, which is never given, thus ensuring the reader's unabated desire.20 Indeed, the point is not to show, but to stage the showing.21 The cyclopean phallus is forever raised in expectation: one made up this time not of the male gazes inside the book, but of the eyes and desires of readers of both sexes outside it. And it sees nothing but words on a page. The only thing it can hope to penetrate, just like Marilyn reaching the end of Ulysses, is the body of the book. University of Nantes
20. We might compare this to William Gass's technique of showing the body of his female character in Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife (New York : Dalkey Archive Press, 1989). We see her breast on the front page, her bottom on the back, and several other photographs of body parts are scattered at key moments inside the book. With many references to Joyce's Molly Bloom, Gass seems to have wanted to make a point about the seduction of the lover-reader by the pimp-writer, through the body of the whore-book. However, this book's shortcoming might be that the female body in it is too obviously shown, rather than subtly staged, thus destroying any arousing titillation of the readers. 21. I am partly borrowing this fundamental term, “staging” from a talk given by Derek Attridge (“The Literary Thing”) at L'Empreinte des Choses, a colloquium organized in Paris III-Sorbonne Nouvelle, 27 and 28 September 2002.
VERBAL OR VISUAL?: “PENELOPE” AND CONTEMPORARY PSYCHOLOGY JOHN SMURTHWAITE Abstract: This paper examines the “Penelope” episode in the context of contemporary ideas in the field of cognitive psychology, with particular reference to the categorization of individuals as “verbal” or “visual” thinkers, developed in the work of Francis Galton and others, a version of which may have been known to Joyce through Freud. The common conception of “Penelope” as a mentally spoken monologue is challenged, and it is proposed that it might rather be seen as a mentally visualized written text. It is customary to refer to the final chapter of Ulysses as “Molly’s monologue”. This is normally done without much perceived need for definition or substantiation. The term has a clear authorial basis in that Joyce himself named “Monologue” as the “Technic” for “Penelope” in the Linati and Gorman-Gilbert schemata. Nevertheless, my purpose here is to call this convention into question, and to attempt to offer a more precise idea of the manner of representation of what is happening in Molly Bloom’s mind in the early hours of 17 June, with reference to contemporary work in the field of cognitive psychology, particularly the distinction between verbal and visual modes of thought. The customary reference to monologue may be clarified by a review of some relevant comments in the criticism, beginning with the term “interior monologue”. Edouard Dujardin, to whom Joyce deferred as the inventor of the form, explains this as a kind of speech: ….interior monologue, by its very nature as monologue, is, above all, in the first place speech by the character being presented to us; second, speech without an audience; third, unspoken speech.1 The description of “Penelope” by several Joyce critics preserves, and indeed extends, this idea of orality. David Hayman declares: 1. Edouard Dujardin, The Bays are Sere and Interior Monologue, trans. Anthony Suter (London: Libris, 1991), p.103.
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Molly’s monologue is an extreme form of stream of consciousness, so extreme that it brings us close to the conventions of dramatic soliloquy in which the character must describe himself and describe his own behaviour. 2 Likewise Stanley Sultan: A verbal representation of the thoughts with which Molly reacts to and reflects on her situation, the chapter is very properly called “Molly’s soliloquy”.3 Bernard Benstock takes the oral idea still further: Rather than a monologue, “Penelope” is a cantata of Molly’s various voices.4 What all these terms – monologue, soliloquy, cantata – convey is the idea of an inward speech and we can find this too in a classic definition of “interior monologue” given by Dorrit Cohn: […] interior monologue is, by definition, a discourse addressed to no one, a gratuitous verbal agitation without communicative aim.5 For some readers the discourse may not be addressed to no-one but perhaps even heard or at least overheard by the reader or by Molly herself.6 But, as I shall attempt to show, in whatever form this idea may not always be sufficient to explain what we find in “Penelope”. Three elements of consciousness may perhaps be understood as, firstly, physical sensations and raw emotions, which, in a book, must necessarily be translated into words. Examples of such in “Penelope” may include the discomfort caused by Bloom’s inconvenient sleeping posture, the inadequacy of the chamberpot, the performance of various bodily functions, or the annoyance of the creaky press. In this chapter, there is no narrator to tell us, nor another waking character to whom Molly speaks. These things have therefore to be verbalized in Molly’s characteristic idiom. This translation 2. David Hayman, “Ulysses”: The Mechanics of Meaning, (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982), p.104. 3. Stanley Sultan, The Argument of “Ulysses” (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press), pp.418-419. The term “soliloquy” is also favoured by Suzette Henke, Joyce’s Moraculous Sindbook (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1978), pp.233, 236. 4. Bernard Benstock, Narrative Con/Texts in Ulysses (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991), p.120. 5. Dorrit Cohn, Transparent Minds:Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), p.225. 6. See John Spencer, “A note on the ‘steady monologue of the interior’”, A Review of English Literature, 6 (1965), p.41. Here Joycean interior monologue is seen as “language written to be read as if overheard”.
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process was hinted at by Tindall who says that “The author … must verbalize what his observer feels.”7 Joyce’s art lies in presenting such things through Molly’s responses, rather than have her or another describe her actions. 8 Molly has a quiet awareness of her body, often touching and assessing parts of it. She mentions her feet: “I dont like my foot so much” (U 18.262-3); her belly: “my belly is a bit too big” (U 18.450); her nipples: “this one anyhow stiff the nipple gets for the least thing … this one not so much theres the mark of his teeth where he tried to bite the nipple”, (U 18.536-7, 568-9); her pubic hair: “I think Ill cut this hair off me there”, (U 18.1133-4). But consciousness may not always be seen in this light. There might also be thought to be visual images, seen “through the mind’s eye”, which may be static or kinetic, recalled or imagined. Again, in a book, it is necessary to convert these images into words. Even in graphic novels such as Art Spiegelman’s Maus, remembered or imagined scenes have to be provided with a textual “voice-over” to render them intelligible. Then thirdly there might be something that we might call a flow of “verbal thought” and this might be something that comes closest of all to the conventional idea of the “interior monologue” whether it is though to be spoken or not. The relative balance of visual and verbal thinking varies considerably from one individual to another. This first became apparent from the experiments reported in 1880 by the eccentric polymath Sir Francis Galton (1822-1911). Galton sent out a questionnaire in which he asked his subjects to state how clearly they could picture that day’s breakfast table in their minds. He was astonished to find that many of his initial group of subjects (who were mostly his fellow-scientists) not only could not picture their breakfast table at all, but ridiculed the whole concept of mental visual imagery, which was clearly alien to them. Only by sending further questionnaires to a broader range of subjects was he able to obtain any positive results. From these findings, Galton developed the idea that individuals may be categorized as “verbalizers” who think predominantly in words, or as “visualizers” who think primarily in pictures. Galton’s work was further developed in the following decade by Alfred Binet and William James.9 At the time when Joyce was writing Ulysses, these ideas were current and a new generation of researchers was at work in this field. In the course of these investigations, it became clear that a simplistic assigning of individuals 7. William York Tindall, James Joyce: His Way of Interpreting the Modern World (New York: Scribner, 1950), p.41. 8. Transparent Minds, pp.226-7. 9. Francis Galton, Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development (London: Dent, 1907), pp.57-79; William James, The Principles of Psychology (New York: Holt, 1890), Vol.2, pp.44-75.
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to one pigeonhole or the other was unsatisfactory; rather, the verbal/visual scheme should be seen as a continuum of infinite gradations.10 I have not found any evidence that Joyce had read any of this work. However a relevant reference of which I am aware in Joyce’s known reading appears in Freud’s Psychopathology of Everyday Life, which Joyce owned in a 1917 edition. Freud is here discussing memory, rather than active thinking: Remembering in adults, as is well known, makes use of a variety of psychical material. Some people remember in visual images; their memories have a visual character. Other people can scarcely reproduce in their memory even the scantiest outlines of what they have experienced. Following Charcot’s proposal, such people are called auditifs and moteurs in contrast to the visuels.11 I would want to claim that Molly Bloom is a visualizer (or a visuel). Much of “Penelope” takes the form of replays of events from her past, for which she has a memory verging on the eidetic. Street scenes from her childhood in Gibraltar, her consultation with Dr Collins, Bloom running along the station platform with his bowl of soup, Ben Dollard in his overtight trousers, and many more such episodes, are all recalled with visual immediacy and as if they were yesterday. Occasionally there is a blur. Significantly, for example, Molly can still see Mulvey’s penis clearly enough indeed she recalls that “it had a kind of eye in it” (U 18.816) but she is unsure whether or not he had a moustache. Mulvey’s first name (a verbal element) escapes her altogether. Her memories frequently include a reference to what she was wearing at the time, such as “the orange petticoat I had on” (U 18.308-9), “I had that white blouse on” (U 18.787-8) and “my white ricestraw hat” (U 18.797-8). This may be especially interesting in view of Freud’s comment, later in the passage cited above: In these [remembered] scenes of childhood […] what one sees invariably includes oneself as a child, with a child’s shape and clothes […] in their recollections of later experiences adult visuels no longer see themselves. Molly, in defiance of Freud, retains this faculty of self-visualization into adult life; not only in relation to her clothes, but also to her flashing eyes and to “my bust that they havent” (U 18.885-6). 10. An account of the development of the verbal/visual theory may be found in Allan Paivio, Imagery and Verbal Processes (Hillsdale: Erlbaum, 1979), ch.14. A good summary of current ideas is John T.E. Richardson, Imagery (Hove: Psychology Press, 1999). 11. Sigmund Freud, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, trans. James Strachey et al. (London: Benn, 1966), p.47. The one other work on psychology which Joyce is known to have owned was the Jesuit Michael Maher’s Psychology (London: Longmans, 1890). Fr Maher is more concerned with locating the seat of the soul than with discussing modes of understanding or representing consciousness.
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Such a strongly visual flavour for the work of memory is confirmed in the image of the playing of clips from one’s inner film archive, which is described by Joyce himself in a letter of 1927 thus: Whenever I am obliged to lie with my eyes closed I see a cinematograph going on and on, and it brings back to my memory things I had almost forgotten.12 Shiv Kumar has termed “Penelope” “Mrs Bloom’s film de conscience [which] projects on the reader’s mind scenes from her past life, in a cinematographic succession” – and, one might extend this to suggest that these visual scenes are played out on Mrs Bloom’s own mind too.13 I would, then, take issue with Edwin Steinberg’s declaration about the representation of the phenomena of consciousness in verbal form that: […] nowhere will he [the reader] find the simulations or analogues of sensations, mental images, or perceptions […] Rather he will find the words of a woman talking (not necessarily aloud) to herself.14 This reader finds such “simulations or analogues” on every page. Stephen Dedalus, by contrast, would appear to be a verbalizer. He not only talks like a book, as the saying is, but he thinks like a book, in perfectly formed grammatical sentences with footnotes. At times he conducts arguments with himself: What the hell are you driving at? I know. Shut up. Blast you. I have reasons (U 9.846-7) Yet Stephen, no doubt aided by his Jesuit training in composition of place, can also visualize with the best when occasion demands: for instance, his encounter with Kevin Egan in Paris (U 3.216 ff.) or his family’s squalid living conditions (U 16.268-8). Bloom may be placed somewhere in the centre of the verbal/visual spectrum. His inner volubility is matched by his powers of visual recall: of his happy days in Lombard Street West (U 8.160201); or of the inquest on his father: “The coroner’s sunlit ears, big and hairy” (U 6.359-64). Where Bloom and Stephen differ from Molly is that in addition to these “archive” scenes, they have the faculty of creating new fantasy sequences. Stephen, for instance, visually realizes the ragging of Clive Kempthorpe at Oxford (U 1.165-75) and pictures scenes from Dublin’s history (U 3.300-9). Bloom imagines Paddy Dignam’s hearse overturning (U 6.421-6); or his future life, reading pornography in his ideal home, with its polite parrot and well-stocked toolshed (U 17.1499-1602); or sees himself strolling through an Arabian Nights scene, with an insouciant attitude to 12. Joyce to Harriet Weaver, 27 June 1924 (L1 216). 13. Shiv K. Kumar, Bergson and the Stream of Consciousness Novel (London: Blackie, 1962), p.111. 14. Erwin R. Steinberg, The Stream of Consciousness and Beyond in “Ulysses” (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1973), p.221.
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potential robbers (U 4.86-98). All this was lost on Wyndham Lewis, evidently himself an extreme visualizer, who complained: But the fact is that Mr Bloom was unnaturally wordy. He thought in words, not images, for our benefit, in a fashion as unreal, from the point of view of the strictest naturalist dogma, as a Hamlet soliloquy.15 Similarly Dorrit Cohn, who says that, “A writer like Joyce, who gives us Bloom’s mind almost entirely in Joyce’s own words, reveals that he conceives of thought largely as verbalization.”16 Molly’s moments of true verbalization are much rarer than Stephen’s use of visual imagery. One such moment would be her vocalization of the train whistle as “frseeeeeeeefronnnng” (U 18.596); and another would be her imitation of a dog barking “rrrsssstt awokwokawok” (U 18.813). To these we may add her recollection of a Spanish grammar-book phrase “I wonder could I get my tongue round any of the Spanish como esta usted muy bien gracias y usted” (U 18.1471-2), and her complaint of having to sing the tongue-twister “istsbeg” (U 18.876). For the rest, Molly’s stream of pungent opinions and ideas is less obviously oral than at first appears, as we soon find if we attempt to read “Penelope” aloud, or even to “think” along with Molly. Spelling errors which are homophones of the true spelling, such as “neumonia” (U 18.727) or “place” for “plaice” (U 18.939), cannot be conveyed orally. The same is true of the representations of prices and quantities. We might compare Molly’s “2/6 per doz” (U 18.63) with Bloom’s “one and ninepence a dozen” (U 8.171) or Molly’s “£1 or perhaps 30/-” (U 18.1523) with Stephen’s “Fred Ryan, two shillings” (U 2.256). This is also the case with Molly’s eccentric approach to capitalization: “what a Deceiver” (U 18.318); “a Gorgeous wrap” (U 18.674); “I tried with the Banana” (U 18.803); or “something Nevada the sierra Nevada” (U 18.918-9); and such unpronounceable oddities as “symphathy I always make that mistake and newphew with 2 double yous in” (U 18.730-1); “her a—e” (U 18.490); [compare Bloom’s “Tee dash ar” (U 11.1026)]; or “Gardner lieut Stanley G 8th Bn 2nd East Lancs Rgt” (U 18.389). We can also point to the use of numerals in the episode and contrast Molly’s with those of Bloom. Molly has “it was ¼ after 3” (U 18.344); whilst Bloom has “Twenty past eleven” (U 6. 237). Molly has “yes hed be 11 (U 18.1307); Bloom “He would be eleven now” (U 4.420). Molly has “when was that 93” (U 18.555) and Bloom “ninetyfour he died yes” (U 8.159). And Molly has “the very 1st opportunity” (U 18.1192) and “let me see if I can doze off 12345” (U 18.1544-5). By contrast, Bloom’s use of numerals is 15. Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man, ed. Paul Edwards (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1993), p.102. Lewis is here quoting his earlier The Art of Being Ruled. (Lewis’s italics). 16. Transparent Minds, p.79.
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normally only visual in the context of a seen or remembered document: “85 Dame street” (U 8.142); “Kino’s 11/- Trousers” (U 8.90-2); “Spurgeon went to heaven 4 a.m. this morning. 11 p.m. (closing time).” (U 6.788).17 According to Galton, Molly’s usage is characteristic of visualizers: Persons who are imaginative almost invariably think of numerals in some form of visual imagery. If the idea of six occurs to them, the word “six” does not sound in their mental ear, but the figure 6 in a written or printed form rises before their mental eye.18 Molly, however, is not as consistent as Galton’s subjects, for “Penelope” in its final version still contains nearly seventy numbers in spelled-out form. One possible approach to the representation of Molly’s consciousness in this episode may be to regard the apparently “verbal” element of “Penelope” as a written document, imagined by Molly as being in the course of construction. Here we may draw again on Galton’s characterization of visualizers: Some few persons see mentally in print every word that is uttered; they attend to the visual equivalent and not the sound of the words, and they read them off as from a long imaginary strip of paper, such as is unwound from telegraphic instruments. The experiences differ in detail as to the size and kind of type, colour of paper, and so forth, but are always the same in the same person.19 A similar image is employed, in a more metaphorical sense, by Nathalie Sarraute: “[…] unwinding inside us, like the ribbon that comes clattering from a telescriptor slot, is an uninterrupted flow of words.”20 My sense of the episode would differ from Galton’s account of this only in that Molly’s visualized text appears to be hand-written rather than printed. It may seem to have been written, perhaps, by a disembodied hand such as the “deadhand” seen writing on a wall “Bloom is a cod” (U 15.1870-1). Or, to use an anachronistic parallel, with the lacecuffed hand which is seen to write the opening credits in Hollywood swashbucklers. This representation of thought as writing may have been disputed by some more recent psychologists. Alan Richardson, for instance, states that, “It is relatively rare to see words as though they are written on a blackboard, or on a kind of endless band of tickertape.”21 17. Such peculiarities are also discussed by Derek Attridge, Joyce Effects (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), ch.8. 18. Inquiries, p.79. (Galton’s italics) 19. Inquiries, p.67. 20. Quoted in Transparent Minds, p.80. 21. Alan Richardson, Mental Imagery (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), p.73.
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But for our purpose the point is not whether the concept is valid in psychological terms, but that it was current in Joyce’s time. And there is support for it. John Garvin characterized “Penelope” as a written document, but drew (in my view) the wrong inference: “The whole chapter conveys the impression of a literary composition the words of which are intended for the eye and not for the mind.”22 As Lewis represented Bloom’s thought processes as unnaturally verbal, so Garvin rejected Molly’s as unnaturally visual. A further corroboration can be found in authorial intent. Joyce originally conceived “Penelope” as a series of letters from Molly, 23 and indeed the chapter as written does still retain the suggestion of a letter, particularly in its occasional use of the second person, which seems to be of a different order from Stephen’s internal arguments, referred to earlier. “I tell you” (U 18.4678, 1030-1, 1391-2) and “you see” (U18.1483-4) may conceivable be mere rhetorical flourishes, as Cohn suggests, (p.232) but “did you ever see me running” (U 18.1432-3) certainly seems to imply an interlocutor. Many of the features noted above are indeed present, to a considerably lesser extent, in the actual letters which Joyce had received from Nora Barnacle, from her mother, and from Josephine Murray, impelling him to write to Stanislaus: Do you notice how women when they write disregard stops and capital letters?24 The use of numerals, however, as Derek Attridge has shown us, is not a characteristic of Joyce’s female correspondents, but of his father’s letters.25 Several of the features were mostly introduced at a later stage, either by retrospective conversion, or as part of Joyce’s numerous additions, principally at the third placard in mid-November 1921, and to a lesser extent on the fourth placard (late November) and page proof (January 1922). Letters play an important part in Ulysses, particularly for Molly Bloom, for whom a loveletter “fills up your whole day and life” (U 18.737-8). In Gibraltar, she resorted in desperation to posting blank sheets of paper to herself (U 18.698-9); the arrival of a real letter, from Mulvey (U 18.748-68) or Mrs Stanhope (U 18.613-23) was a major event. In this respect the only satisfactory period of her life was her courtship by Bloom, whose “mad crazy letters” led her to masturbate (U 18.1176-9), though she was apparently shocked by “that letter with all those words in it” (U 18.318-9). Since her marriage, Molly has been in an epistolary desert. When her old friend Mrs Dwenn wrote from Canada, it was merely to request a recipe (U 18.718-20). Milly only sent her a postcard, though she wrote a letter to Bloom. Boylan’s 22. Andrew Cass [John Garvin], “Childe Horrid’s Pilgrimace”, in John Ryan (ed), A Bash in the Tunnel: James Joyce by the Irish (Brighton: Clifton Books, 1970), p.173. 23. JJII 501. 24. Letter to Stanislaus Joyce, 3 October 1906 (L II 173). 25. Attridge, p.103n.
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letter, evidently brisk and businesslike, was another disappointment (U 18.734-6); even if Boylan had been capable of producing a romantic or erotic letter, he clearly had more sense than to write a potential Exhibit A, to cause “Laughter in court” (U 11.1078-80). Molly lacks the resourcefulness of her husband, who buys love letters with halfcrown postal orders, having constructed an elaborate apparatus of false names, disguised handwriting and accommodation addresses. Bloom is also alleged to have “telephoned mentally” to Miss Dunn (U 15.3029-31); Molly writes a letter mentally, either to herself or to some correspondent of her own imagining. In summary, then, recalling the elements of consciousness distinguished earlier, we can now trace three threads in “Penelope”: physical sensations and actions, which in the absence of a narrator must be voiced by Molly; some infrequent instances of verbal thought; and the visual element which flicks rapidly between the “cinematograph” of memory and the written record which Adaline Glasheen called “Molly’s letter to the world”.26 It may moreover also be possible to reconceive the episode not so much as a spoken or quasi oral “monologue” but as a piece of writing that Molly’s visual imagination may be said to read as part of the very process by which she writes it. University of Leeds
26. Adaline Glasheen, Third Census of Finnegans Wake (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), p.xxxviii.
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SPINNING WITH “PENELOPE” FINN FORDHAM Abstract: This highly original essay treats “Penelope” as a body in motion and, consequently, as one that is to be discussed in terms of its speed or indeed slowness of speed. It treats speed in contemporary Futurist theory as well as varying different senses of speed, including speed as represented and the speed of rhythm and performance and meaning to produce a suggestive new approach to reading the fluid dynamics of the episode. Yes because Molly is fast, a bit of a goer. Reading “Penelope” we may find ourselves propelled, through several auricular illusions, to marvel at the rapidity of her spinning and experience her as speed. In this piece I’ll run with this sensation to meditate swiftly around it. I plan to carry out as practice what I’m arguing for in theory: an attention to the dynamics of speed in aesthetic sensation and an integration of the results with those values ascribed to the various speeds of living.1 Our bodies are the primary site for the impact of these speeds, speeds which our bodies endure and enjoy. Thus a focus on formalistic concerns can be joined to an engaged political critique. The topics I cover are spun together to an extent, but the following synopsis shows the thread of the argument. The sensation of speed and rhythm, though somewhat subjective, is essential to narrative. Despite this there is a lack of work on the experience of speed in the critical field: Marinetti and Virilio focus on the technological but Joyce, frightened of air travel, prefers to inhabit the body, taking its pulses, schematizing its rushes, stumblings, compressions and openings. The body is the primary site of that space which registers socio-economic forces, and Ulysses registers this in turn: the quick heart, the slow digestion. However, Joyce departs from the naturalism that is required in any attending critique of how the human body fares in the social world. So Molly, more than a person or character, is inflated and idealised beyond the human into the “prehuman” and “posthuman” earth ball “Penelope” (L I 180). What helps illuminate the velocity of “Penelope” is as much Stephen Dedalus’s aesthetics in A Portrait with its formal considerations of how parts and whole relate. Joyce enjoys speed because of the formal options it gives him – especially that of 1. I would like to thank the Leverhulme Trust for financial assistance which made writing this essay possible. In addition, it has profited from the comments of Richard Brown, Caroline Warman and Joseph Brooker.
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appealing to its opposite, the “calm” of the cosmos. Bruno’s cosmic vision evoking that infinity in which opposites coincide, helps explain how “Penelope”, whose unstopped period is infinite, can be both fast and slow. Joyce’s joy at speed embodied in “Penelope” reflects moreover the compulsion and propulsion of the process of composing at speed. For a sense of such rates of composition, of narrative action and of aesthetic sensation a degree of quantification is needed. Countering notions associated with a romantic postmodernism (the privileging of process over product and the suspicion of measurement), I propose a dynamics and kinematics of reading which experiments with terms from classical physics. The sensation of speed cannot of course be universal: Joyce himself wrote of “Penelope” turning “lourdement sur son axe” and as the huge earth ball spinning ‘slowly surely and evenly round and round’ (L I 169, 170). But it is common: while Joyce conjured up a stateliness which goes with the heavy, the slow, the sure and the even, others found quickness, celebrating Joyce for being at one with the Futurist cult of speed. Stuart Gilbert wrote of “a rapid flux of images”2 and Stefan Zweig hailed the novel as “a film of psychic situations, buzzing and flitting in “Expresstempo”, in which enormous landscapes of the soul… go reeling by… A tarantella of unconsciousness, a frantic, rushing flight of ideas which whirlingly float indiscriminately with themselves.”3 Pacing in voicing is also highly subjective and performances are often transformative. Actors can stretch “Penelope” out to help the sense that Molly is herself stretching out, dreamily slow and sleepy: “Ye-e-es… because … he never did a thing like that before... as ask to get his breakfast in bed… with a couple of eggs…”. These are my ellipses and stresses but are modeled on Katarzyna Bazarnik’s fine 1998 performances in Krakow and Rome. Yet “Penelope” is read silently more than it is performed out-loud and this may explain why performance is often unsatisfactory. Readers, I would argue, prefer the inner theatre where they can rehearse the pacing for themselves – allowing control over the back and forth experience described above. Judging by a quick survey I made of how people respond to “Penelope” her speediness is confirmed, though I would be happy to hear of experiences to the contrary. Readers more or less negotiate speeds – more (through active scriptible engagement) or less (through passive lisible surrender). For the surrendering reader, narratives are designed as kinds of vehicle, intended to be experienced, for example, as pacey (high-octane thrillers) or gently lulling (lyrical love stories). 2. Stuart Gilbert, “The Rhythm of Ulysses,” reprinted in Bernard Benstock, Critical Essays on James Joyce (Boston: G.K.Hall, 1985), p.178. 3. Stefan Zweig, “Anmerkung zum Ulysses Die Neu Rundschau” (1928), reprinted in Robert H. Deming, James Joyce: the Critical Heritage, 2 vols. (London: Routledge, 1970), vol. 1 p.444.
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In Ulysses the protracted slowness of nineteen hours stretched out over 740 pages is compensated for by the fast paced drama of ever-roving internal reflection. Gilbert, Zweig and others may be speaking of the stream of consciousness generally, but “Penelope” has surely always been its paradigm. The thought of “Penelope” is a fluid speech, not a disrupted peristalsis. As such it has the rapidity of the loquacious street-corner gossip, the flip side of the hurried and harried tongue in Beckett’s Not I. Her speed is consonant with her tolerance, her free-thinking affirmations which liberally let bodies and ideas flow, despite all the contradictions pulling in opposite directions.4 It has the pace of unsubstantiated judgement. There are few breaks for the rational, for reflection, checking or proving and none for resolving any of those contradictions: we have just had this mode exhaustively in “Ithaca”, and watched its exhaustions. Her rhythms and pace offer a benchmark for comparison elsewhere. Listen in “Calypso” for instance, as Bloom walks, how: Quick warm sunlight came running from Berkeley road, swiftly, in slim sandals, along the brightening footpath. Runs, she runs to meet me, a girl with gold hair on the wind. (U 4. 240-2) The last eight words – “a girl with gold hair on the wind” – have the same jig-like rhythm as the last eight of the novel, “and Yes I said yes I will yes”, that is, three anapaests with a docked first syllable. The sounds of rhythm and pace which echo across varying distances in Joyce’s novels become as important for the novels’ structures as the reticular formation of scattered verbal motifs. The sensation of “Penelope” as speed is caused of course by the unstaunched flow of words that offer no internalisable stage directions so we must rush alongside them, with no time to pace the flow ourselves. Without punctuation as guide we may stall and retreat but we also re-advance and continue. This defamiliarization of the pace of words serves to reconfirm our sense of motion, as we shift between unfamiliar rates of deceleration and acceleration. Compared with the rest of Ulysses, there are no longer those alternating moves between the streams of consciousness and the embankments of narration: the mental has flooded the shores of the material and phenomenal. “Penelope” seems to be pure thought and as the Chorus in Shakespeare’s Henry V reminds us, thought is a paradigm for rapidity: … our swift scene flies, In motion of no less celerity Than that of thought’ (HV, iii. Prol, 1-3).
4. For an analysis of these contradictions and their composition, see James van Dyck Card, Anatomy of “Penelope” (London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1984), pp. 38-55.
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The pacing of events in narrative and of the words which narrate them is essential to successful linguistic performance, spoken or written. So pace is a fundamental criterion of evaluative criticism, as it is of modernity. Generally we are driven by a sense of the faster the better. Culture is frequently too slow but rarely is it too fast. The apparent “difficulty” of Ulysses comes down to readers not being able to “get it” quickly enough, and finding it not to be a page turner (a mode of reading described as decadent by Beckett: “a rapid skimming and absorption of the scant cream of sense is made possible by what I may call a continuous process of copious intellectual salivation.”5) In any case, criticism on speed of language is scarce. The practical criticism of prosody looks at rhythm but not pace, and may shatter our experience of the latter anyway, since close reading is so often a slow reading. This is a bizarre exclusion: prosody is not so objective as to exclude pacing as too subjective to consider. In the analysis of texts, we are often asked the meaning of a word or phrase, and sometimes of a rhythm, but rarely of the varied speeds a piece has (or how we might pace it). Narratology can come closer as it looks at temporal relations between events and narration, but it cannot examine the rhetorical speeds of language. Contextualizing or historicising criticism presumably finds that questions of pace are too formalistic. New or otherwise, historicism could profit from relating the contrapuntal experiences of different speeds in different cultural practices to the rhythms of life and society. Reader response, again bizarrely, is more concerned with hermeneutics and such processes as “concretization” than with the sensation of sound and its rhythms. An alternative lies presumably in musicology and musical aesthetics, since in music tempo is explicit because tempi are so often marked. To think of pace in language is certainly to think of one of its musical aspects. If we could import such theory we would be responding in a manner suitable to the Paterian aspiration of all art to the condition of music. The quotations from Gilbert and Zweig locate and located Joyce within the modernist cult of speed that Futurism inaugurated. But Marinetti is technophiliac, while his critical descendant – Paul Virilio - is technocentric. Such writers on technology tangentially shoot away from any intimate relation to the form of the body and its speeds, forgetting again what Joyce – and this collection of essays - would have us remember. For Joyce turned to face the body, and turned the body to face us. As he entertained the fantasy of becoming the “poet of [his] race”, he fantasised a regression into the body’s interior, nestling in Nora’s womb: “like a child born of your flesh and blood, fed by your blood, [to] sleep in the warm secret gloom of your body.” (L II 248). This does not mean Ulysses as epic of the body is technophobic 5. Samuel Beckett, Our Exagmination… (London: Faber and Faber, 1972), p.5. Hereafter Our Exagmination.
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since its materialism means that bodies are often imagined as machines, such as the corpses in “Hades” (U 6.674), and also machines are imagined as bodies, such as the press in “Aeolus” (U 8.175-6). Through Joyce’s attention to adverbs, we are asked to listen more attentively to the most muffled strains of bodies and their rhythms and drives, and perceive the pace of our movements through recognition and disavowal of them. The studied attention to the body and its speeds throughout Ulysses alerts us to the body as a composite of limbs and organs and fluids that accelerate and decelerate, voluntarily and involuntarily. The fingers that write, the legs that stride, muscles that stretch and contract, the heads that turn, the tongues that clack. Behind and beneath these are the internal organs and their drives - the stomach gaping for food, the bowel that needs emptying, the heart that needs soothing, the lungs expanding. In “Penelope” Molly’s relatively static body and moving mind seem to confirm a Cartesian mind-body dualism. An inverse relation frequently applies in Ulysses: the rate of flow of the stream of consciousness is inversely proportional to the rate of flow of the body. Walking allows a steadying and a progression of thought, as when we accompany Stephen on the beach or Bloom on the way back from Dlugacz the butcher. Rushing effaces reflection as when Bloom breathlessly avoids Boylan in “Lestrygonians” (U 8.1169-93). Between chapters we rapidly skip over distances with no pause for thought. Of course there are exceptions – but it is a rule from which to start. With “Penelope” more precisely the interesting inverse relation is the outer body to the inner body. While the former is supine, the latter secretes and flows continually her menses, her blood and her urine. As we hear in that classic confluence of fluids, “pouring out of me like the sea”, the ocean, thought, bodily fluids and Joyce’s writing all flow together. Each element in such metaphors have distinct resonances and rhythms: metaphorical layering like this brings about a syncopated polyphony of thoughts – something that would be extended in Finnegans Wake. The rhythms of the inner body have an agency which makes her outer body move. This complicates the mindbody dualism by splitting one of its elements, producing a subordinate outer body we know and an inner insubordinate body we don’t. We know better by sight an exterior world separated from us than our interior body that is integral to and forms the bulk of our being. It seems as though “Penelope” in her stillness and in the hedonism of her reveries, not having to work except in bed with Boylan (nice work if you can get it) is enjoying a luxury of thought. She is the inverse of Marjorie Howes’ description of the servant as a “body in perpetual motion”.6 This then opens 6. See Marjorie Howes, “Tradition, Gender and Migration in 'The Dead'; or how Many People has Gretta Conroy killed?", pp. 149-173, Yale Journal of Criticism, 15, 1 (Spring 2002), p. 156.
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up the field of our relations to speed in socio-economic contexts, and its concurrent fields of gender, class, race, age, nation. Economic systems make different demands on rates of production. To modernise, to rationalise is to speed things up, by making bodies – whether institutional or human – leaner. And this impulse forces through the cult of the acceleration of the social body, the cult of Progress. The costs of progress are many – including the interruption of thought which consequently has to squeeze its moments of reflection, just as academics squeeze their research in between other duties, and demands made on the body by the body politic and the body itself. The compulsion to produce competitively at a high rate can be traumatic. No surprise that tranquility does not come naturally but is purchased through such minor tranquilizers as valium, minor tranquilizers remaining some of the most commonly prescribed medicines. The culture-industries which invite us to choose between consuming at speed or at greater speed are the spurious antidote to the labour-culture where we are forced to produce at speed or at greater speed. Joyce’s Dublin in Ulysses is not in tune with the contemporary accelerations and pressures of urban living. This is arguably more the case in the “taylorised world” (FW 356.10-1) of Finnegans Wake where, as it is launched from the surface of Ulysses, language is propelled with even greater speeds and efficiency of associative linkage.7 We could develop this context further, but the determinism and naturalism at its heart is foiled by the gigantism of the last chapters of Ulysses. For “Penelope” is not naturalistic, she is not even human. “Posthuman” (L I 180), she is an aesthetic solution: a spiralling flourish as closure. Her speed, momentum and duration are part of an “ideal insomnia” (FW 120.13-4) though she is far from an ideal reader. She shows little anxiety about sleeplessness and has little desire to sleep, never stops to think about the strange extent of her reveries – in toto her words embody a mental and physical stamina that is quasi-divine, but to which as subject she – or it - is indifferent. As an idealisation she celebrates the thrill of the drug of the speed of thought, and therapeutically neutralizes the fear of the un-calmable flight of ideas and visions, that insufficiently acknowledged strain of the manic in Joyce. Seeing the speed of “Penelope” for itself and in relation to the pacing in the rest of the novel illustrates and helps bring to life the “aesthetics” in A Portrait - that dry, technical and seemingly inapplicable jargon of Chapter V. It begins well: “Beauty awakens a stasis [which is] called forth, prolonged and finally dissolved by… the rhythm of beauty…” then becomes stiff: 7. F.W. Taylor (1856-1915) saw his Principles of Scientific Management into print in 1911. In this influential work his time and motion studies provided techniques for improving industrial efficiency but were also credited with an intensification of a dehumanising mechanisation of labour.
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rhythm is the first formal esthetic relation of part to part in any esthetic whole or an esthetic whole to its part or parts or of any part to the esthetic whole of which it is a part … you apprehend it as balanced part against part within its limits; you feel the rhythm of its structure. (P 210) It is striking how Stephen’s aesthetic theory (once Joyce’s, as the Pola notebook shows) is initially so interested in balance and stasis, even in being “arrested”, traits that are reflected in the strictures and stases of the definitions that follow. The ultimate process however is that the rhythm of beauty “dissolves” the stasis which beauty had awakened. What I would propose is that to feel the “rhythm of the structure” involves thinking of the variations in the speeds of the parts of the whole. Most novels create rhythm through events. Take War and Peace: there are set pieces which, alternating, have different speeds: conversations, an arrival, parties, a ball, a battle, a long march, recuperation, then battle, death, gambling. In Joyce, rhythm, balance, beauty, dissolution come from the symphonically varying speeds of the different styles more than the arrangement of events. Let us try comparing “part to part”; fast “Penelope” to slow “Ithaca”, fast “Circe” to slow “Eumaeus”: or compare whole to part Ulysses to “Penelope”, and vice versa. These comparisons, made through a sense of pace, allow you “to feel the rhythm of its structure”, and a rhythm of beauty which dissolves the stasis of structure. All novels have a form, elements of which help create relations to speed, which, though hard to quantify, are essential to the aesthetic experience if there is to be one. A long narrative may involve a steady upward walk, then a planing off, then a quick scramble through its dénouements, or switch or exchange the experience of these. Endings are crucial - the last acts of Shakespeare, the wrap-it-all-ups of Dickens, the swift revelatory pulling back of the curtain of detective fiction, the final pursuits in Hitchcock. Narratives are terrains – with shape and contour. The contours of Ulysses are exceptional – ending with a spinning vortex whose gradient increases markedly as we descend or ascend through its final stages, passing out into an open space of post-coital post-vorticial dissolution. Could we map this terrain? See the rhythms and relative pacings of Ulysses – of any novel - in cross section? Could such a map contribute to a theory of the experience of speed? Narratology could help here but it ignores language, Joyce’s primary material for pacing, still marking time long after narrative event has left its mark. “Penelope” as an ending is a reflection and a homage to the way narratives are accelerated through into their dénouement. But, in the absence of event, “Penelope” is an extended unwinding – fraying the threads of the untied knots of dénouement. Alongside the naturalistic impersonation of a speedy speaker, the projection of that voice into a tireless eternity is an idealisation. In this it reflect Joyce’s courting of speed, his happy encounter with liberalising
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modernity (though his love for precise timing could set him against it). Through Anna Livia and “Penelope”, speed is equated with life; in Dubliners to remain in Dublin even if alive, is a kind of death. Joyce liked Sterne and disliked Swift – and neatly thought these “writers ought to change names”, because Swift was in fact stern in his morality and Sterne was in fact swift in his thinking.8 Perhaps that is why Joyce often surges to an end so well – endings invite a gathering momentum, which can be rounded off with a falling climax. Joyce enjoys moving up a gear into lyrical speed as at the end of Chapter 4 in A Portrait – a fore-sketch of “Penelope”: “On and on and on and on he strode… To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life. On and on and on and on and on!” Stephen’s vision requires him to “still the riot of his blood”. The contemplation of the heavens is the means: “He felt above him the vast indifferent dome and the calm processes of the heavenly bodies: … His eyelids trembled as if they felt the vast cyclic movement of the earth” (P 145). The vast slowness of cosmology is reassuring. The cosmological “Penelope” turns reassuringly “like the huge earth ball slowly surely and evenly round and round spinning” (L I 170) “lourdement sur son axe” (L I 169). As I mentioned this contradicts our experience of the paciness of “Penelope”. But this contradiction can be accounted for through an appeal to Bruno, to authorial detachment and the indifference of the author above his handiwork, both sharing a cosmological perspective. “Maximal speed”— runs Beckett’s gloss on Bruno— “is a state of rest”.9 And “a flood of movement and vitality [is] released by the conjunction of these two elements [Hell and Paradise]”.10 But a certain kind of Infinity is necessary for such a contraction of opposites: “In infinite duration, an hour is no different from a day, a day from a year, a year from a century, a century from an instant, because [periods] do not exist any more than do centuries…”.11 The perspective of infinity enables the identity of opposites, a lack of differences, indifference. Speeds are relativized: the swiftness of “Penelope” for us is its slowness for Joyce. As only mortal readers we may not experience infinity not for long anyway - but this leaves us with the pleasures of differentiable
8. Frank Budgen, James Joyce and the Making of “Ulysses” (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p.219. 9. Our Exagmination, p.6. And see the Second dialogue of Bruno’s “On the Infinite Universe and Worlds”, translated in Dorothea Waley Singer Giordano Bruno, his Life and Thought. With Annotated Translation of his Work, On the Infinite Universe and Worlds (New York: Schuman [1950]), p.320. Also available at the following url: www.positiveatheism.org/hist/brunoiuw2.htm. 10. Our Exagmination, p.22. 11. See Giordano Bruno, Cause, Principle and Unity translated and edited by Robert de Lucca (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p.97.
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speeds instead. It is a pleasure in difference – a pleasure from being up against it. Joyce’s fantasy of cosmological perspective, of his departure from the human earthball—a therapeutic “falling upwards”, as Virilio calls it—is arrived at partly, I would argue, from reaching and surpassing an escape velocity in the act of composition.12 Michael Groden proposed that “the processes by which [Joyce] wrote the book cannot be separated from other aspects of its meaning.”13 There is clear evidence that Joyce’s rate of composition increased in the last eighteen months of composition.14 The pleasure in the speed of “Penelope” is a reflection of the pleasures of a highrate of writing which gave Joyce an exhilarating experience of acceleration, momentum and energy. But the exhilaration is also produced by the imminent moment of completion when the process of composition could stop, or pause, or continue but now in a new and different field – that of Finnegans Wake. And the distant or proximate prospect of the finished product transforms the nature of the ongoing process. This sense of imminent and actual completion, allows us to introduce a critique of a prevalent position in cultural theory, which has stretched into textual studies – where process is given a primacy over product. As David Greetham wrote, speaking of Clifford Geertz, “To my mind [the] recuperation of the construction and saying of texts is precisely what the recent textual shifts have been concerned with: from the spatial to the temporal, from the fixed to the variant, and from the product to the process.”15 This shift towards a positive evaluation of process comes from an affirmative association with change, movement and becoming, while product or form gets chained to stasis and being. The problem here is that the simplistic dualism and the binaristic evaluation provides “process” with too absolute a value. We can see a classic statement of this displacement of static form and this associated problem of making change absolute, in Deleuze’s analysis of Spinoza and the latter’s “kinetic proposition”: In effect, the kinetic proposition tells us that a body is defined by its relation to movement and rest, to the slowness and quickness between particles. That is to say: it is not defined in terms of its form or its functions. Its global form, its specific form, and its organic functions will depend on its relation to speed and slowness. Even the way a form develops depends on these and not the other way round. The important thing is to conceive of life, each individual part of life, not 12. Paul Virilio, Open Sky, translated by Julie Rose (New York: Verso, 1997), p.2. 13. Michael Groden, “Ulysses” in Progress (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), p.203. 14. See Michael Groden in JJA 50, pp.ix-x. 15. David Greetham, Theories of the Text (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p.422.
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as a form, or a development of form, but as a complex relation between different speeds, between the decelerations and accelerations of particles. A composite of greater and lesser speeds on an immanent plane. It happens that a musical form might depend on a complex relation between what is fast and slow within its sonor particles. Yet it isn’t simply a question of music, but concerns our way of living: it’s with the help of varying speeds that we slide between things, that we are coupled with something else: there is never a beginning, never a tabula rasa, we slip between, intermingle, marry or dominate rhythms.16 This evokes ideas that are similar to the roles of rhythm and pace and the varying terrains of narratives which I have proposed in this essay. But the focus on perpetual movement with no beginning and presumably no end, gives to process too static an essence that paradoxically prevents becoming from becoming. Process can be near or far from product, hurtling or slouching towards or away from it. This relation effects process, so process is a function of its potential transformation into a completed form, and on into product and thence consumption (where it becomes part of a new process of production with another reader/consumer). An evaluation of the radically transformative power of a perpetual and perpetually fluid process was estimated most powerfully by Cixous in the mid 1970s with a vision informed presumably by her earlier work on Joyce. She links woman to the geo-physical as Joyce linked his “indifferent Weib” to it, but affirms its energy with a different stress: Unleashed and raging, she belongs to the race of waves… she has never held still; explosion, diffusion, effervescence, abundance…17 16. My translation of the following: “En effet, la proposition cinétique nous dit qu’un corps se définit par des rapports de mouvement et de repos, de lenteur et de vitesse entre particules. C’est-à-dire: il ne se définit pas par une forme ou des fonctions. La forme globale, la forme spécifique, les fonctions organiques dépendront des rapports de vitesse et de lenteur. Même le développement d’une forme dépend de ces rapports, et non l’inverse. L’important, c’est de concevoir la vie, chaque individualité de vie, non pas comme une forme, ou un développement de forme, mais comme un rapport complexe entre vitesses différentielles, entre ralentissement et accélération de particules. Une composition de vitesses et de lenteurs sur un plan d’immanence. Il arrive de même qu’une forme musicale dépende d’un rapport complexe entre vitesses et lenteurs de particules sonores. Ce n’est pas seulement affaire de musique, mais de manière de vivre: c’est par vitesse et lenteur qu’on se glisse entre les choses, qu’on se conjugue avec autre chose: on ne commence jamais, on ne fait jamais table rase, on se glisse entre, on entre au milieu, on épouse ou on impose des rythmes.” See Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza, philosophie pratique (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1981), pp. 164-5. 17. Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément, The Newly Born Woman, trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolois: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), pp. 90-1.
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and at times it is in the fissure caused by an earthquake, through that radical mutation of things brought on by a material upheaval when every structure is for a moment thrown off balance and an ephemeral wildness sweeps order away.18 Unlike Joyce’s vision of “Penelope” but to an extent like ours, Cixous intuits and inserts into her vision a necessary component in energy – speed and disruption. Cixous brings to light those aspects of the body of the earth – in its fissures and explosions - which Joyce passes over in his vision of the earth’s slow and even spinning. And yet the metaphor for woman’s imagined awakened potential sounds awkward now in the wake of the recent tsunami in the Indian Ocean, with a destruction which is terrifying rather than radical—and measurably so, whether in the numbers of deaths or the earthquake’s point on the Richter scale. With the radical vision of “sweeping away order” in Cixous there is a resistance to any analysis which involves any kind of mensuration, so the different forces and quantities are not differentiated. Countering this resistance, I am arguing for a return to the possibility of a quantification of the forces of language, through experimentation with the terms of physics. This counteracts other work associated with postmodernism in the latter’s opposition to certain “classical” scientific modes: we read for instance that “the world of classical physics was preoccupied with and governed by solid objects. The new physics […] became interested in liquids, in movements, in processes of change and exchange…”.19 This trades off a false opposition of epochs – the old classically static, the new romantically moving, and it passes too quickly over the fact that Newtonian physics analysed motion and discovered gravity, not in themselves solid objects, defining gravity as a force with acceleration. What I am proposing then is an experimentation in cultural criticism, using the terms of physics, dynamics and kinetics alongside our experience of language, whether reading, speaking, writing, or listening, recalling that words (in any of these overlapping modes), in having a kind of mass, can be experienced as having speed, acceleration, momentum, force, pressure, energy - both potential and kinetic - and that they carry out work. This sense of the physics of language could then be placed next to how our own bodies experience such physical qualities and forces, to which indeed they may be subject. We think, as critics, that we are continually weighing words, but we shy from the difficulties – perhaps amounting to a hopeless impossibility – 18. Hélène Cixous, Laugh of the Medusa, reprinted in Dennis Walder (ed), Literature and the Modern World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p.320. 19. See Steven Connor, Topologies: Michel Serres and the Shapes of Thought, a paper written for the “Literature and Science” conference held in Ascoli Piceno, Italy 20-22 May 2002 and available at Steven Connor’s website: http://www.bbk.ac.uk/english/skc/topologies.
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that lie in literally quantifying the imprecise, fugitive and unpredictable elements that we find in language. But as all experimentation starts with a degree of hopelessness, this need not impede any speed which we might pick up as such work progressed. University of Nottingham
“PENELOPE” WITHOUT THE BODY MAUD ELLMANN Why should those lovers that no lovers miss Dream, until God burn Nature with a kiss? W.B.Yeats, “The Man who Dreamed of Faeryland” Abstract: This essay challenges the critical consensus that “Penelope” identifies woman with the body. Pointing out that “Penelope” is more concerned with letters than with flesh, it argues that Molly’s discourse represents a form of disembodiment, in which her flesh is rewoven into words. The final kiss melts away any commonsense conception of the body as gendered, individuated, self-contained, transuming both body and language into a “posthuman” topography of intensities. “I am the flesh that always affirms.” This statement, translated from Joyce’s shaky German in a famous letter to Frank Budgen, has often been taken as the final verdict on “Penelope”: “Ich bin der [sic] Fleisch der stets bejaht.” As many commentators have pointed out, the German phrase recalls and reverses Mephistopheles’s assertion in Goethe’s Faust, “I am the spirit that always denies” (“Ich bin der Geist der stets beneint”). Assuming that Molly Bloom represents the flesh that always says yes, critics have understood her to be speaking on behalf of the entire female sex, epitomising what Joyce calls “perfectly sane full amoral fertilisable untrustworthy engaging shrewd limited prudent indifferent Weib” [woman].1 By associating the feminine with flesh [Fleisch], the masculine with spirit [Geist], Joyce seems to be endorsing one of the oldest and weariest clichés of Western thought. But it is strange that he mixes up his German genders, rendering “Fleisch” as masculine rather than neuter. If this is an error, it may also be a portal to discovery, disclosing Joyce’s own uncertainty about the gender of the flesh. Furthermore, his letter to Budgen attributes greater importance both to affirmation and to flesh than “Penelope” itself bears out. 1. Letter from Joyce to Frank Budgen, 16 August 1921, in Richard Ellmann (ed), Selected Letters (New York: Viking Press, 1975), p. 285. Hereafter SL.
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It is true that Molly’s rhapsody begins and ends with yeses, but these are separated by a sea of no’s – not to mention O’s, which are even more insistent. And far from saying yes to flesh, her monologue revolves around the theme of disembodiment, particularly in the form of shedding skins. This paper therefore argues that Joyce’s comments on “Penelope” have sent his critics on a wild goose chase for the flesh, obscuring the episode’s preoccupation with the word, precisely as an agency of disenfleshment. Just as “Sirens” needs to be released from music, and “Aeolus” from wind, in order to dislodge the critical consensus on these episodes, so “Penelope” needs to be released from flesh in order for its words to be perceived anew. As we shall see, these words lead us away from any commonsense conception of the body – gendered, individuated, self-contained – into an undiscovered country of intensities, scorched by the flightpaths of desire. Rather than affirming nature and the flesh, Molly burns them with a kiss. Nonetheless, Joyce’s letter to Budgen has encouraged critics to treat Molly as woman [“Weib”] rather than a woman, while equating woman with the body – not a body. Both these abstractions, woman and body, preclude the insight that women might be different from each other, in body and in spirit, rather than merely different from men. Molly herself shows acute awareness of differences between women, as did Nora Joyce, who dismissed the proposition that Molly was created in her image with the verdict: “She was much fatter.”2 Some women are fatter than others, but by assigning the organ “fat” to the “Penelope” episode in the Linati scheme of 1921, Joyce absorbs these variations into undifferentiated blubber. No wonder Molly cries, “O Jamesy let me up out of this pooh!” (U 18.1128-9). And no wonder she appeared to Joyce in a dream, hurling a child’s coffin at her own creator with the words: “And I have done with you, too, Mr Joyce” (JJ II 549). It is clear that Molly refuses to be coffined in Joyce’s conception of the feminine. Joyce once said that “Ithaca” was the true ending of the book because “Penelope” had no beginning, middle, or end.3 This suggests that the last chapter represents a postscript or appendix rather than a termination: it emerges after Ithaca’s enormous full stop, which Joyce instructed the printers to enlarge, as if to exaggerate the termination to absurdity. As appendix, “Penelope” provides a supplement to the atonement or at-one-ment of the two male heroes in Ithaca, where they are united as Stoom and Blephen, in a spooneristic parody of fusion. But “Penelope” is a dangerous supplement in that it undermines the sense of an ending; an opening rather than a closure, it 2. Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 743. Hereafter JJ II. 3. Letter from Joyce to Harriet Shaw Weaver, 7 October 1921, in James Joyce Letters, vol. I, ed. Stuart Gilbert, revised by Richard Ellmann (New York: Viking, 1966), p. 172. Hereafter L I.
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opens up a chink in the armour of the patriarchal plot. Joyce described Molly as “indifferent,” and her monologue remains aloof to the action of the novel, in it but not of it, indifferent both to the teleology of plot and to the dialectic of polarity and symmetry between the heroes (SL 285).4 In fact, “Penelope” could be seen as the cemetery of symmetry, to borrow one of Bloom's inspired puns (U 7.168-70). In an obvious sense, the contrast between “Ithaca” and “Penelope” epitomises the age-old dichotomy between the Man of Reason and the Woman of Nature. Since the beginnings of Greek philosophical thought, femaleness has been conflated with everything that Reason has transcended, dominated, or simply left behind: the forces of nature, the instincts of the body, the death-dealing power of the earth-goddesses. Joyce identified Molly Bloom with Gea-Tellus, a fusion of the Greek and Roman earthgoddesses, and declared that her soliloquy revolves around the female body, “its four cardinal points being breasts, arse, womb, and cunt” (U 17.2313; SL 285). Such pronouncements obscure the obvious fact that “Penelope,” like every chapter of Ulysses, is entirely composed of written words, disembodied from their source of utterance. In the “Scylla and Charybdis” episode, Stephen speaks of Mother Dana weaving and unweaving our bodies - an allusion to the Celtic mother-goddess, but also to the Dublin literary journal Dana, edited by W.K. Magee, which rejected the first version of “A Portrait of the Artist” in 1904, forcing Joyce to re-weave his own self-portrait (U 9.376-8). Similarly Molly Bloom unweaves her flesh to weave new portraits of herself in words. The late literary theorist and film critic James Snead, in his Cambridge PhD thesis on Joyce and Faulkner, proposed that “Penelope” is “about orthography.”5 Since the word “ortho” derives from the Greek word for “straight” or “upright,” whereas Molly remains prone throughout her monologue, it might be more appropriate to term her stream-of-consciousness “proneography.” But Snead is right that “Penelope” emphasises the materiality of writing more insistently, perhaps, than any other chapter of Ulysses. Vicki Mahaffey has pointed out that Molly is “a woman of letters in all senses of the word: obsessed with letter writing as a form of lovemaking, liberal with letters in her mental orthography, and literal in her approach to foreign words.”6 In Molly’s hilarious account of a visit to the gynaecologist, who asks her if she suffers from emissions (“where do those old fellows get all the words they have omissions,” she scoffs), she takes a fancy to the 4. Jean-Michel Rabaté discusses Molly’s indifference in Joyce upon the Void (London: Macmillan, 1991), pp. 43-68. 5. James Snead, “Hiatus and Reversal: Aspects of Repetition in Absalom! Absalom! and Ulysses”, Cambridge PhD thesis (1979). 6. Vicki Mahaffey, Reauthorizing Joyce (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 175.
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doctor when he writes out a prescription: “still I liked him when he bent down to write the thing out frowning so severe his nose intelligent. . .” (U 18.1172-3). Noses are significant to Molly; confronted with her lover Blazes Boylan’s “tremendous big red brute of a thing,” she wonders that “his nose is not so big” (U 18.145-6). But it is the doctor’s writing that takes her fancy, before she even notices his nose. Of all the emissions that she malaprops as “omissions,” it is clear that ink turns her on as much as spunk. Joyce originally conceived of “Penelope” as a series of letters written by Molly, and she evidently gains as much pleasure from writing and receiving love-letters as from any of her masquerades of femininity. Boylan’s letters, like his nose, are much too short to gratify her appetites, despite his big red brutish charms: “I wish somebody would write me a loveletter his wasnt much and I told him he could write what he liked yours ever Hugh Boylan . . .” (U 18.735-6). Anyone who signs a loveletter like that is unlikely to satisfy a woman whose husband’s “mad crazy letters . . . had me always at myself 4 and 5 times a day. . .” (U 18.1176-9). Ruminating on her girlhood in Gibraltar, Molly recalls that the days went by “like years not a letter from a living soul,” and finally drove her into sending herself junk mail: “the odd few I posted to myself with bits of paper in them” (U 18.698-9). This epistolary masturbation mirrors her pleasure in soliloquising, in which she frigs herself with words, caressed in thought. As well as remembering loveletters, Molly thinks about books that she has read or rejected, some of which were written by women – a possibility rarely acknowledged in Ulysses. One of these is Molly Bawn by Margaret Wolfe Hungerford, which Molly spurns because it has a Molly in it, objecting to Moll Flanders for the same reason: “Molly bawn she gave me by Mrs Hungerford on account of the name I dont like books with a Molly in them like that one he brought me about the one from Flanders. . .” (U 18. 656-8). This objection exemplifies Molly’s resistance to containment in a book. Of course it could be argued that every chapter of Ulysses is about orthography, in one way or another, and that “Penelope” is no exception to this rule of self-reflexiveness. But Molly’s “female monologue” (which was the “technic” Joyce assigned to “Penelope” in the Linati scheme) is one of his few innovations to have spawned further writing which is more than merely imitative, inspiring such works as Samuel Beckett’s The Unnameable, or Nastassja Kinski’s closing monologue in Wim Wenders’s movie Paris, Texas (1984), not to mention the whole school of écriture feminine. Most of Joyce’s other experiments are one-offs: nobody could write another “Ithaca” without being accused of plagiarism or pastiche, and James Stephens had the good sense to turn down Joyce’s bizarre invitation to take over the composition of Finnegans Wake. So “Penelope” is unusual in Joyce’s work for opening up new possibilities for future writers.
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The Linati scheme designates the time of “Penelope” as the mathematical symbol of infinity, the lemiscate or recumbent 8, which reminded Joyce of female buttocks. Eights also feature in Molly’s birthday on 8 September 1870, as well as in the chapter’s eight unfinished sentences, which Joyce associated with the eight legs of a spider, weaving and unweaving its own web: “fly = 6 legs. spider = 8.”7 In Christian numerology, as Diane Tolomeo has pointed out, eight is the number of new beginnings.8 Yet “Penelope” has achieved an infinity its author never bargained for. Beckett writes in The Unnameable, “One starts speaking as if it were possible to stop at will. . . . The search for the means to put an end to things, an end to speech, is what enables the discourse to continue.”9 The ending of Ulysses also started something that Joyce could not stop: its literary reverberations exceed the confines of the proper name, eluding the control of what he calls the law of “copriright.”10 The most cannibalistic of writers, Joyce tries to incorporate all his literary fathers into the belly of his book, but “Penelope” is one chapter that gets away. From this point of view, the “Oxen of the Sun” episode could be seen as an allegory of Ulysses as a whole. Here Joyce chomps away at the oxen of the literary past, imitating all the styles of the English language from medieval hymns to Southern revivalist preaching, yet notably excluding any female authors – there are no pastiches of Jane Austen or Maria Edgeworth or George Eliot. On a naturalistic level, the medical students in the maternity hospital reinforce their homosocial bonds by denigrating women. But meanwhile offstage, in another room, inaccessible to any of the male narrators, a baby is born, something new and unforeseeable is set in motion. Like the mother of this baby, Molly is excluded from the masculine action of Ulysses: she therefore marks an absence or orifice within the text, but also generates the novel’s teeming afterlife. One of Freud’s more outrageous propositions was that weaving was women’s sole contribution to civilisation, and that it was invented to conceal their “genital deficiency.”11 Apparently Joyce conceived of Molly’s monologue in similar terms, as a spiderweb of words woven and unwoven round the “hole in the middle” of the female body. This hole is never filled in, but disseminates itself throughout the chapter in the form of O’s, riddling 7. See Philip F. Herring (ed), Joyce’s “Ulysses” Notesheets in the British Museum, (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1972), p. 499. 8. Diane Tolomeo, “The Final Octagon of Ulysses,” JJQ 10 (1973), p. 450. 9. Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable, in Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable (London: Calder, 1994), pp. 301-2. 10. James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (London: Faber, 1964), p. 185. Hereafter FW. 11. Sigmund Freud, “Femininity” (1933) in The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Standard Edition, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1953-1974), vol. 22, p. 132.
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the discourse like a sieve. As we have seen, Molly herself represents “a hole in the middle” of the novel, in the sense that she is missing from its centre, emitting her omission everywhere. “[W]hats the idea of making us like that with a big hole in the middle of us,” Molly protests (U 18.151-2). What’s the idea indeed? This certainly confirms Nora Joyce’s view that Joyce knew nothing about women: the idea that we experience our bodies as donuts or bagels is preposterous (JJ II 629). In an obvious sense this so-called “hole” is a textbook example of castration-phobia, whereby the male projects his fear of lack or “omission” onto the female body. But one could also argue that this hole signifies the absence of the female body in Ulysses, the hole through which the lady vanishes. In other words, it marks the limits of representation: “In the buginning is the woid,” Joyce writes in Finnegans Wake (FW 378.29). Feminists have reacted to “Penelope” in opposite ways. Some object to what they see as Joyce’s equation of woman with the body, and his association of the feminine with holes and leakage. Mary Ellmann writes in Thinking about Women: “In Molly Bloom's soliloquy . . . thinking and menstruating are similar and concomitant processes. She can no more govern the first, by sentence structure or punctuation, than she can the second.”12 Despite the appearance of incontinence, however, Molly exercises a good deal of sphincteral control over her sentence-structure. It is worth remembering that much of the punctuation was deleted only in the proofs, after most of her well-formed sentences had been constructed. Champions of écriture feminine have also overlooked this grammatical propriety, celebrating Molly’s logorrhoea as a means of bursting out of the confines of male discourse.13 Molly’s indifference to formalities of punctuation, her dissolution of the proper name – at least the masculine proper name – into a soup of pronouns: such deviations have been praised as a kind of terrorism against the no-no’s of our day, against the oppressive forces of the fixed, the proper, and the same. For this reason “Penelope” provides the paradigm for Luce Irigaray’s controversial theory of “two-lipped signification,” defined as a feminine syntax in which “there would no longer be either subject or object, ‘oneness’ would no longer be privileged, there would no longer be proper meanings, proper names, ‘proper’ attributes. . . . Instead, that syntax would invoke nearness, proximity, but in such an extreme form that it would preclude any distinction of identities, any establishment of ownership, thus any form of appropriation.”14 This is what Cole Porter, in a different context, 12. Mary Ellmann, Thinking about Women (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968), pp.74-5. 13. See inter alia Suzette A. Henke, James Joyce and the Politics of Desire (New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 127, 130. 14. Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 134.
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calls “the urge to merge with the splurge.” And many feminists have felt the urge to merge with the splurge of Molly’s rhapsody. Personally I prefer the kind of feminism that resists these oceanic yearnings. But Molly herself is much less gushy than she seems. Gertrude Stein declared that she had thrown away punctuation in order to achieve “the evenness of everybody having a vote.”15 Similarly, Molly’s unpunctuated discourse evens out the power relations built into the structure of the sentence, but as Derek Attridge has pointed out, the rules of grammar are concealed rather than overthrown.16 Nor is the hierarchy of orthography abolished: spasms of upper-case letters remind us the difference between high and low, upright and prone, while the sporadic appearance of the capital letter O, like an enormous hollowed-out full-stop, provides an alternative form of punctuation – a loose end rather than a final period. In a chapter so preoccupied with orifices and “omissions,” these O’s could be interpreted as orifices in the prose, portals to new zones of pleasure. In this sense Molly does indeed have an O-mission – a mission to create more O’s and apertures. These O-zones indicate that we are entering a body with multiple orifices, the few poor orifices of the human body being insufficient for the metempsychoses of desire. Yet despite the freedoms suggested by these O’s, Molly obeys the rules of sentence-structure almost slavishly, which is why it was so easy for the infamous editor Danis Rose to restore the punctuation to “Penelope.” Grammatically and orthographically, her stream-of-consciousness is much more correct than Bloom’s or Stephen’s, and in spite of the appearance of free-association, Molly rarely loses her train of thought. Joyce indicated that “because” was a key word in the chapter, and Molly’s monologue preserves the logic of “because,” upholding the law of cause-and-effect – a law that Irigaray would presumably associate with patriarchy. Nietzsche famously said, “I fear we have not got rid of God because we still believe in grammar.” Well, Molly Bloom thoroughly believes in both. Another key word in “Penelope,” according to Joyce, is “bottom.” But the first time this word is used it refers to a false bottom, when Molly remembers her housemaid Mary Driscoll in Ontario Terrace, who took to “padding out her false bottom” for Bloom’s delectation (U 18.56). These terms “because” and “bottom” both derive from Bottom’s speech in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: “It shall be called Bottom’s Dream, because it hath no bottom.” In “Penelope,” Joyce also conjures up a dream without a bottom, only a series 15. Gertrude Stein, “A Translantic Interview 1946”, in Bonnie Kime Scott (ed), The Gender of Modernism: A Critical Anthology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), p. 503. 16. Derek Attridge, “Molly’s Flow: The Writing of ‘Penelope’ and the Question of Women’s Language,’” Modern Fiction Studies 35 (1989), pp. 545-546.
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of false bottoms, mirages of foundations such as the mother and the body and the earth. What is more, the chapter also has no top: Joyce dematerialises surfaces as well as depths. Zakir Paul has proposed that “Penelope” be seen as the exfoliation of Ulysses, in which the novel sloughs off the necrotic layers of tradition, much as a spider sheds its skin.17 It is Molly who introduces the metaphor of exfoliation when she thinks about the skin lotion her husband neglected to pick up from the chemist: this is one of many errands Bloom forgets in the narcotic “Lotus-Eaters” episode. Molly says: “O no there was the face lotion I finished the last of yesterday that made my skin like new . . . I thought it was beginning to look coarse or old a bit the skin underneath is much finer where it peeled off there on my finger after the burn its a pity it isnt all like that. . .” (U 18.458-9,463-5). Later she reiterates: “its so much smoother the skin. . .” (U 18.581). By the same token, her monologue peels off the older coarser epidermis of the novel to reveal a smoother skin beneath. In the Linati scheme, skin is the organ assigned to the “LotusEaters” episode, in which Bloom’s monologue pullulates with images of skin-disease: eczema, smallpox, dandruff, freckles, warts, bunions, pimples, barber's itch, and worst of all the unfortunate Lord Ardilaun, who was forced to change his shirt four times a day because his skin reputedly bred lice and vermin. These images of skin disease may be interpreted as symptoms of contemporary fears about degeneration, but they also bring to light the existential insecurity of skin, its susceptibility to laceration, penetration, desquamation. In Ulysses, this insecurity is largely projected on to women, whose outer coverings of clothes and skin are seen as dangerously detachable. “Queer the number of pins they always have,” Bloom thinks as he withdraws a pin from Martha Clifford’s letter. “No roses without thorns.” (U 5.277-8). In Bloom’s imagination, the female body is merely “pinned together” and forever threatening to split apart. Compare the story “Peeling” by Peter Carey, in which the aging Beckettian narrator undresses a neighbour in his boarding house, peeling off layer after layer of her clothing until nothing remains except an earring. When he pulls at this ornament her voluptuous body unzips, revealing a young man underneath. But this male body turns out to be a further skin, which unzips into the body of an adolescent girl. When there are no skins left to flay, the old man pulls off the girl’s limbs and hair, reducing her to the bald head and torso of a doll. Similarly, Molly remembers peeling off the clothing of a doll, and she unzips her own body in the course of her imaginary bacchanalia, exfoliating into a young man, a pubescent girl, and a ten-year-old child: “in the summer and I in my skin hopping around I used to 17. Zakir Paul made this suggestion in my class on Ulysses given at Northwestern in Spring 2001.
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love myself then stripped at the washstand dabbing and creaming. . .” (U 18.922-3). The psychoanalyst Esther Bick, in an influential essay on the experience of skin in early infancy, postulates that the parts of the personality, in its most primitive form, are felt to have no binding force among themselves but depend on an external object for their integration. This object – usually the mother's nipple, voice, or smell – must be introjected in order for the ego to experience itself as self-contained. In effect, this introjected object buttons up the ego. If this buttoning object fails to be internalised, however, the infant resorts to fantasies of omnipotence that deny the need for passive submission to an object. These fantasies produce what Bick describes as “second-skin”: a pseudo-independence often leading to the precocious development of speech or strength, the infant using the sound of its own voice, or the rigidity of its musculature, to hold the fragments of the personality together. Without this carapace, the ego leaks into infinite space, in a collapse of boundaries depicted in the psychoanalytic literature as an “explosion,” “annihilation,” or “catastrophe.”18 An example may be found in Frantz Fanon, who describes his discovery of blackness as a “haemorrhage” in which his body is repainted with his own black blood.19 Molly also uses the sound of her own thoughts to hold the fragments of her life together, weaving and unweaving a second skin of words. Yet this sonorous wrapping lacks the buttons that could keep it closed and selfcontained: they have gone “the way of all buttons,” to borrow a “timehonoured adage” from “Eumaeus” (U 16.37). In “Penelope,” Molly remembers that she sewed a button on the bottom of her daughter Milly’s jacket, and worries that “I oughtnt to have stitched it and it on her it brings a parting. . .” (U 18.1031). Here Molly is alluding to the superstition that sewing or repairing a garment when a person is wearing it will cause a separation to occur. The idea that stitching brings a parting, that mending implies rending, seems to capture the ambiguity of exfoliation, in which the skin reconstitutes itself by peeling off. It is intriguing that the verbs “to skin” and “to peel” mean the opposite of their respective nouns: to skin is to remove the skin, to peel is to unpeel. Thus Molly skins herself with words, and yet those very words provide her with a second skin, finer than the skin they cauterise. Molly also speaks of unbuttoning a lover and peeling back the foreskin of his penis: “it had a kind of eye in it theyre all Buttons men down the middle on the wrong side of them. .” (U 18.816-7). In Molly’s theory of sexual 18. Esther Bick, “The experience of the skin in early object relations,” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 49 (1968), pp. 484-6. 19. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967), pp. 109-14.
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difference, women have a hole in the middle of them, whereas men have buttons down the middle on the wrong side of them. But a button necessarily implies an aperture or O-zone, even if that O is fastened shut, suggesting that men’s buttons cannot insulate them from the risk of haemorrhage projected onto the unbuttoned words and flesh of women. Molly’s abandonment of punctuation demonstrates her contempt for the buttons of sentence-structure. But she experiments with more imaginative forms of buttoning. One of these may be found in the clusters of placenames that punctuate her monologue, like “islands in the unnavigable depth of our departed time” – as Wordsworth describes the “spots of time” in The Prelude. Although Molly notoriously avoids proper names, it is usually the names of men that disappear into the maelstrom of her pronouns, whereas she differentiates the names of women pretty clearly, and positively revels in the names of places, especially places where she has been kissed, which is the only sexual act that really makes her happy: “he kissed my heart at Dolphins Barn”; “he kissed me under the Moorish wall”; and most famously, “the day we were lying among the rhododendrons on Howth head . . .my God after that long kiss I near lost my breath yes he said I was a flower of the mountain. . .” (U 18.330,1604,1572-7). In all these scenes, the he’s could be anyone or no one, but the capital letters of the place-names tower over personal identities. Location, location, location. These place-names function as upholstery buttons in the billowing folds of Molly’s discourse. Some of the names refer to places in Gibraltar, and they bespeak a kind of orientalism, endowing exotic landscapes east of Ireland with a sexual exuberance sorely missing from the house at 7 Eccles Street. When Molly’s reverie alights upon these place-names, the past rolls back into the present, diverting the linearity of narrative into eddies and whirlpools of repetition. Moreover, the fact that place-names mark the spots where Molly has been kissed transforms them into sanctuaries of desire. Throughout her monologue Molly tries to change her shape to suit her lovers’ fantasies, peeling off the skins of mother, virgin, bitch, and whore, although she complains that “theres nothing for a woman in that” (U 18.495). Her notorious narcissism is the product of a painful alienation, condemning her to see herself only through the eyes of men; this is one reason why she thinks the penis has “a kind of eye in it”. The kiss is the only sexual experience that heals Molly’s alienation by reaching “long and hot down to your soul,” and touching the wellspring of her own desire (U 18.106). “In kissing do we render or receive?” asks Cressida in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida. Bloom and Molly both remember kissing on the Hill of Howth as the deepest union of their lives, because the kisser coalesces with the kissed: High on Ben Howth rhododendrons a nannygoat walking surefooted, dropping currants. Screened under ferns she laughed warmfolded.
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Wildly I lay on her, kissed her: eyes, her lips, her stretched neck beating, woman’s breasts full in her blouse of nun's veiling, fat nipples upright. Hot I tongued her. She kissed me. I was kissed. All yielding she tossed my hair. Kissed, she kissed me (U 8.911-6). The wonder of the kiss, in Adam Phillips’s words, is that it “blurs the distinction between giving and taking.”20 Masturbate as they will, Bloom and Molly cannot kiss themselves on their own mouths. The kiss demands another kisser, much as a yes demands an interlocutor: “wherever there is a yes,” Derrida declares, “the other is hooked up somewhere on the telephone.”21 A yes is necessarily an answer to another, belying the idea of monologue; but a kiss turns self and other inside-out: “Kissed, she kissed me.” Phillips argues that kissing is “integral to the individual’s ongoing project of working out what mouths are for.”22 The kiss on Howth Head confounds two functions of the mouth, for Bloom and Molly kiss and eat at the same time, exchanging the “seedcake warm and chewed” between their tongues as a substitute for eating one other (U 8.907). While kissing can be combined with eating, however, it is virtually impossible to kiss and talk at the same time. Molly is scarcely lost for words, but the experience of kissing leaves her almost speechless. At these ecstatic moments, when language is overpowered by desire, the place-names bubble up into the prose. Actually it would be more precise to say they spatter down, since many of the references to Gibraltar were afterthoughts on Joyce’s part, added to successive pageproofs of “Penelope.” These place-names “remember” Molly, in every sense, buttoning her discourse back together at the brink of dissolution in the oceanic. Iain Sinclair writes in London Orbital: “Why doesn’t matter. When is of no account. We need to be able to track the story back: this is where it began, that’s the station, there is the river.”23 For Molly, there was Dolphins Barn, there was the Moorish wall, there was the hill of Howth: these placenames anchor her in language and memory at moments when the kiss threatens to obliterate all boundaries. Joyce told Harriet Weaver that in “Penelope” he had “tried to depict the earth which is prehuman and presumably posthuman” (SL 289). This suggests that the place-names belong to a topography prior or posterior to the imposition of the human subject. They could be seen as erogenous zones in 20. Adam Phillips, On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 97. 21. Jacques Derrida “Ulysses Gramophone: Hear Say Yes in Joyce,” in Bernard Benstock (ed), James Joyce: The Augmented Ninth (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1988), p. 35. 22. On Kissing, p. 96. 23. Iain Sinclair, London Orbital: A Walk around the M25 (London: Granta, 2002), pp. 297-8.
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the body of the earth, a “posthuman” body underneath the skin of gendered, individuated selves. If the body is the subject of Penelope, this is not a female or a human body but a terra incognita, blazed with kisses. University of Notre Dame
BODY WORDS
RICHARD BROWN
Abstract: Exploring aspects of the Modernist and Postmodernist attempts at the imaginative reclamation of the body, this essay discusses the insistence on the body in the strategies of representation in the “Penelope” episode, offering an analysis of its so-called “cardinal” or “wobbling” points (the words “because”, “bottom”, “woman” and “yes”), arguing that these may be understood as central to either or both of these Modernist and Postmodernist projects by virtue of their providing a tangential form of structure and reference that attempts to redress the constraints on the libidinal that may be characteristic of conventional representations, working to make “sense” in partial resistance to the instrumental, pathologizing or criminalizing tendencies of the “sentence”.
Joyce, Modernism and the Body Ulysses is filled with the experiences, forms and discourses of the body and it works to articulate these in distinctive vocabularies that unfold from Mulligan’s curiously wounded word “ouns” to the specially-coded body words of the “Penelope” episode that it is my intention to consider here in the broad context of Modernist and Postmodernist problems of representation.1 Whereas this body writing seemed to mark Ulysses off as different from the legitimately literary to its first readers, we can now see the extent to which its somatography confirms the central place of Ulysses to whatever shared epochal sense we may attribute to Modernist texts and also to the newer orthodoxies that define our sense of the literary text since the arrival of literary theory in the 1960s. It is therefore especially appropriate for us to
1. James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. Hans Walter Gabler et. als. (New York and London: Garland, 1984). Hereafter U.
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focus on the bodiliness of what may be the most bodily of its episodes, “Penelope” or at least one that is bodily in the most interesting of ways. Beyond Descartes, beyond even Hegel, the book opens with a gesture towards a Nietzschean-Freudian-materialist intellectual frame, part of whose function may be to announce what the final episode brings into fruition as an achievement in writing of a thoroughly Modernistic, post-Cartesian, or what Joyce, in a letter to Harriet Weaver, called even a “posthuman” kind.2 It is tempting to think that Joyce might have made Mulligan a Nietzschean and staged him so prominently at the start of the book precisely because of Nietzsche’s stern rejoinder in the first part of Thus Spake Zarathustra against those that he calls “despisers of the body”. According to Nietzsche, “the wakened, the enlightened man says: I am body entirely, and nothing beside; and soul is only a word for something in the body…You say ‘I’ and you are proud of this word. But greater than this -- although you will not believe in it – is your body and its great intelligence which does not say ‘I’ but performs ‘I’.3 Mulligan may be said to “perform” his body indeed. By contrast, Stephen, in his role as Telemachus, is said in Joyce’s schema to “not yet suffer the body”.4 If, however, we do look at the way in which Stephen “performs” his body in the first episode, we see him as disappearing to the margins (we see his “threadbare cuffedge”, U 1.106), withdrawn to an interior space of mourning, melancholy and aestheticised resentment – albeit taking many readers along with him as he goes. Yet, the more he withdraws towards the interiority of the “Proteus” episode, the more even Stephen encounters an “ineluctable” presence and “modality” of perception, that is a modality of the body. In Nietzsche, as in Marx and Freud, the twentieth century undermined the Cartesian split between body and mind, emphatically disrupting the hierarchical paradigm by which the body is discursively construed as an other to consciousness in so much enlightenment rationalist thought. In so doing it produced a crisis of representation in the arts that frequently surfaces as a crisis in mimesis and in the representation of the body. A paradigmatic work like Picasso’s 1907 Demoiselles D’Avignon, with its multi-discursive array of differently figured womens’ bodies seems to declare that there is no longer one representation of the body but that the body may, as it were, intrude through and into the conventions of representation by insisting on the necessities of modality and of difference. According to the history offered in Peter Brooks’s study Body Work it was the pressure put on 2. Selected Letters of James Joyce, edited by Richard Ellmann (London: Faber, 1978), p. 289. Hereafter SL. 3. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), pp. 61-2. 4. James Joyce, Ulysses:The 1922 edition, ed. Jeri Johnson (Oxford: OUP, The World’s Classics, 1993), p. 736.
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representation by the combination of hyperrealism and the masculine gaze in nineteenth-century bourgeois art – displayed in paintings like those of Felicien Rops, or Henri Gervex or, most of all, Gustave Courbet’s now widely-discussed painting L’origine du monde (1866), that gives rise to the Modernist break with mimesis in the visual arts.5 So in literary Modernism, especially those canonical works occurring around or immediately after the First World War, we find an urgent new agenda in the representation of the body. Virginia Woolf in her 1926 essay “On Being Ill”, reminds us how “All day, all night the body intervenes”… though “of all this daily drama of the body there is no record”.6 Eliot’s 1921 essay on the Metaphysical Poets insists that when poets ask us to “look into our hearts and write” they are “not looking deep enough…One must look into the cerebral cortex, the nervous system, and the digestive tracts.”7 The body is reconfigured through the concept of the “Wild Body” enunciated by Wyndham Lewis in his first critical essay published in The New Age on 5 May 1910, in which he complains that, “The body is sung about, ranted about, abused, cut about by doctors, but never talked about…It is not, however, the body that is ailing, but our idea of the body.”8 We can point to the “jelly-fish” state of the mind described by H.D. in her 1919 “Notes on Thought and Vision” which depends upon the womb and love-vision as centres of consciousness for, as she says, “Our concern is with the body.”9 The First World War itself, with its dehumanized industrial technologies of trench and tank and gasmask and aeroplane, was a disaster for the human body, not least for the symbolically smashed body of Lawrence’s Clifford Chatterley. Yet the potentiality of the body is what empowers Mellors and Connie Chatterley, who preaches the “resurrection” of the body: “Give me the body. I believe the life of the body is a greater reality than the life of the
5. Peter Brooks, Body Work: Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 143. Christine Froula, Modernism's Body : Sex,Culture, and Joyce (New York : Columbia University Press, 1996). Many Joyceans discuss Joyce’s literary achievement in relation to music. One recent exception, who discusses Joyce and Modernism in the visual arts, is Dan Schwarz in his book Reconfiguring Modernism: Explorations in the Relationship Between Modern Art and Modern Literature (New York: St. Martin’s, 1997). 6. Virginia Woolf, “On Being Ill”, in The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Volume IV (1925-1928), (London: The Hogarth Press, 1986), pp.317-8. 7. T.S.Eliot, “The Metaphysical Poets” (1921) in Selected Essays (London: Faber, 1931), p. 290. 8. Percy Wyndham Lewis, The Complete Wild Body, ed. Bernard Lafourcade (Santa Barbara, California, Black Sparrow Press, 1982), p. 251. The New Age is available on line at www.modjourn.brown.edu. 9. H.D., “Notes on Thought and Vision” (1919), in Bonnie Kime Scott (ed), Gender and Modernism ed. (Bloomington: Indian University Press, 1990), p. 108.
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mind: when the body is really awakened to life”.10 That links her to the paradoxical witchy wisdom of Yeats’s zesty late poems and especially to his emblematically bodily character from those poems, Crazy Jane.11 It’s small wonder then that Bernard Shaw’s thoroughly modern young woman Ellie Dunn in Heartbreak House parodies her contemporaries in saying that: “We now know that the soul is the body, and the body the soul.”12 Images of the body in Modernism need not, however, be so triumphalist. Take, for example, the image of the unimagineably disintegrated body of the mentally unstable boy Stevie who is the first and most obvious victim of the bomb outrage in Joseph Conrad’s 1907 novel The Secret Agent -- a body whose status as enigmatic evidence, whose clues, provide a paradigm for a discourse that runs throughout the novel in which the grotesque or extreme or dramatically altering bodily states of the characters provide a symbolic language of clues to the reader in a literary discourse that is at once embedded in and attempting to reach beyond those nineteenth-century discourses of phrenology, physiognomy and Lombrosian criminology, according to which the outward forms of the body provide a direct sign of its inner truths.13 With its scattered eyes, ears, feet, hands, teeth, nails, hair and, above all, bones, there is also a dismembered buried body in “The Waste Land” that, for instance, Maud Ellmann’s reading works to exhume.14 We might perhaps even claim, in a spirit of Bakhtinian carnival or of an epochal mirror phase that the body is the waste land of literary Modernism that its discourses encounter as waste but refuse to abandon as merely waste, indeed perhaps, rediscover as meaning because it is a waste of parts, in the sense of these parts being uncontained by function or totality or perhaps by authority or power.
10. D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961), p. 245. 11. W.B.Yeats, see especially “Crazy Jane Talks With the Bishop” in Collected Poems (London: Macmillan, 1961), pp. 294-5 and the approach to these poems in Elizabeth Butler Cullingford, Gender and History Yeats’s Love Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 12. George Bernard Shaw, Heartbreak House (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964), p. 127. 13. Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent, ed. Roger Tennant (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 87-8. 14. T.S. Eliot, “The Waste Land” in Collected Poems (London: Faber, 1963), pp. 61-80. Maud Ellmann, “The Waste Land: A Sphinx Without a Secret”, reprinted in Harriet Davidson (ed) T.S. Eliot (Longman Critical Readers) (London: Longman, 1999), pp. 90-108.
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The Body of Theory It is not only in its relation to these key aspects of Modernism that the presence of body is exposed in Ulysses but also if we see the text in an anticipatory dialogue with literary-critical Postmodernism, which has continued to insist on this post-Nietzschean and anti-Cartesian paradigm. If there is an orthodoxy which informs the terms of our discursive encounter with the literary text since the arrival of the post-1968 generation, the definition of the literary text as a body in Roland Barthes’s Pleasure of the Text might be one. Barthes welcomes those Arab scholars who refer to the text as “that certain body” and explains that this body is not that of the anatomists and physiologists (the pheno-text of the grammarians and philologists) but is its “erotic body” irreducible to the controls of consciousness or even to a reductive sense of physiological function and need: The pleasure of the text is that moment when my body pursues its own ideas – for my body does not have the same ideas as I do.15 After Barthes, we might say that this eroticised textual body becomes the site of meaning in the reading of literary texts, the substance of their semiosis, as much perhaps or even more than Walter Benjamin’s sense of the importance of the “political” (as opposed to the traditional importance of the “sacred” in art) in “The Work of Art in the Age of its Mechanical Reproduction”,16 or of the “moral” or “ethical” significances sought by traditional Arnoldian-Leavisite ethical criticism may claim. It is this “body” that is the meaningful thing. But it is not simply a question of textual pleasure. For the French feminisms of the 1960s, especially in such pieces as those collected by Elaine Marks and Isabel de Courtivran this body provides not only pleasure and meaning but also an determination to “disintellectualize writing” in order to articulate the body, reclaim the writing of the body from patriarchy and both embrace and exploit the identification of women and body as a means of writing back through and with the body in practices of Cixousian écriture.17 Likewise for a generation of Butlerian millennial gender theorists, the
15.Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (London: Cape, 1976), pp.16-17. 16. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of its Mechanical Reproduction” Illuminations (London: Fontana, 1973), pp.224-6. 17. Elaine Marks and Isabel de Courtivran (eds), New French Feminisms: An Anthology (Brighton: Harvester, 1981).
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disturbance or troubling of the body is that which matters. The body remains a contested site both of social inscription and of resistance in such work.18 This material undoubtedly conditions our contemporary readings of Joyce and other Modernist texts, which is not perhaps so much of a surprise when we recall the extent to which its discourses were themselves produced often quite directly from a reading of Joyce. In their underlying sense that the body might constitute an other to language and, potentially at least, a place of resistance to its formulations, we might see a suggestive context for Joyce’s presentation of Ulysses as an epic of the human body, not only in terms of its series of organic/mechanic correspondences for each of the episodes but also in that it works to “allow each adventure (that is every hour, every organ, every art being interconnected and interrelated in the somatic scheme of the whole) to condition and even to create its own technique” (SL 271). Such a structure seems both to invoke and to call into question the organic relation of part to whole and seems even to offer a model in which each of the parts seems poised to usurp the authority of that whole. It was, though, a body part which stands in an unusually transparent and directly metonymic relation to the whole that Joyce offered as the label for the body part for the “Penelope” episode – the “fat” (according to the Linati schema) or “flesh” (as in the Gorman-Gilbert plan). These two terms are usually taken to define more or less the same kind of thing. Leaving aside the further connotations of the appearance of the word fleisch in German (which may mean “meat”) in Joyce’s letter to Budgen,19 such flesh can, I suppose, both mean the body itself or else that part of the body’s substance that is other than the more functionally definable limbs or organs. It is, for example, at least in the experience of Shakespeare’s Venetian merchant Antonio, that part of the body no pound of which can be removed without endangering the whole. The flesh is not a part of the body listed alphabetically, for example, in the commonsensical British Medical Association’s Complete Family Health Encyclopaedia on my shelf.20 It is not, in that sense, a part usually understood to be governed or governable by conventional medical discourses. The “flesh” suggests the body in general, as defined by its libidinality and mortality. In that it may be thought to be as much a part of the cultural as of the medical sphere, the place where law, language and the body meet, and moreover be thought to be the part that is, as it were, the material ground of all the rest.
18. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1990) and Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (London: Routledge, 1993). 19.SL 285. 20. Tony Smith (ed), British Medical Association’s Complete Family Health Encyclopaedia (London: Dorling Kindersley, 1990).
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Body with a Capital “B” One aspect of the body language of the “Penelope” episode that may be said to conform to this part of the structural programme of Ulysses consists in the way the language of the episode repeatedly insists on the physical presence of the body. This is but is not only in the sense that the episode records the experiences of Molly’s body that take place during its time frame and her contacts with her immediate sensory environment, such as the feel of the bed, the smell of the gaslamp (U 18.912), the uncomfortable proximity of Bloom, the noise of the train (U 18.902-8) and the warmth of the June night that reminds her of her girlhood in Gibraltar. Whilst Molly, as some complain, is in some ways physically confined to her bedroom, in others she ranges expansively across wide physical spaces around Dublin and even around her distant but significant other location in the Gibraltar of memory which becomes a site of the libidinal for her and is a place that is made every bit as real by Joyce in the book as is the famously almost reconstructable Dublin of the book’s day. Whether here or there Molly’s discourse invokes the physical sensations of actual places by her use of locational specifics like names but also such demonstratives as “that” and “the [place] where” which the reader (with a few rule-proving exceptions such as the feel of the icy wind from the Sierra Nevada, U 18. 918-9, or the view of the bay of Tangiers from Europa Point “almost”, U 18. 859-60) is often surprised to find so specific and so accurate. Just as with Joyce’s Dublin, the imagination of realistic characters (like Mrs Rubio or the Stanhopes or her father and Captain Groves), the precise use of shop and personal and street names (the Delapaz and the Opisso and the Ramps and Calle of U 18.1463-69) and the detailed sensual placement of the physical body in their locations (such as the look of the olives in the shop Abrines U 18.1482) all underscore the physicality and materiality of this construction of the real. The precise locations in which she imagines her body in its erotic occasions provide Ewa Ziarek with a suggestive contrast between the “technological” and the “organic” modes under which female sexuality is construed in the modern world.21 Moreover it seems given as an aspect of Molly’s psychology for her to make an insistent demonstrative display of the location, the “where” of her body, frequently her erotic body. She knowingly shows off the attractions of her breasts to Bloom’s past employer Joseph Cuffe the cattle merchant, for example, at the end of sentence two when he gives her “the great Mirada” and she “knows her chest was out that way” (U 21. Ewa Ziarek, “The Female Body, Technology and Memory in “Penelope” in Richard Pearce (ed), Molly Blooms : A Polylogue on “Penelope” and Cultural Studies (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994), pp. 264-286.
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18.512, 533). She threatens to take Bloom to the place where she has been accosted by Professor Goodwin (“and show him the very place too”, U 18.281) and she contemplates, even more threateningly, the excremental bodily revenge of “smathering it all over [the] wrinkly old face” of the too inquisitive Dr Collins (U 18.1161), who has the cheek to ask her if she has an “offensive odour” and who refers to her vagina in a way that she satirizes with the rhyme-word “cochinchina” as if the word were as unfamiliar to her as is Chinese. Molly pointedly indicates (for whose benefit? to herself? to the reader?) the exact physical sensation of “the smoothest place” which “is right there between this bit here how soft like a peach” (U 18.1145-6) in a passage which seems to suggest that she is masturbating as well as contemplating in bed. And this insistence on the immediate presence of the physical body extends also from her own body to the bodies of others, even in their absence, such as in the remarkably demonstrative line: “theres the mark of his spunk on the clean sheet” (U 18.1312). Part of the effect of the somaticisation of the episode, as Derek Attridge and others have pointed out, may arise not only from the capacity of language to make reference as from its opposite: the distinctive attention to the physical properties of language as a medium that Joyce builds into the episode. 22 The significant near total absence of punctuation can be seen alongside such features as the use of figures rather than words for numerals, the eccentric use of capitalisation and the reproduction in the text of features of written as opposed to spoken language such as in the recalled postcard from Hester Stanhope signed “yrs affly Hester xxxx” (U 18.623) or the line from the bereavement letter for Nancy Blake in sentence four in which the redundant letters in the misspelled words “symphathy” and “newphew” are retained crossed through (U 18.730). We might also add another phenomenon of Molly’s language: the conspicuously dialogic way in which so many of her thoughts may be said to be quotations whether, for example, from the very many lines of songs in her musical repertoire or else more generally from catch phrases or proverbial sayings or else pervasively from what has been said to her or might have been thought to have been said to her by others. In addition to this attention to the material phenomenon of language one might note the attention to the physical objects of the printed or performed word that the episode also provides for us with its recurrent mention of the verbal media or artifacts that Molly may have consumed, by reading (or as part of an audience). These include the magazines The Gentlewoman (U 18.447), the Irish Times (U 18.255), the (Gibraltar) Chronicle (U 18.830), or 22. Derek Attridge, “Molly’s flow: the writing of “Penelope” and the question of women’s language” in Joyce Effects: On Language, Theory and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
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the Evening Telegraph (U 18.1262), or Bloom’s magazines (U 18.40-1), to the plays she has seen like The Only Way and Trilby (U 18.1038, 1042-3) and the Wife of Scarli (U 18.1118-9), or the theatre shows (U 18.111), or more literary intertextualities, such as references to Moll Flanders (U 18.658), Byron (U 18.185, 209, 1324-5) and Southey (U 18.1148), to Rabelais (U 18.488-90, 580) and to the books she has been given by Bloom (U 18.493-5, 968-9, 1238, 1396) and even Mrs Rubio (U 18.1474) and to the especially suggestive, so-called “sensation novels” of the 1860s by Wilkie Collins, Mary Braddon and Mrs Henry Wood and Margaret Hungerford that Molly has been given by her Gibraltar friend Hester Stanhope (U 18.650-658), books which are treated by critics such as Elaine Showalter, Kate Flint, and Lyn Pykett in terms of the sensational subject matter but also sensational bodily effects upon the reader they were sometimes said to produce.23 A striking example of this sensual intertextuality may come in the passage from sentence seven where Molly recalls the love letters that she has received (presumably from a somewhat younger and more amorous Bloom) in which she makes a direct connection between the literary language of Keats’s poetry and the language of the physical body (in this case with a capital P for precious and a capital B for body) in which the reference to the body is underlined by the reference to underlining as much as or more than it is obscured by it: his mad crazy letters my Precious one everything connected with your glorious Body everything underlined that comes from it is a thing of beauty and a joy for ever something he got out of some nonsensical book that he had me always at myself 4 and 5 times a day sometimes (U 18.1176-78) The quote from Keats, hackneyed and almost disparaging as it may be, surely suggests a connection between these love letters and Keats’s poetry, which was itself thought dangerously sensual by contemporaries, and also to Keats’s letters, which were frequently ungrammatical, oddly punctuated and capitalized like Molly’s but to powerfully enunciate a desire for a life of “sensations rather than thoughts” nonetheless. That Keats’s poetry in particular might have a sensational effect on the body as well as the mind of the reader may be suggested, for example, by such arguments as Christopher Ricks classically made about blushing as an involuntary sensual reaction of the body in his classic critical study of Keats and Embarrassment. 24 Furthermore, other aspects of Molly’s description of her letters, such as the 23. Elaine Showalter, “Subverting the Feminine Novel: Sensationalism and feminine Protest” in A Literature of Their Own (London: Princeton, 1977), pp. 163181. Kate Flint, The Woman Reader 1837-1914 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1973). Lyn Pykett The “Improper Feminine”: the women’s sensation novel and the new woman writing (London: Routledge, 1992). 24. Christopher Ricks, Keats and Embarrassment (Oxford: Clarendon, 1974).
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use of the word “everything” connects them to Joyce’s own 1909 letters to Nora where the word is also underlined and used in this sexually charged way. 25 Molly has apparently quite literally read these letters with her body in what is evidently a repeated act of masturbatory self-pleasuring brought on by the libidinal experience of text. And, as with Joyce’s letters, Molly’s monologue is rhythmically scattered with words that denote female sexual body parts. Unlike the letters to Nora, though, some of these words may only be said to do so by virtue of a kind of private code that Joyce revealed to his friend Frank Budgen in the letter describing the episode which he wrote in 1921, as if drawing attention to new vocabularies of the body was part of the hidden agenda of the writing of the episode. The Cardinal Points We might, then, wish to return to a reading of the material presence of those distinctive words, which Joyce called the “cardinal points” of the episode: “the female breasts, arse, womb and cunt expressed by the words because, bottom (in all senses bottom button, bottom of the class, bottom of the sea, bottom of his heart), woman, yes”, since they are such a distinctive aspect of the stated way in which the episode may be said to offer a language of the body. The use of these words can present a series of problems to criticism, especially if we recall that, at least according to Stuart Gilbert, Joyce also contemplated structuring the episode according to a similar but slightly different and less well-known group of words which he (Gilbert) called the episode’s “wobbling points”: “woman”, “bottom”, “he” and “man”.26 Both lists contain words that have become items in the criticism of the episode, since those Gilbert-inspired, early discussions of the tendency, from Molly’s female-gendered perspective to move between thoughts about the men of her acquaintance with the pronoun “he”, to what is among the best known of contemporary readings of Ulysses by Jacques Derrida in terms of what he called the “telegrammaphonic” effects of the word “yes”. 27 25. SL 182: “for I have told you everything” (assuming Ellmann’s italics to refer to an underlining in the handwritten original, notwithstanding the frequent underlinings also recorded in his edition of these letters). See also my article on the use of the word “’Everything’ in ‘Circe’” in Reading Joyce’s “Circe” (European Joyce Studies 3), ed. Andrew Gibson (Amsterdam and Atlanta : Rodopi, 1994), pp. 222-240. 26. SL 285. Stuart Gilbert, James Joyce’s “Ulysses” (London: Peregrine Books, 1963), p.341. 27. I might point to the account of these early discussions in my own essay on the constructions of gender in the language of the episode in Joyce Studies Annual. Jacques Derrida “Ulysses Grammaphone: Hear Say Yes in Joyce” in, for instance, Derek Attridge (ed), Jacques Derrida: Acts of Literature (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 253-309.
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From these statements, it would appear to be the structural as well as the referential (or quasi-referential) function of the words that was important to Joyce and both may have discernible impact upon the reader of the episode. Whether we chose to call them “cardinal points” or “wobbling points”, Joyce apparently had in mind a special structural frame for a style which is otherwise distinctive by virtue of its refusal of more conventional structures. Molly’s eight so-called “sentences” are instantly distinguishable from conventional sentences for most readers by their large and irregular size (ranging from two to ten or more pages), by their resemblance to paragraphs (in their separation from each other by punctuating line breaks) and by their lack of the kinds of punctuation marks or “stops” that mark syntactic form and breaks (though, of course, the style does adhere to the usual parts of speech in its representation of conversational syntax or thought as the simple exercise of reading aloud can usually demonstrate to even the most bemused first-time reader). In their very arbitrariness and in their being so embedded within the episode’s style, the words might be seen as an echo of the book’s subversions of narrative logic by some other apparently designing narrative agency, that David Hayman memorably named “The Arranger” in his classic narratological study of the book.28 The style of this episode was said by Hayman in these terms to return to a more conventionally character-centered kind of writing (to a “personal narrative consciousness”). Yet we wouldn’t want to claim these body words as something that the character Molly herself might be thought to be consciously aware of using in this way, any more than the body part references in the Linati and Gorman-Gilbert schemes would be understood as part of the consciousness of the characters in those episodes. The four words may be a parallel in this episode for the four words of the cat’s vocabulary in “Calypso” (U 4.16-38) or the “fourworded wavespeech” of “Proteus” (U 3.456-7). Ulysses, as we are reminded in “Aeolus”, is a book in which “everything speaks in its own way” (U 7.177) and they are an aspect of the way in which this particular episode and perhaps, by implication, the body, or the gendered body, or the “flesh” may be said to speak in its “own way”. The structural control that Joyce’s body words may be said to exercise over the episode is a particular but tangential one and one that seems to draw upon and to emphasize the connective and pronominal aspects of their use as much as much as the equally tangential character of their referentiality. This may especially be the case with the word “yes”. The word “yes” appears in “Penelope” some 82 times, many more times than it does in any other episode (the nearest being “Circe”, much longer but 28. David Hayman, “Ulysses”: The Mechanics of Meaning (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982), pp. 93-104. According to Hayman himself Joyce “returns us to the earth in ‘Penelope’” and to a fixed notion of character, p. 104.
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with only 11 examples).29 The episode, as Joyce explained, begins and ends with the word “yes”. So does sentence three (U 18.535). More playfully, the final sentence begins with a “no” (U 18.1368) and there’s an obvious structural crescendo in the last page or so where some 18 of the 82 yesses occur, appropriately enough, in the context of Molly’s recall of Bloom’s proposal to her. Otherwise the distribution of the word through the episode as a whole might be said to be deliberately a-structural or irregular one rather than giving the impression of its being tied to a mechanical or arbitrary form. According to the OED, the word “yes” is an unglossable one, at least by means of the near synonym on which the lexicographer normally relies. It is defined as a word signifying acceptance or agreement -- offered in response to a question. It is, in that sense, a word that might be exceptional in the extent to which it is usually to be understood as part of a dialogue rather than as having a referential function and this makes it an especially appropriate word for producing the effect of a non-structural structure that Joyce seems to have wanted to achieve. On the other hand we might distinguish between various kinds of “yes” emerging from different kinds of context and the distinctions that seem especially appropriate in the language of this episode may be between confirmatory and affirmatory sorts of “yes” and between the “yes” that confirms a proposition put by another as opposed to the selfconfirmatory or self- affirmatory kind of “yes” that we find here. The language of the episode includes the conventional form of “yes” but more frequently offers self-confirmatory kinds, that develop an intuition, for example, or the celebratory kinds of affirmation (perhaps posed in implied symbolic opposition to some larger cultural denial) that many readers find in the closing lines. In this, the irregular recurrence of the word throughout the episode may most resemble punctuation in its effect, as Molly’s thoughts pause to consider and then build upon their suppositions in a way that provides a powerful amorphic shape and continuity to her monologue. Such continuity might be thought a fascinating development from the kind of punctuation “stops” that are absent here, apart from the inevitable exceptions at the end and at the end of sentence four (U 18.1609, 747) and the suggestion that a “woman knows where to stop” (U 18.1439) that Joyce may have included deliberately to draw attention to this. Following Derrida, Derek Attridge has focused on what he calls the “effects” of Joyce’s language, though, of course, both meaning and effect are present and so one might be attracted to the word “sense” (in its placement between meaning and sensation) as one that more still fully conveys the suggestive conjunction of these two aspects of its operation.30 Such “senses” 29. A Handlist to James Joyce’s “Ulysses” by Wolfhard Steppe with Hans Walter Gabler (New York: Garland, 1985). 30. Derek Attridge, Joyce Effects (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
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are especially enhanced when the word “yes” occurs in direct conjunction with another of the key words in the Budgen list which may also function as the answer to a question posed by oneself or by another and which frequently has a connective syntactic function: the word “because”. “Because” occurs 46 times in “Penelope” though, as Katie Wales has observed, it occurs even more frequently in the first half of the “Nausicaa” episode (Gerty MacDowell’s section has 51; Bloom’s just 10).31 It also occurs 14 times in “Ithaca”, that episode of questions and explanations but in “Penelope” seems to offer a comfortable sense of confirmation and explanation and of the connectedness of things as one might wish them to be connected rather than by mechanical or causal laws. The “because” may be said to make libidinal linkages through senses of the desiring and the nutritive as explanatory motivations for behaviour (“he came somewhere Im sure by his appetite”, U 18, 34-5) in a way that may be suggestively linked with, if it need not directly refer to, the breast itself. The distinctive verbal coupling “yes because” occurs six times in the first sentence of the episode (as well as twice later). This phrase sets the tone as well as the “sense”, from the first two words of the episode onwards and the implied question to which they respond. There is what we might call an inquisitive or “detective” discourse in that sentence as Molly shows her ability to read the body’s signs of desire in this way. She wonders where Bloom may have been before returning home so late and imagines a number of potentially incriminating scenarios that may also be thought to go some way toward constructing a self-legitimating or self-exculpatory defence of the day’s activities on her part. Indeed the “sense” of this first sentence of the episode may be to raise questions about and challenges to the legal and the legitimate more pointedly. Molly’s detective work includes a disparaging discussion of the solicitor John Henry Menton “of all the big stupoes I ever met and that’s called a solicitor” (U 18.43-4). She invokes the case of the notorious Victorian female criminal Mrs Maybrick who poisoned her husband but who, according to Molly, may be defendable on the basis that it “was her nature” and that the legal system should not “be brutes enough to go and hang a woman surely” (U 18.234-5). It is hard to imagine that the legal sub-sense of the word “sentence” is not also at play here and that Molly’s discourse may be said to attempt to substitute “sense” for “sentence” in these aspects of its content as well as its forms. When Molly thinks of receiving and of writing love letters and recalls, at the end of the fourth sentence, that the emotional life of her friend Atty Dillon with “the fellow that was something in the four courts” was frustrated perhaps as a result of her too rigid adherence to the mechanical writing formulae of “the ladies 31. Katie Wales, The Language of James Joyce (Basingstoke: Palgrave,Macmillan, 1992).
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letterwriter” (U 18.741-2) the association of such ideas seems to be confirmed. If this quasi-syntactic function of both words is suggested both by the Gilbert term “wobbling points” and by the Budgen term “cardinal” (which etymologically invokes the Latin cardus or hinge), such functions may add to the sense of the “wobbling” of the fleshly body as an additional tangential form of reference. Conversely, the absurdity of assuming that the words might only be read as a secretive code making a literal kind of reference to particular concealed body parts might be demonstrated by a crude exercise in substitutive translation of the start (“cunt breast he never did a thing like that before”) or the end of the episode (“and first I put my arms around him cunt and drew him down to me so he could feel my because all perfume cunt and his heart was going like mad and cunt I said cunt I will cunt”). It might be argued that the reader who is apprised of these special extra meanings in this way would be no better served than a reader who might quite arbitrarily decide that the word “and” denoted the kneecap or the word “breakfast” secretly referred to the practice of cunnilingus. Yet the body words, once we do know their specially designated senses, do act as a cumulative subliminal reminder of the body and bodiliness in the text and moreover, their curiously non-referential, referentiality may remind us that the idea of touch is at least etymologically embedded in the concept of the tangential and that “touching” can be another kind of “meaning” (in at least two senses) too.32 Joyce barely needed an additional or covert vocabulary to denote the sexual body parts in an episode whose language is already courageous in the naming of such parts and it might underestimate the riskiness of the language of the episode to suppose that some kind of self-censoring programme might be at work in it. The cardinal words – though some conceal what are or were conventionally thought to be obscene terms for female body parts -- are not best describable as euphemism in the ways they work. By comparison with the potentially more euphemistic Gilbert list, the Budgen list rather seems to suggest an additional provocation or undersense. It may be that Joyce especially wanted to add more bodily force and subliminal or tangential sense of these body parts through these terms, to construe a body that is at once beyond the reduction to the functional or organic and yet one that may speak from the bodiliness of its body parts. Christine van Boheemen, for example, in her highly sophisticated readings of the language of episode, suggests that it might be read in terms of the tradition she finds in Diderot, psychoanalysis
32. It might be noted he concept of the “democracy of touch” and the consistent play between language and sexual experience is also a feature of Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover as Michael Bell has usefully demonstrated in his work on that novel in D.H.Lawrence:Language and Being (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
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and elsewhere of the “confessing vagina” or the part of the libidinal female body which speaks.33 We might observe that cardinals are easily identifiable (in etymology and ecclesiastical vestment and North American ornithology) because they wear red. Redness might perhaps recall the conspicuously rouged sexual body parts in Courbet’s L’origine du monde that, as I argued, Brooks and Froula invoke as a high point and crisis of mimesis in the early twentieth-century Modernist arts. At any rate Joyce’s cardinal words might also be “cardinal” by virtue of their play with obtrusiveness and disguise and with the more obscene terms for the body to which Joyce’s letter gestures which may also occur. Joyce’s cardinal words draw attention to certain of the body’s organs but also explore ways in which the instrumental concepts of functional specialization on which so much in medical discourse depends, may need to be resisted in its tendencies to pathologise and define. Consider, for example, the word “because” in relation to the episode’s other possible ways of saying “breast”. If “because” means “breast” then it’s not because Joyce was unable to use the word “breast” itself. The word “breast” occurs once in “Penelope” (U 18.570) and we see “breasts” at the end (U 18.1607) and we get “bubs” (U 18.901), chest (U 18.416,529, 533,729), more than a couple of “nipple(s)” (U 18.537,569 and 914), no “tits”, though there are the “thirsty titties”, at line 536, not to mention the idea of Bloom milking Molly into his tea that outraged some early readers and the references to “them” that begin the short but breast-filled sentence three and occur elsewhere. Joyce does seem to draw attention to and make play with the private referential element in his cardinal words in such ways. For example, he includes no examples of the “breast” word “because” in sentence three, even though much of the sentence in fact focuses on what are called both “titties” and “breast” in it. The word “because” tends to function all the more to provide the sense of an enabling syntactic stop or link and, in that, may have something in common with the characteristics of the word “between” or entre that provide the basis for that extraordinary argument by which Jacques Derrida is enabled to construct a dialogue between Plato and Mallarmé in which nothing less than the idea of meaning as representation
33. Christine van Boheemen, “Molly’s Heavenly Body and the Economy of the Sign: The Invention of Gender in “Penelope” in “Ulysses”: En-Gendered Perspectives, ed. Kimberley J. Devlin and Marilyn Reizbaum (Columbia South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 1999), pp. 267-281. See also her discussion of the “embodied text” in Christine van Boheemen-Saaf, Joyce, Derrida, Lacan and the Trauma of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 155-193, where the linguistic materiality of the episode is construed as masculine act of substitution or displacement of the threat or promise of the libidinal female other.
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comes into question.34 We might then argue that Joyce hints tangentially at reference to these libidinal or discursively excluded body parts through his use of parts of speech that are especially slippery in terms of their syntactic labelling. In the opening sentence of the episode the word “bottom” occurs first in its relatively abstract sense of relational location but then twice in the sense that directly names the body part in a sexual way, referring to Bloom’s trademark sexual practices of “kissing my bottom” (U 18.53) and that he “came on my bottom” (U 18.77). Indeed “bottom” apparently becomes the definitive name of the sexual body part in her account of the confession with Father Corrigan, though her insistence that it is the word (“couldn’t he say bottom right out” U 18.110) may disguise the extent to which either she or he may actually be taken to be referring either to the anus or to the vagina at this moment. Such ambiguity may be connected to the importance of the woman’s bottom as a sexual site that was such a controversial part of the representation of the sexual body in Lawrence’s near contemporary Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Both desired and desiring and the products of those movements of desire, Molly’s body in “Penelope” is a contested site whose libidinality she needs to consistently relegitimate in the face of the institutions that surround her and she does this in the deft counter-suspicions and accusations she makes against Bloom especially in the first sentence but also in her consistent refusal to accept the languages and authorities of such intrusively patriarchal institutions as the confessional when she famously mobilizes the potential semantic ambiguity of the interrogative “where”. It may also be part of this programmatic playfulness that there are no actual uses of the word “bottom” in sentence two. Molly, however, recalls Bartell d’Arcy’s exaggerated pronunciation of the song line “kiss me straight on the brow and part which is my brown part” (U 18.276,1522), as if to suggest that traces of reference to such body parts can never really be suppressed from emerging whichever actual word may be used. Like in Bottom’s dream, then, there is no “bottom” in sentence two, but we do have one of the uses of the word “behind” for bottom (not listed in the letter to Budgen) that occurs in a strongly flavoured, erotic context (U 18.417) and we are given in the discussion of Rabelais reference to the “bumgut” and “a-e as if any fool wouldn’t know what that meant” (U 18.490-1). In sentence three, by contrast, the word “bottom” occurs in the more abstract sense of relational location (U 18.586) and Joyce again uses the word “behind” to make a sexually charged reference to the anus (U 18.568). Joyce’s somewhat adverbial glosses on and extensions to the word “bottom” 34. Jacques Derrida, “The Double Session” in Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (New York: Continuum, 1981), pp. 189-192.
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in the Budgen letter seem to confirm his deliberate play with the potential reference of the word to a specific body part as opposed to more abstract or geometrical location and to make it hard or impossible say, for instance, when exactly any obscene reference is taking place and when not. This may point to and subvert the kind of censorship of specific words to which he had himself been subject in his attempts to publish Dubliners. Tangential reference may have appealed as a way of evading or poking fun at literary censorship for Joyce just as it casts Molly in a position of subversive resistance to the criminalizing discourses of the law, to the condemnatory inquisition of the confessional and also to the pathologising discourses of medicine at various times during the monologue. And this may be linked to the simultaneous heightening and problematisation of mimesis that I argued was characteristic of the Modernist moment in art and literature. Molly’s “yes” word may also, then, not directly refer so much as give a tangential undersense of the vagina. When the episode more directly mentions the vagina it also does so in ways that reveal a degree of sensitivity to the problematics of reference and representation. The word “cunt”, that Joyce mentions in the letter as the referential equivalent for his “yes”, does not appear at all, though it has done so earlier in the book, in “Calypso” (U 4.227) and in the name of Cunty Kate in “Circe”. The word “vagina”, on the other hand, occurs twice as we have seen (U 18.1154,6) at that moment where Molly’s visit to the “dry old stick” Dr Collins make her feel a serious adverse reaction to his use of the term. She also resists the euphemistic terminology of Father Corrigan’s “rather high up” (U 18.115). Her preferences are for what she perceives as the more straightforward (though it may actually be more ambiguous) term “bottom” or else to the attractively sensual reference to “this bit here how soft like a peach” (U 18.1146) or else a coarser reference to “my hole is itching me” (U 18.902). A detailed study of the word “it” in her discourse might reveal other key ways in which the tendency of the pronoun to gesture towards obscene bodily reference in all language let alone in Molly’s “private” and bodily-gendered language might be seen. “It” is a word that is not listed in the Budgen letter or by Gilbert and not all the episode’s “its” would mean the same thing but the word surely deserves a similar kind of attention for ways in which it functions here. Perhaps most broadly and relevantly suggestive in this respect may be the reference to “a thing hairy” and “hairy etcetera” that Molly makes toward the end of the episode in sentence eight (U 18.1385-8). She is here apparently half-quoting a rhyme that has been chanted at her in a sexually suggestive way by Dublin’s Marrowbone Lane “cornerboys”, which runs: “…my uncle John has a thing long…my aunt Mary has a thing hairy…and he puts his thing long into my aunt Mary’s hairy etcetera”. The double-entendre seems clear enough but the full sexual joke of the double entendre is a little more complex in this case since the clinching line of the chant seems to come in
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identifying the potential non-sexual meaning of the words (“and turns out to be you put the handle in a sweeping brush”, U 18.1388) and this is done, Molly thinks, to “make me blush” (U 18.1386). The blushing, of course, implies a kind of reading and an understanding that the body expresses involuntarily, revealing a potentially incriminating sensual knowledge and familiarity with the obscene that the conscious subject may be expected, according to moral conventions, to deny. This riddle of the naming of the sexual body parts and Molly’s reaction to it confirm how the language of the episode is artfully constructed around the problematics of such forms of reference. Molly is determined to acknowledge her body and its desires but also to be engaged in a kind of struggle to articulate the experience of her body over and against the institutionalised forms of language in the confessional and in legal, medical and other fields that she feels may entrap and define her experience no less than does this riddle. It may also be significant that it is when the figure of Stephen is uppermost among the men in her thoughts that Molly thinks of this riddle. Molly’s sensitivity to the presence of the body in language and to the presence of the body itself which is built into the episode beyond her supposed consciousness in these “cardinal points”. This is the very opposite of the monkish attack on the “kinetic” in the art theory that was proposed by Stephen in A Portrait. In other ways there may be degrees of sympathy between them. There must be a link between her potential blushing here and Stephen’s repeated blushings throughout Ulysses. We might also see links between the strategy of tangential reference (of naming by not naming) which is built into her discourse and Stephen’s famous artistic strategy of “silence, exile and cunning” from the earlier book. There is surely also a congruence between her desire to articulate the freedom and independence of her body against the lawyers, priests and doctors who would govern and control it and his frustrations with Mulligan the medic as well as his mental struggle as an artist with the “priest and the king”. Molly’s attempt to find the language of her body is represented in the variously tangential linguistic strategies of the “Penelope” episode of which the four “cardinal” or “wobbling” points may be among the most intruiging. These can be closely connected to Stephen’s attempts to find his “body” as an emerging young man and as a writer and both can be seen to be in the mainstream of the crises of representation of the body that are essential both to Modernism and Postmodernism in the ways that I have defined them here. The body, its desires and its “kinetic” reactions to the aesthetic may not appear as opposite of literature as they do for Stephen in A Portrait but may instead become the very definition of literature as in that conjunction between her sensual experiences of reading love letters and reading Keats that is made in Molly’s thoughts. The recognition to which Molly’s reading with the body
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leads us is not just to a sense of the self-pleasuring body but to a sense of the body as a contested site of discourses -- that on which the act of writing may be written as law. The “Penelope” episode performs Molly’s “I” both explicitly and tangentially and in the Nietzschean sense that the gendered body may provide the basis of a Modernist concept of identity that I outlined at the start of this chapter. Its body words constitute an affirmation that is posited on the everpresent possibility of its denial. Joyce’s project of talking about the body is thus both in the mainstream of Modernism and beyond, suggesting the crises of representation in which Modernist body discourses found themselves suspended: both reclaiming representation and needing to forge routes beyond the representational double-bind. There is a cultural-historical and theoretical as well as an everyday conversational answer to McCoy’s question “How’s the body?” which, as I suggested in my introduction, a study of the strategies of representation in the episode can help us to answer. Through its cardinal points the body speaks as a structure that is not quite structure and as reference that is not quite referential at least not in a conventional sense. The body words of “Penelope” serve to remind us that the gendered sexual body like so much in the book speaks in its own way: thus speaks Joyce’s somatography. University of Leeds
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JACK THE RIPPER AND THE FAMILY PHYSICIAN: GYNAECOLOGY AND DOMESTIC MEDICINE IN “PENELOPE” VIKE MARTINA PLOCK Abstract: This essay discusses two crucial medical subtexts in Joyce’s “Penelope”. As my argument will show, at the turn of the twentieth century gynaecological theory and domestic medicine both emerged as effective instruments in reinforcing conventional gender politics. In presenting Molly Bloom’s conflicting and kaleidoscopic image Joyce overtly challenges reductive representations of femininity and medicine’s growing influence in the society of modernity.
When the signs of Nora’s first pregnancy in Trieste in 1904 could no longer be ignored, Joyce wrote to Stanislaus with an unusual request, asking him and Vincent Cosgrave to read books on midwifery and embryology and to send him “the results” (LII 73). Astoundingly, although she might have been able to give much better advice, Aunt Josephine, Joyce’s usual source of information, was not addressed with this particular concern. Instead Joyce seemed to have preferred textbook guidance on how to handle a pregnant woman. And although this anecdote plainly emphasises Joyce’s early interest in gynaecology, coming to the fore more prominently in “Oxen of the Sun”, it demonstrates, on the other hand, that at the turn of the twentieth century the subject of women’s diseases was rigidly controlled by a congregation of medical experts. When Nora became pregnant in Trieste, obstetrics and gynaecology had emerged as new medical specialities and their spokesmen argued authoritatively on the topic of female pathologies. In “Penelope” Joyce uses medical debates on so-called women diseases as a provocative intertext for the representation of Molly Bloom’s sexuality. Her encounter with the gynaecologist, Dr Collins, in 1888 responds explicitly to the complex turn-of-the-twentieth-century discourse that related womanhood, pathology and social politics. It further recalls fin-de-siècle fears of medical abuse that were most explicitly captured in the sensationalist image of Jack the Ripper. Yet surprisingly, as “Penelope” reveals, the biologically motivated argument that advocated women’s social inferiority received support by another, much more subtle medical interventionism. As we shall
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see, patent medicine forms an equally central medical subtext for “Penelope”. Molly’s references to her Family Physician and patent adverts unmistakably disclose her reliance on domestic medicine that propagated the image of domesticated womanhood. Joyce thus shows that both gynaecological theory and domestic medicine actively participated in reinforcing women’s conventional social roles at the beginning of the twentieth century. In 1878 Frances Power Cobbe, feminist and founder of the (1875 established) Society for the Protection of Animals Liable to Vivisection, commented on medicine’s increasing influence in the secularised and scientifically orientated nineteenth-century society: There is no denying the power of the great Medical Order in these days. It occupies, with strangely close analogy, the position of the priesthood of former times, assumes the same air of authority, claims its victims for torture […] and enters every family with a latch-key of private information, only comparable to that obtained by the Confessional.1
In “Penelope” Joyce underlines the effects of this modern medical imperialism when Molly refers to Aristotle’s Masterpiece, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’ most popular pseudo-medical reference guide (which also bore the subtitle “family physician” in several editions). Her slip of the tongue innovatively transforms it into “Aristocrats Masterpiece” (U 18.1238) and thus correctly identifies doctors such as her gynaecologist, Dr Collins, as the new aristocrats of a modern, medicalised society. It is this authority of medical men in turn-of-the-twentieth-century society that motivated Molly’s first encounter with a gynaecologist. Clearly, her 1888 illness was only a minor one, possibly leucorrhoea, and an appointment with the gynaecologist possibly superfluous. However, the encounter with Dr Collins took place in a time when gynaecological theory was increasingly concerned with women’s menstrual cycles, its potential suppression and resulting ailments. In the second half of the nineteenth century gynaecological addresses recreated the clinical perception of the female body, regarding the retention of the regular flow of the menses as the primary reason for female mental pathologies.2 Medical theory thus created an underground link between the obstruction of the menstrual blood and insanity, between female physiology and pathology. Consequently, women became, “by definition, disease or disorder, a deviation from the standard of
1. Frances Power Cobbe, “The Little Health of Ladies”, Contemporary Review 31 (1878), p.292. 2. See Sally Shuttleworth, “Female Circulation: Medical Discourse and Popular Advertising in the Mid-Victorian Era” in Body/Politics: Women and the Discourses of Science eds. Mary Jacobus, Evelyn Fox Keller and Sally Shuttleworth (New York and London: Routledge, 1990), pp.47-68.
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health represented by the male.”3 Accordingly, the notorious Victorian psychopathologist Henry Maudsley argues that “at each reoccurring period there are all the preparations for conception, and nothing is more necessary to the preservation of female health than that these changes should take place regularly and completely.” He continues: “Hence it is that the outbreak of diseases is so often heralded, or accompanied, or followed by suppression or irregularity of these functions.”4 The regularity of the menstruation is therefore identified as an indication of women’s psychological equilibrium. In the attempt to master the many illnesses connected with menstruation, medical theory then developed an extensive topography of female disorders. Among those identified were amenorrhoea (retention and suppression of the menses), dysmenorrhoea (acute pain during menstruation), menorrhagia (morbidly profuse menstruation) and leucorrhoea (white vaginal discharges)5 – the very illness from which Molly suffered. No wonder, then, that Molly worries on the night of 17 June 1904 if “there is anything the matter with my insides or have I something growing in me getting that thing like that every week” (U 18.1149-50) that is “pouring out of me like the sea” (U 18.1122). Although she suffers not from obstructions but rather the contrary, medical theory suggests that her uncontrollable body functions demand professional attention. Furthermore, in the discussions of the retention and the suppression of the menses, puberty and early adolescence, the times when the reproductive functions start to develop, were identified as crucial moments for the regulation of the flow of menstrual blood and, accordingly, for the development of women’s future health and happiness. Doctors and patent medicine adverts agreed that obstructions and so-called female irregularities occurring in the years of early adolescence doomed women to a long life of suffering and mental disorders. Viewed in this light it is not surprising that the young Molly Bloom seeks medical advice about “that white thing” (U 18.1152) coming from her. In 1888 she would have been at exactly this crucial age which doctors had singled out as especially dangerous for the occurrence of menstrual irregularities. In the same way that medical discourses gained popularity and influence on individuals’ lives in the second half of the nineteenth century, doctors also radically changed their medical examination methods. The Family Physician, which is, according to Gifford and Seidman, likely to be Molly’s medical
3. Ornella Moscucci, The Science of Woman: Gynaecology and Gender in England 1800-1929 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p.102. 4. Henry Maudsley, “Sex in Mind and in Education”, Fortnightly Review 15 (1874), p.467. 5. Shuttleworth, “Female Circulation”, p.61.
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manual, was first published in 1879, describes this new role of the modern doctor, showing thereby a surprising resemblance to the confessional: The modern physician occupies a very different position to that of the oldfashioned family medical attendant, and assumes much more the role of the scientific adviser. He is not satisfied with a mere recital of aches and pains, but tries to find out by patient investigation why it is that that the system of the sufferer has gone wrong. […] [H]e feels that he has not properly performed his duty until he has got to the bottom of it. […] He demands implicit confidence and will take no denial, every detail of the patient’s life must be laid bare, and no fact, however trivial, escapes his investigation.6
Turning to Molly and Dr Collins we see that Molly is subjected to exactly this type of interrogation. However, the doctor’s scientific vocabulary clearly causes confusion: “your vagina he called it” (U 18.1154). “Vagina” is certainly not a word Molly Bloom would use. It seems almost as if in using such formal anatomical terminology Dr Collins alienates Molly’s body from its rightful owner. His medical questions and Molly’s creative comments, “asking me if what I did had an offensive odour what did he want me to do but the one thing gold maybe what a question” (U 18.1160-61); “could you pass it easily pass what I thought he was talking about the rock of Gibraltar” (U 18.1163-64); “asking me had I frequent omissions where do these old fellows get all the words they have omissions” (U 18.1169-70) exemplify the contrasting views that doctor and patient hold in regard to Molly’s body. Molly’s organic understanding is confronted by the doctor’s attempt to theorise her sexual body parts. Their points of view are incompatible and result in Molly’s perplexity and her rebellious comments that assign absurdity and incompetence not to her own but instead to the doctor’s idiom. Yet in spite of Molly’s linguistic confidence it is interesting to note that unlike Father Corrigan, another male authority figure who Molly recalls in her soliloquy, Dr Collins is not turned into the object of her erotic fantasies. Molly hardly regards the doctor as a man at all. On the contrary, she assures herself that Dr Collins is a “dry old stick” (U 18.1153) when he has his “shortsighted eyes” (U 18.1171) on her. Evidently, Molly seems to follow the customary advice given to nineteenth-century women: to look on the doctor with his unpleasant questions and surgical tools as an old woman,7 or in Molly’s case at least as an old man. In reading age and impotence into Dr Collins’s image, Molly desexualises the encounter that is over-determined by the gynaecologist’s tainted reputation. In “Penelope” Joyce is thus distinctly alluding to the problematic relationship between gynaecologists, their female patients and sexuality. And he might have had one specific case in mind. In 6. The Family Physician:A Manual of Domestic Medicine by Physicians and Surgeons of the Principal London Hospitals (London: Cassell and Company, 1894), p.XXVII. 7. Power Cobbe, “The Little Health of Ladies”, p.294.
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the early 1860s Sir William Wilde, father of Oscar Wilde, was accused by one of his patients, Mary Travers. She repeatedly reported that he had raped her while she was under the influence of chloroform.8 Although her case was never a strong one, rumours spread in Dublin and even in England so that The Lancet found it necessary to defend Sir William Wilde publicly.9 His guilt was never ascertained, but the case nevertheless helped to propagate tales of sexual abuse by male doctors in Ireland. It is no surprise, therefore, that Molly expresses her mistrust of Dr Collins by announcing, “I wouldn’t trust him too far to give me chloroform or God knows what else” (U 18.1171-72). Since the beginning of its career as narcotic in 1847 and independent of Sir William Wilde’s case, the administration of chloroform had always been controversial.10 It was widely used in gynaecological operations and was one reason for the explosive rise of surgery in the second half of the nineteenth century. Naturally, the anaesthetised patient facilitated surgical treatment. Instead of operating on a screaming and squirming creature in excruciating pain, doctors now performed surgical procedures on sedated bodies that had more resemblance to corpses on the dissection table than to individuals. Molly’s reference to chloroform, then, clearly recalls the dangerous potential of the narcotic, referring to its use and abuse in gynaecological surgery. One such operation routinely performed in the 1860s as a radical therapy for female diseases such as masturbation, nymphomania and mental disorders was clitoridectomy, the surgical removal of the clitoris. Especially, notorious among the numerous doctors who performed this operation was Dr Isaac Baker Brown. His flourishing practice was eventually closed when the Obstetrical Society of London expelled him for malpractice in 1867.11 Naturally, the female pathologies making this extreme corrective intervention allegedly necessary are all connected to sexual activities that defy the approved image of conventional female sexuality. And although clitoridectomy had lost its appeal for medical practitioners when Molly Bloom seeks medical advice in 1888, it is noteworthy that it had been replaced by another widely practised operation: ovariotomy. After its first employment as a remedy for ovarian cancer and cysts in 1809 by the American surgeon Ephraim McDowell (1771-1830), the number of ovariotomies carried out in Britain rose steadily during the nineteenth 8. Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (London: Penguin, 1988), pp.13-15. I would like to thank Maud Ellmann for this reference. 9. Ibid., p.14. 10. Mary Poovey, “Scenes of an Indelicate Character: The Medical Treatment of Victorian Women” in Uneven Development: The Ideological Work of Gender in MidVictorian England (London: Virago Press, 1989), p.24. 11. The case is discussed in Susan Kingsley Kent, Sex and Suffrage in Britain 18601914 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), pp.116-19.
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century. Apparently it had been performed over 130 times by 1851.12 But whereas it had originally been introduced as a cure for physiological illnesses, ovariotomy was soon applied as a corrective treatment for psychological women diseases. Hysteria or nymphomania were female maladies that doctors expected to treat with the removal of healthy ovaries. Yet despite its celebration as scientific progress in gynaecological surgery, the operation was in the 1880s greeted with fervent opposition both from medical practitioners and from the lay public. Firstly, the mortality rate remained high. This, however, was not the main reason for the operation’s condemnation. Obviously, in attacking the patient’s reproductive organs with the surgical knife, ovariotomy effectively castrated the woman. In an age obsessed with national regeneration the operation was regarded as a much more fundamental surgical intervention than its equally controversial counterpart, clitoridectomy. Whereas one operation mutilated only one individual, the other in preventing reproduction was damaging to the nation at large. In the decade that witnessed this controversy about ovariotomies, a specific event crucially highlighted the woman’s role as victim of the surgeon’s knife. In 1888, curiously the same year that Joyce chooses for Molly’s gynaecological consultation, Jack the Ripper dissected his victims in Whitechapel. The mutilated bodies of the discovered prostitutes had been cut open and allegedly certain female organs such as the uterus and ovaries were conspicuously absent. Naturally, theories of the Ripper’s identity mushroomed. At times a Jewish anarchist was believed to be the culprit,13 but it was also “popularly believed that Jack the Ripper was an abortionist” or a “vivisecting surgeon of London University who had extended his research from animals to women.”14 Such an identification of the Ripper with a medical practitioner is, no doubt, a zesty slice of popular nineteenth-century mythology. Nevertheless, as Judith Walkowitz and Elaine Showalter have shown, the Whitechapel cases evoked and helped to disseminate themes of “medical violence against women in fin de siècle literature – of opening up, dissecting, or mutilating women”.15 The Ripper’s image thus turned into a 12. Number taken from Moscucci, The Science of Woman, p.137. 13. Sander L. Gilman, “‘Who Kills Whores?’ ‘I Do,’ Says Jack: Race and Gender in Victorian London” in Death and Representation, eds. Sarah Webster Goodwin and Elisabeth Bronfen (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), pp.263-84. 14. See Angus McLaren, ‘“Not a Stranger: A Doctor’: Medical Men and Sexual Matters in the Late Nineteenth Century” in Sexual Knowledge, Sexual Science, eds. Roy Porter and Mikuláš Teich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) p.273 and Coral Lansbury, ‘Gynaecology, Pornography, and the Antivivisectionist Movement’, Victorian Studies 28 (1985), p.431. 15. Judtih R. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (London: Virago, 2000), 199. See also Elaine Showalter,
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popular cultural metaphor for medical abuse and women appeared in these discussions as helpless victims of the doctor’s knife. In “Circe” Joyce uses the many speculations that circulated around the Whitechapel mystery to create Bloom’s criminal profile: accused of having sent obscene letters and postcards to Mrs Yelverton Barry, Mrs Bellingham and the Honourable Mrs Mervyn Talboys, he poses both as “Jack the Ripper” (U 15.1153) and as “anarchist” (U 15.1156) while Mrs Bellingham vindictively offers to “vivisect him” (U 15.1105). With this suspicious connection to the Ripper in mind, Bloom’s culinary preferences for “the inner organs of beasts and fowls” (U 4.1-2) may appears in a very different light. If the Ripper cases were primarily about disembowelment, then Bloom’s interest in “thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fired hencods’ roes” and above all “grilled mutton kidneys” (U 4.4) might be read as a concealed comic reference to the alleged Jewish anarchist who roamed the streets of Whitechapel. This is not to suggest that Joyce deliberately used the Ripper myth as reference point for his Jewish protagonist. Yet the sensationalist Ripper cases indisputably belonged to the cultural matrix of turn-of-the-twentieth-century society that Joyce consciously explored in Ulysses. Molly is, as we have seen, aware of the cultural discourses that associated the gynaecologist with the image of a vivisector of women. In her particular case it is also vital to remember that the operations performed by Victorian gynaecologists were factual punishments for female sexual transgression. Doctors performed clitoridectomies and ovariotomies to cure female diseases that were, in the first place, a form of sexual rebellion. Yet even in simple cases of menstrual irregularities medical practice suggested a cure that advocated the application of leeches to the pelvis, the labia and the uterus – if this did not cause the wished-for results, a lancet might be used to secure the extraction of blood.16 With regard to these potential threats, it is not surprising that Molly is at pains to hide her masturbation over Bloom’s “mad crazy letters” (U 18.1176) from the gynaecologist, although she herself seems certain that it is the reason for her illness. It is also not surprising that she recalls the encounter with Dr Collins on the night of the 17 June in 1904: in committing adultery Molly has, according to turn-of-the-century medical theory and social conventions, identified herself anew as a sexually disobedient woman. Strikingly though, apart from the reference to chloroform, the gynaecologist’s menace to Molly remains strangely censored. Instead, Molly vividly illustrates the hazards to which women are commonly exposed. She Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (London: Bloomsbury, 1991), pp.127-43. 16. Shuttleworth, “Female Circulation”, p. 62.
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contemplates the murder case reported in Lloyd’s Weekly, Josie Breen’s husband with his muddy boots in bed “what a thing like that that might murder you any moment, what a man” (U 18.224) and eventually creates an erotic vision, which is surprisingly reminiscent of the Ripper case: “that blackguardlooking fellow with the fine eyes peeling a switch attack me in the dark and ride me up against the wall without a word or a murderer” (U 18.1417-19). The latter, however, happens in the realm of fantasy. Whereas Molly openly flirts with imaginative danger, the encounter with Dr Collins is characterised by an unacknowledged threat. Consequently, for Molly the many cases of violence directed against women serve as a displacement of the gynaecological examination’s latent menace. *
*
*
The second medical subtext in “Penelope” regards Molly’s dependence and fascination with patent medicine. No doubt, the suggestion to pair gynaecology and patent or domestic medicine in the analysis of Joyce’s episode might come as a bit of a surprise. Clearly, it must seem as if the two medical discourses represent fundamentally different aspects of the nineteenth-century preoccupation with medical philosophy. In fact, medical practitioners fought an unrelenting battle against the so-called “irregulars” that threatened to undermine their authority. Nonetheless, these two medical modes are unexpectedly linked by sharing the same starting point in midwifery and obstetrics. Obviously, obstetrical practice focused on the delivery of babies and the subsequent medical treatment of both mother and children. After 1800 male-midwives established a firm foothold in general medical practice. In other words, the obstetrician emerged as a general practitioner or family doctor. Nineteenth-century domestic medicine, on the other hand, had also identified the family unit as the prime target for their products. The title of Molly’s medical manual, The Family Physician, strikingly illustrates this. As a result, we can identify gynaecology as the official academic variety of its patent counterpart, domestic medicine. Joyce ingeniously uses the two complementary discourses as subtexts for the discussion of gender roles in “Penelope”. And since domestic medicine had a far wider reach than its academic sister discipline, it is not surprising that its impact on Molly’s thoughts by far exceeds that of official nineteenth-century gynaecology. As Stephen Dedalus accurately observes, Joyce’s characters live in “the age of patent medicines.” (U 15.4470-71) Given the omnipresence of patent medical ads at the turn of the twentieth century, it is not surprising that Bloom is intrigued by “The Wonderworker, the world’s greatest remedy for rectal complaints” (U 17.1819-20). Yet because they were regarded as more enthusiastic consumers than men, women formed the main audience for the patent medicine advertisement
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campaign. Consequently, fashion journals such as Molly’s Gentlewoman sprinkled their pages with countless patent ads. These generally promoted an image of beauty that was synonymous with vigorous health. An ad for Beecham’s Pills “Health Crowning Beauty”, published in The Gentlewoman on 19 July 1902, illustrates this new understanding of beauty. This image presents health and beauty as two classical maidens holding each other’s hands, and the already crowned “health” is offering a garland to the yet uncrowned “beauty”. The advert not only illustrates that health precedes beauty, but that it is also in the power of the woman who aims for good looks to achieve her goal. It is entirely her responsibility to attain the fitness and health promised here; in taking the patent pills offered. Molly is unquestionably susceptible to the seductions of patent medical advertising. When she worries that her “belly is a bit too big” (U 18.450), she recalls the advices in The Gentlewoman: “breathing exercises” (U 18.455) and “the antifat” (U 18.456). These methods masquerading as medical advice are far more attractive and preferable than the more obvious solution “to knock off the stout at dinner” (U 18.450). While thus promoting the woman’s agency in the administration of patent medicine, the adverts and medical textbooks simultaneously emphasised professional approval of the remedies offered and consumed. Accordingly, the full title of Molly’s Family Physician is A Manual of Domestic Medicine by Physicians and Surgeons of the Principal London Hospitals. Its cover illustration further emphasises the book’s medical authority. It is almost biblical in its appearance, and the publisher’s aim was certainly to sell the book as a medical bible. The abundance of medical icons on the book’s cover further illustrates that the manual stands in a long tradition of medical art. It suggests continuity from ancient Egypt via Greece and Rome. Thus, the book itself aspires to the status of medical authority: a medical authority that is absent and present at the same time. Although a direct confrontation with medical men is avoided, the reference to doctors, physicians, medical icons and symbols promises a successful and professional treatment of illnesses. The dawn of domestic medicine, emerging concurrently with the propagation of the gynaecologist’s damaged reputation, therefore promoted the creation of a medical empire for women more independent from their male medical advisors. It seems that by reading domestic medicine’s manuals women are able to replace the doctor as medical authority. Equipped with the knowledge provided by her handbook, she takes over his position and cures not just her own ailments but also those of other family members. Thanks to her new medical education, she is a second Florence Nightingale, able to perform the doctor’s duty. However, it is obvious that this image of the devoted, altruistic nurse reinforces reactionary gender politics. Women were admitted to medical knowledge, but their role remained that of a subaltern only replacing the
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doctor in his absence. They did not achieve the same knowledge and authority that studies and degree guaranteed him. Furthermore, this allegedly new role of the woman as medical administrator was, of course, never really a radical breakthrough. Evidently, women had since antiquity been responsible for the administration of their family’s health.17 But latenineteenth-century rhetoric recreated the image of the woman healer as progressive and signposted thus the dawn of modernity and its ostensibly shifting social roles. In spite of this reformist new undertone, women’s domain remained the house. Within its walls they were allowed to share the medical knowledge generally reserved for men – a suggestion underlined by the title of Molly’s medical manual, The Family Physician. Despite the prefix “modern” this new role shows the woman as far from being emancipated. Instead, the nurse image strengthened gender roles that gynaecological theories had resolutely established. Naturally, the woman’s role as nurse was accentuated when children were involved, especially at a time which was obsessed with public and national health. The Report of the Inter-Departmental Committee on Physical Deterioration in 1904 was the result of this growing English alarm at national degeneration. The major concern of the Committee was infant mortality, and it explained the increasing numbers by lack of maternal care.18 However, if maternal ignorance was one reason for the failing health of the nation’s offspring, neglected breastfeeding was the second explanation. Campaigns for children’s welfare followed, which tried to re-establish a domestic ideal with an improved form of motherhood at its centre. A Ladies’ National Association for the Diffusion of Sanitary Knowledge had already been established in 1857 and it extensively distributed guides such as Health of Mothers, How to Rear Healthy Children, How to Manage a Baby or The Evils of Wet-Nursing.19 This campaign was, of course, part of the nineteenthcentury preoccupation with public and preventive medicine. Yet in women’s cases, medical and social debates crucially interacted. Evidently, in the medical propaganda for public health the mother emerged as the pivot for domestic happiness and family welfare, as the incarnation of an idealised form of Victorian femininity and domesticity. Molly’s open rebellion against such “chaining up” (U 18.1391), as she calls it, lies in her sexual adventure that blatantly violates the image of domestic bliss and motherhood. However, even the subversive image of the adulteress becomes entangled with medical propaganda. When Molly 17. Joan Lane, A Social History of Medicine: Health, Healing and Disease in England, 1750-1950 (London: Routledge, 2001), p.2. 18. Report of the Inter-Departmental Committee on Physical Deterioration, Vol. 1: Report and Appendix (London: Wyman & Sons, 1904), p.55. 19. Titles taken from Roy Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity from Antiquity to the Present (London: Fontana, 1999), p.641.
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remembers Boylan caressing her breasts, she notices the unmistakable marks of his teeth (U 18.569). The sexual image is thus interlaced with that of the infant sucking its mother’s breast and this emphasises Molly’s opinion of male dependence on women: “they wouldn’t be in the world at all only for us they don’t know what it is to be a woman and a mother how could they where would they all of them be if they hadnt all a mother to look after them” (U 18.1439-42). Yet if Boylan has, through this comparison, regressed to a state of childish dependency, Molly also claims that she “had a great breast of milk with Milly enough for two” (U 18.570-72). Apparently, Bloom has even suggested that she should earn money as a wet nurse. With this emphasis on the biological function of Molly’s breasts, we are back in the realm of medically propagated motherhood. As we have seen, after the Committee for Physical Deterioration had expressed its concerns about infant feeding, mothers were encouraged to breast-feed. Accordingly, Molly’s Family Physician contains detailed instructions for wet nurses to achieve maximum success in breastfeeding. In an extraordinary passage the manual even suggests that “brunettes make better nurses and give better milk than blondes.”20 Molly’s thoughts are evidently influenced by this specific medical discourse. Even the thoughts of her adultery bring her back to the medically promoted role of the mother, creating a blend of incompatible selfrepresentations in her soliloquy. While she hovers between many potential parts: Bloom’s nurse, Milly’s confidante (U 18.1021) or the unbridled adulteress, Molly’s conflicting portrait distinctly emphasises the crux inherent in one of modernity’s most significant medical theories. Within its progress-orientated mission lies another message: the promotion of a reactionary image of femininity. Joyce uses an intriguing textual design to underline the efficacy of the argument developed in ‘Penelope’. It is worth remembering that Molly’s image is, until we hear her own voice at the end of Ulysses, thoroughly constructed by Joyce’s male characters. An imaginary reader of Joyce’s Ulysses encounters her only through the masculine and misogynist comments of characters such as Simon Dedalus in “Sirens” (U 11.496-97) or the Nameless One in “Cyclops” who calls her “the fat heap he [Bloom] married” (U 12.503). With the opening of the last episode of Ulysses things change abruptly. To be sure, Molly Bloom’s voice emerges at a very remarkable moment in Joyce’s work: long-expected like the star turn of a performance. Accordingly, it recalls and re-examines people and situations described throughout the text. For instance, Molly vividly recalls Simon Dedalus’s alcoholic affliction (U 18.1291). She reveals that Bloom is unaware of the secret of his bed (U 18.1212-14) and she even refutes his assumption that all her Spanish is 20. The Family Physician, p.2.
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forgotten (U 5.60-61 and U 18.1469-71). And it is not only the world of Ulysses that finds its way into Molly’s thoughts. Dante Riordan (U 18.4) is recalled and Kathleen Kearney (U 18.376) and Tom Kernan (U 18.1264) are only two of the Dubliners that reappear in Molly’s nocturnal thoughts. Molly’s is also the last voice an imaginary reader might hear before diving in to the world of fragmented identities and characters of Finnegans Wake. Taking the special situation and location of the “Penelope” episode into consideration, we can assume that it is a response, a response to the prescriptive and restrictive notions of women and their medically theorised bodies. Particularly evident is this in Molly’s representation as a cultural investigator and critic. Apart from her occasional urge for medical knowledge (U 18.180-81) she possesses all the diagnostic talent she would need to pose as a medical analyst. As we have seen, The Family Physician had underlined the doctor’s function as medical detective. Not surprisingly, Molly shows remarkable investigation skills when she tries to trace down Bloom’s love affairs or the remaining French letters in his pocket (U 18.1235). In “Nausicaa” Bloom also acknowledges her sharp eyes: “When I said to Molly the man at the corner of Cuffe street was goodlooking, thought she might like, twigged at once he had a false arm. Had, too.” (U 13.914-16) Molly’s soliloquy further shows that she is aware of medicine’s dominating influence in women’s lives. She confidently identifies the medical subtext dominating her environment and its gender roles. For example, her thoughts linger for a long time over male attitudes towards maladies. Bloom, if not a hypochondriac, is certainly not particularly good with pain or ill health. Molly remembers domestic dramas about bleeding noses (U 18.24) and Bloom’s fear of blood poisoning (U 18.31-32). According to Molly, he shares this attitude with the rest of his sex. All of them “are so weak and puling they want a woman to get well” (U 18.22-23). Men simulate or exaggerate pain and women attend to them. As Molly recalls, Bloom used a simulated illness to gain Dante Riordan’s attention (U 18.3-4) during their stay in the City Arms Hotel. Astutely observing this phenomenon, Molly identifies the sexual politics that dominate the behaviour on both sides: she remembers “Miss Stack bringing him flowers […] anything at all to get into a mans bedroom with her old maids voice trying to imagine he was dying on account of her” (U 18.26-29). Women respond to exaggerated illness with a mistaken sense of romance suggested by the nurse image. Molly, who is aware of the underlying sexual dynamics, outwardly fails to be romantic when considering Bloom’s illness, “if ever he got anything really serious the matter with him its much better for them to go into a hospital where everything is clean” (U 18.17-19). Yet evidently, Molly’s remark is not misanthropic. Instead it is a response to medicine’s sustained dominance in women’s lives. It is therefore noteworthy that the “he”,
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referring to Bloom, changes into “them” in the second half of Molly’s statement. Her comment is therefore not to be understood as a rejection of Bloom, but as a political observation on a universal game that defines gender roles. Following from this, Molly predictably admits that she is tired of the role of the nurse, “besides I hate bandaging and dosing” (U 18.31). No doubt, this weariness is also the motive for her unsentimental comments about Bloom’s potential terminal illness: “yes and then wed have a hospital nurse next thing on the carpet have him staying there till they throw him out” (U 18.20-21). A critical evaluation of idealised motherhood also finds its way into Molly’s thoughts. Although she is herself clearly influenced by medicine’s authority, Molly nevertheless rightly identifies Mina Purefoy as the model of domesticated womanhood: Mina Purefoys husband give us a swing out of your whiskers filling her up with a child or twins once a year as regular as the clock always with the smell of children off her […] the last time I was there a squad of them falling over one another and bawling you couldn’t hear your ears supposed to be healthy” (U 18.159-65).
We know for sure that it is Ruby: the Pride of the Ring that is lying on Molly’s bedside table. Otherwise I would suggest the presence of another text, a text Joyce was familiar with: Friedrich Engels’s The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. In this late work Engels argues that the “modern individual family is founded on the open or concealed domestic slavery of the wife and modern society is a mass composed of these individual families as its molecules.”21 Engels’s statement reappears in a tortuous version also in Molly’s soliloquy: “whoever suggested that business for women what between clothes and cooking and children” (U 18.1129-30). And as Engels identifies prostitution and the wife’s adultery as the two main social consequences of the modern monogamous and patriarchal family,22 both themes take up a prominent place in Molly’s thoughts. While she is reflecting on her sexual encounter with Boylan, she suspects Bloom’s and other husbands’ loitering about the red light district. Strikingly, however, we can see that the assumed role of the adulteress, which Molly appropriates to liberate herself from the monotonous existence of wife and mother, fails to meet the expectations. If, as Engels suggests, adultery is the product of the modern capitalist society, Molly’s affair with Boylan is in no way liberating. Instead it represents a confirmation of the society that produced the operating cultural and sexual politics. However, in commenting on the nature of men, women and the sexual and social dynamics between them, Molly exceeds the role allocated to her. She 21. Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1972), p.137. 22. Ibid., pp.131-34.
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confuses the gender roles suggested by modern medicine’s discourses and Joyce smuggles in a socialist cultural critique at the least expected place of his book. Molly even has a final prescription to offer: I don’t care what anyone says itd be much better for the world to be governed by the woman in it you wouldnt see women going and killing one another and slaughtering when do you ever see women rolling around drunk like they do or gambling every penny they have an losing it on horses yes because a woman whatever she does she knows where to stop (U 18.1434-39).
This is an ironic allusion, of course, since Molly has only on that day lost money on horses (U 18.423-27) and calls women “a dreadful lot of bitches” (U18.1459) at another moment. Finally, it should not be forgotten that her body remains a site of pleasure for Molly. Boylan is not the only one experiencing gratification from her. Molly’s comments display an evident autoerotic tendency. Her breasts excite her (U 18.1379) and she congratulates herself on the whiteness and smoothness of her “pair of thighs” (U 18.1144-45). So, whereas nineteenthcentury doctors suggested a pejorative interpretation of women’s physiology, Molly’s positive identification with her body and its functions reconsiders their notion of an innate female pathology. Although she is clearly troubled by the occurrence of what Maudsley calls the “tyranny of the organization”, “O Jamesy let me up out of this pooh” (U 18.1128-29), her affirmative reevaluation of the physical experience exhibits the incompleteness of medical constructions of womanhood. “Penelope” thus unmistakably demonstrates that Molly’s behaviour and comments are influenced by modern medical propaganda and its constructions of idealised femininity. At the turn of the twentieth century both nineteenth-century gynaecology and its non-academic sister discourse domestic medicine effectively controlled the interpretations of acceptable female social conduct. Their combined efforts thus created a significant cultural milieu that determinedly monitored women’s lives in a time when the suffragette movement was threatening to overthrow the social status quo. In Joyce’s text Molly’s miscellaneous and often contradictory images complicate notions of male and female discourses. Her representation is not just a collection of feminine identities. Instead, these feminine aspects are contrasted with Molly’s engagement in so-called male dominated discourses, especially that of the cultural critic that so conspicuously resembles the analytical work of the male medical practitioner. Joyce was clearly aware of the social and cultural consequences of medically propagated theories of women. These theories gave him the opportunity to build into the image of voluptuous femininity a more complex image of women. Evidently, Molly’s image points to and criticises the arbitrariness of culturally constructed
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concepts of women and gender and effectively identifies medicine’s scientific evaluation of women as a fictional interpretation of the social context. University of York
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“INDIFFERENT WEIB”: GIORDANO BRUNO AND THE HERETICAL MODE OF VISION IN “PENELOPE” GARETH JOSEPH DOWNES
Abstract: This paper suggests that Joyce wove the ontological immanentism of Giordano Bruno’s thought into the text of Ulysses, specifically from Bruno’s Cause, Principle and Unity. It explores the extent to which his engagement with the Brunonian doctrine of the coincidence of contraries influenced the composition of “Penelope” as a text in which the scholastic principles of form and matter are destabilised. It argues that Joyce’s “indifferent Weib” (LI 170) is constructed as a conscious and deliberate challenge to the ontological proscriptions of contemporary Ultramontane Catholicism and neo-scholasticism, particularly in the episode’s subversion of patriarchal and proprietal conceptions of the feminine.
Bruno, Giordano, Opera omnia. Decr. S. Offi. 8. Febr. 1600. Index Librorum Prohibitorum (Vatican: Polyglottus, 1940).
In an interview with James Knowlson in 1989, Samuel Beckett told him that the only comment that Joyce ever made on ‘Dante…Bruno.Vico...Joyce’, was that, although he liked the essay, he thought there “wasn’t enough about
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Bruno; he found Bruno rather neglected.”1 To a large extent Joyce’s comments are justified and instructive. Beckett’s appraisal of Bruno and the significance of the doctrine of the coincidence of contraries in the Wake is relatively telegraphic, when compared to his more expansive accounts of the importance of Dante’s “system of poetics” and the Viconian theory of the “inevitably of cyclical evolution”.2 Of the recent critical consensus about Joyce’s appropriation of the coincidence of contraries, Theoharis Constantine Theoharis wryly observed in 1988: “Scholars have noticed this conception so often and so casually that it has become one of the clichés of Joyce criticism (especially criticism of Finnegans Wake). Like all clichés this one is true, but rarely understood or spoken of with penetrating or precise intentions.”3 Along with Jean-Michel Rabaté’s agile treatment of Joyce’s dialogue with the Nolan in Joyce Upon the Void,4 the most significant and seminal research on Joyce’s encounter with Bruno has been undertaken by Sheldon Brivic, Elliot B. Gose, Robert D. Newman, and Theoharis himself: that is, scholars who are primarily concerned with ascertaining the significant of Brunonian traces and allusions in Ulysses, and not the Wake.5 However, the approach of these studies is not complemented by much extended historicist scrutiny or refinement. Joyce did not encounter Bruno in a vacuum and, it can be argued, any study of the function or presence of philosophical, mystical, patristic or theosophical systems or elements in the Joycean text should be read in the context of his determination to effect a sundering with the Roman 1. James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London: Bloomsbury, 1997), p. 100. 2. Samuel Beckett, “Dante…Bruno.Vico..Joyce”, Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress, Samuel Beckett et al (London: Faber and Faber, 1972), p. 3. The observation that Beckett’s appraisal of Bruno in this essay is a relatively concise one, and disproportionately small in comparison with his more expansive treatments of Dante and Vico, has also been made by John Pilling. See John Pilling, Beckett before Godot (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 17. 3. Theoharis Constantine Theoharis, Joyce’s “Ulysses”: An Anatomy of the Soul (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), pp. 40-41. 4. See Jean-Michel Rabaté, Joyce Upon the Void: The Genesis of Doubt (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1991). 5. See Sheldon Brivic, Joyce the Creator (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985); Elliot B. Gose ‘The Coincidence of Contraries as Theme and Technique in Ulysses’, in Robert D. Newman and Weldon Thornton (eds), Joyce’s “Ulysses”: The Larger Perspective (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1987), and The Transformation Process in James Joyce’s “Ulysses” (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1980); Robert D. Newman, “Bloom and the Beast: Joyce’s Use of Bruno’s Astrological Allegory”, in Bonnie Kime Scott (ed), New Alliances in Joyce Studies: “When it’s Aped to Foul a Delfian” (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1988).
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Catholic Church of his upbringing and education. Although Joyce was an apostate who left the Church in his mid-teens, “hating it most fervently” (L II 48), he possessed a perversely intimate knowledge of its spiritual and intellectual traditions. Like Bruno, he was a “deviant insider,”6 who evinced anti-clericalist opposition to the political and social influence of the Church, and who was unable to give his rational assent to the scholastic system that was the theologico-philosophical basis of its apologetic. Bruno was and remains an anathema for orthodox Catholicism; he was “one of the atheistic writers whom the papal secretary puts on the Index.”7 (SH 46) It is relatively well known that he covertly employed the heretical auctoritas of the Nolan in his early writings, as he began to enunciate his “open war” (L II 48) against the Church, and that he began slowly to incorporate aspects of Bruno’s philosophy, specifically the doctrine of the coincidence of contraries, into his own writings during the composition of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. However, the supersaturation of the Joycean text with the Catholicism in which he famously avowed his misbelief arguably obscures the subversive and heretical nature of his discursive engagement with Bruno’s pantheistic philosophy, particularly for secular or non-Catholic critics, or, indeed, the critic of a Catholic upbringing and education born in the period after the reforms of the Second Vatican Council. Therefore, a sustained historicist appraisal of Joyce’s reading of Bruno is, perhaps, the most efficacious means of effecting an examination of the apostate Irishman’s complex dialogue with the Church. Pascendi dominici gregis and Roman Catholic Modernism. A fervid intellectual climate prevailed within Catholicism during the latenineteenth and early-twentieth centuries with the triumph of Ultramontanism, the neo-scholastic revival and the condemnation and suppression of Roman Catholic theological modernism, defined in 1907 as the “synthesis of all heresies”8 with the promulgation of the encyclical Pascendi dominici gregis. An awareness of the status of the immanentism of Roman Catholic theological modernism for Ultramontane Catholicism provides a useful 6. Lester R. Kurtz, The Politics of Heresy: The Modernist Crisis in Roman Catholicism (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986), p. 2. This phrase is an extremely useful means of describing the ambiguous relationship that exists between those men and women who adopt a discursive position that is at odds with the broader religious communion of which they are apart, and helps qualify the tension between individual subversion and institutional containment. 7. James Joyce, Stephen Hero, ed. Theodore Spence, rev. eds. John J. Slocum and Herbert Cahoon (London: Paladin, 1991), p. 46. Hereafter SH. 8. Politics of Heresy, p. 7.
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context in which to assess the heretical nature of Joyce’s engagement with Bruno. In a letter that he wrote to Stanislaus in August 1906, Joyce states: “For my part I believe that to establish the church in full power again in Europe would mean a renewal of the Inquisition — though, of course, the Jesuits tell us that the Dominicans never broke men on the wheel or tortured them on the rack.” (L II 148) Although the Church no longer handed over its “deviant insiders” to the secular arm to suffer the ultimate censure, during the period in which Joyce was born, educated and grew to maturity, the Church, feeling itself increasingly under threat from the anticlericalist and materialist cultural condition of modernity (“the wolves of disbelief” (SH 58)), cultivated an atmosphere of institutional and philosophical medievalism, and prosecuted any departure from a narrowly defined orthodoxy with force majeure. The Index of Prohibited Books was re-established in September 1900,9 and Roman Catholic modernist theologians, such as the Dublin-born Jesuit George Tyrrell, were excommunicated as obstinate and unrepentant heretics. In 1864 Pius IX had published a “Syllabus of Errors” with the encyclical Quanto cura, which was a categorical denunciation of the “principle errors of our times”, and rejected the proposition that the “Roman pontiff can and should reconcile and adapt itself to progress, liberalism and modern civilization.”10 The infallibility of the Pontiff on matters of faith and doctrine was declared a dogma of the Catholic Church during the First Vatican Council, with the promulgation of the encyclical Pastor aeternus in 1870, and this gradual limitation of the power to define orthodoxy to the office of the Pope, and the ecumenical council he convened, produced an intellectual climate that was increasingly absolutist and intolerant of any discursive attempts to stray beyond the narrowly defined boundaries. Joyce was by no means indifferent to the counter-revolution that was taking placing in Catholic doctrine and theology at this time. During his sojourn in Rome in 1906, he spent some time in the Biblioteca Vittorio Emanuele. He undertook some research on the events of the First Vatican Council, and paid particular attention to the circumstances of the promulgation of Pasto aeternus. In a letter to Stanislaus on 13 November 1906, Joyce wrote: “I was today in the Biblioteca Vittoria Emanuele, 9. The new Index was re-established on 17 September 1900 by Leo XIII. See J. N. Kelly, The Oxford Dictionary of Popes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 312. 10. Pius IX, “The Syllabus of the Principle Errors of our Times”, H. Denzinger and A. Schönmetzer (eds), Enchiridion Symbolorum Definitiorum et Declarationem de Rebus Fidei et Morum, 34th edn. (Freiburg, 1967), p. 2980; cited in Nicholas Sagovsky, “On God’s Side”: A Life of George Tyrrell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), p. 59.
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looking up the account of the Vatican Council of 1870. Before the final proclamation many of the clerics left Rome in protest. At the proclamation when the dogma was read out the Pope said ‘Is that all right, gents?’ All the gents said ‘Placet’ but two said ‘Non placet’. But the Pope ‘You be dammed! Kissmearse! I’m infallible.’” (L II 192) Under the pontificates of Pius IX, and his successors Leo XIII, and Pius X, there was “a skilfully organised retreat from the jungle of postEnlightenment ideas into the hortus conclusus of an artificially constructed theology.”11 Integral to this retreat was the revival of scholasticism, and in 1879, with the issuing of the encyclical Aeterni patris, Leo XIII made Thomistic neo-scholasticism mandatory for the entire Church. However, this “facile scholasticism”12 was Aquinas simpliciter and many modernist Catholic scholars and writers, both lay and clerical, believing such an apologetic incapable of making Catholicism a possibility for contemporary culture, found themselves numbered among the “partisans of error”13 and anathematised accordingly. The truth of divine revelation was, and is, an a priori of traditional Catholic faith and Catholicism involved the rational assent to a dogmatic and extrinsic system of belief. In Stephen Dedalus’s phrase, Catholicism was a religion that was “logical and coherent.”14 As Lester R. Kurtz has argued in The Politics of Heresy, in such an extrinsic theologico-philosophical system, “faith is imposed on the passive believer authoritatively from the outside.”15 For such French modernists as Maurice Blondel, a lay religious philosopher of the Sorbonne, the arid rationalism of neo-scholasticism was an exercise in “ideological reiteration”16 and unacceptable for contemporary philosophy, since, as he argues in The Letter on Apologetics: “philosophy considers the supernatural only in so far as the idea of it is immanent in us”.17 He attempted to develop a “New Apologetic”18 that would be capable of 11. Gabriel Daly, Transcendence and Immanence: A Study in Catholic Modernism and Integralism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), p. 189. 12. Terence Brown, Ireland: A Social and Cultural History, 1922-1985 (London: Fontana, 1981), p. 30. 13. Pius X, Pascendi dominici gregis, in Roman Catholic Modernism, ed. Bernard M. G. Reardon (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1970), p. 237. 14. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ed. Seamus Deane (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992), p. 265. Hereafter P. 15. The Politics of Heresy, p. 72. 16. Transcendence and Immanence, p. 107. 17. Maurice Blondel, The Letter on Apologetics and History and Dogma, trans. Alexander Dru and Illtyd Trethowan (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1994), p. 198. 18. A.Leslie Lilley, Modernism: A Record and Review (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1908), p. 95.
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reconciling the problematic relationship between “nature” and “supernature”: between an historically situated humanity and a transcendent personal divinity. He argued that knowledge of the divine could be discovered from a study of human consciousness. Although he did not suggest that the divine was immanent in nature like Bruno, he did belief that “transcendent Being is immanent in every form of human experience”.19 He stated that there is a determinist feature of human existence. In the consciousness of all individual subjects there is an exigence, a need for self-transcendence. The “determinism consists in having to make a choice,” and the “refusal to choose is itself a choice.”20 What distinguishes Blondel’s apologetic immanentism from atheistic existentialism is the belief that this “determinism leads ultimately to God.”21 As Bernard M. G. Reardon has noted in Roman Catholic Modernism, “Blondel’s whole argument is that at the deepest level of his being, man longs for something ‘uniquely necessary’ (l’unique nécessaire) which at the same time remains inaccessible to his own striving.”22 Blondel argues that the immanent experience of exigence is an instance of human participation in the divine. Thus, through the recognition of the transformative processes of human life in which human action, the continuous exercise of free will, is conceived as a participant in the divine, God is encountered as both an immanent and a transcendent reality. Although the Holy Office was inclined to depict the modernists as “partisans of error” who had leagued themselves with the “enemies of the Church”,23 they were essentially pious and conservative reformers who sought to make Catholicism a possibility for modernity, and they were not wilful and deviant schismatics. Nevertheless, when the “draughtsmen of Pascendi sought an underlying philosophy for the mortal threat which they saw facing the Church”24 the “method of immanence” was singled out. Pascendi dominici gregis is an intemperate document, and its treatment of philosophical modernism, and its authors, is damning. The encyclical condemns the basic errors of modernism, and argues that the religious philosophy of modernism is placed on the foundation of “Agnosticism”25 and “vital immanence”.26 Pascendi accuses the modernists of positing an agnostic philosophy that limits the entirety of human knowledge and aspiration “within the field of phenomena”, thus excluding “God and all that 19. Roman Catholic Modernism, p. 54. 20. Transcendence and Immanence, p. 34. 21. Ibid., p. 34. 22. Roman Catholic Modernism, p. 53. 23. Pius X, Pascendi dominic gregis, in Roman Catholic Modernism, p. 238. 24. Transcendence and Immanence, p. 52. 25. Pius X, Pascendi dominici gregis, in Roman Catholic Modernism, p. 238. 26. Ibid., p. 239.
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is Divine”.27 Apologetic immanence is attacked for destroying “natural theology” (scholasticism) and for rejecting “all external revelation”;28 and the “method of immanence”, in its attempt to demonstrate the immanent exigence for the divine in the human mind, is denounced as a “great sacrilege.”29 Although Blondel was not excommucicated as a heretic, like Tyrrell, he was forced to recant. The Immanentism of Cause, Principle and Unity and “Penelope” After his death at the hands of the Roman Inquisition at the Campo dei Fiori in Rome in February 1600, Bruno became an anathema, and his name was not to be uttered, or even acknowledged. His books were burned publicly; and were placed on the Index, where, “They were classed with other dangerous works on the black arts.”30 Although Cause, Principle and Unity is not the most notorious of the Nolan’s “Indexed” writings, it is the text in which Bruno posits and expounds his theory of ontological immanence. Published secretly in London in 1584, Cause, Principle and Unity continues and expands the argument of another Italian dialogue published previously that year, The Ash Wednesday Supper. In The Ash Wednesday Supper Bruno celebrated the Copernican cosmological system as a prophetic symbol of the imminent overthrow of the “blind”31 PtolemaicAristotelian conception of the universe. Where Copernicus’s heliocentric system was based on mathematical calculation, Bruno’s cosmology was intuitively conceived. For Bruno, Copernicus’s theory of a finite and heliocentric universe was a precursor to the revolutionary realisation of a belief in an infinite universe of infinite worlds in which the divine was immanent in nature. The geocentric cosmological model was an hierarchical system that the Church employed to delineate the dogmatic definition of the relationship between historically situated humanity and a transcendent God, “nature” and “supernature”, and to legitimate ecclesiastical authority. In rejecting this geocentric system and repudiating what Joyce calls the “mechanical heaven” that the priest “dangles […] before the public” (SH 91), 27. Ibid., p. 238. 28.Ibid., p. 239. 29. Ibid., p. 240. 30. Giordano Bruno p. 97. McIntyre asserts that Bruno’s works were placed on the Index some three years after his death, on August 7, 1603 (p. 97). However, the 1940 edition of the Index states that Bruno’s works were, in George Tyrell’s phrase, “Indexed” on 8 February, 1600. See Index Librorum Prohibitorum, p. 66. 31. Giordano Bruno, The Ash Wednesday Supper, trans. Edward A. Gosselin and Lawrence S. Lerner (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, in association with the Renaissance Society of America, 1995), p. 87.
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Bruno was challenging both the authority of the Church, and its ontological proscriptions about the nature of reality. In scholastic cosmology God is a transcendent cause extrinsic to a fallen sublunary world. Humanity is born with the stain of original sin and trapped in an imperfect sphere of generation, decay, and corruption. As Molly reflects in “Penelope”, temporal existence is viewed by orthodox Christianity as a “vale of tears”.32 In the patriarchal tradition of Christian theology and metaphysics it is Eve who is held responsible for the stain of original sin, and humanity’s exile from a perfect union with God. In “Nestor” Deasy, the misogynistic and ant-Semitic Orangeman, declares to Stephen: A woman brought sin into the world. For a woman who was no better than she should be, Helen the runaway wife of Menelaus, ten years the Greeks made war on Troy. A faithless wife first brought the strangers to our shore here, MacMurrough’s wife and leman, O’Rourke, prince of Breffni. A woman too brought Parnell low. Many errors, many failures but the one sin. (U 2.389-95) Thus the feminine is made consonant with the corporeal world of generation, decay and corruption, and is regarded as synonymous with the existence of sin and imperfection. Bruno regarded this redaction of existence as a cruel illusion, and in his heretical immanentist philosophy he sought to reconcile humanity with the “divine law which governs nature” and free it from the “fear of imaginary divinities, cruel and unfathomable, who look down from the heavenly heights, controlling the sublunary world in a mysterious way.”33 In The Ash Wednesday Supper, the Nolan is praised by Teofilo as the philosopher who has “passed beyond the borders of the world, [who has] effaced the imaginary walls of the first, eighth, tenth spheres”; “by the light of his senses and reason”, he has “laid bare covered and veiled nature” and opened “our eyes to see [truly] this deity, this our mother [the earth] who feeds and nourishes us on her back.”34 As Robert de Lucca has argued in the introduction to his translation of Cause, Principle and Unity, Bruno was “aware of the fact that the fall of Aristotelian cosmology implies the end of traditional metaphysics”,35 and it is in this dialogue that he “sought to re-vivify terrestrial physics and metaphysics on the basis of a principle of becoming.”36 In this respect, 32. James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. Hans Walter Gabler (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), 18. 1517-18. Hereafter U. 33. Lucca, “Introduction’, Giordano Bruno, Cause, Principle and Unity and Other Essays on Magic, trans. Robert de Lucca and Richard J. Blackwell, ed. Alfonso Ingegno (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. x. 34. Bruno, The Ash Wednesday Supper, p. 110. 35. Lucca, “Introduction”, Cause, Principle and Unity, p. x. 36. Ibid., p. vii.
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Bruno’s cosmology was thus to “assume a radically anti-Christian character.”37 Cause, Principle and Unity is comprised of five dialogues. While the first dialogue is an apology for the abuse Bruno had heaped on the grammarians of Oxford University in The Ash Wednesday Supper, the remaining four dialogues are entirely concerned with an exposition of the Nolan’s immanentist ontology, and the doctrine of the coincidence of contraries, by Teofilo to three interlocutors: Dicsono, Gervasio and Poliinnio. The second dialogue is concerned with the nature of the divine. Although human reason is finite and cannot truly countenance the reality and truth of an infinite divinity, the “effects of the divine operation”38 can be discerned in the processes of the material universe. The universe is the simulacrum of the divine. Through the modality of the “world soul”39 the divine produces and constitutes all things in nature as both extrinsic and intrinsic cause. In the Third and Fourth dialogues Teofilo is solely concerned with the immanence of the divine in nature. According to Aristotelian and scholastic philosophy, form is defined as the essential determinant principle of a thing which transforms something (matter) into a determinate species or kind of things; and matter is defined as the component of a thing which has bare existence but requires an essential determinant (form) to make it a thing of a determinate kind. For traditional scholastic metaphysics, matter is the chaotic substratum of all existence, and is consonant with the feminine. However, in Cause, Principle and Unity Bruno overthrows the hierarchical relationship between form and matter. As Paul Henry Michel has observed in The Cosmology of Giordano Bruno, in Cause, Principle and Unity the “formal and material” principles are understood to issue “from the prime Unity; […] Both are divine in the sense that they proceed directly and necessarily from the divinity. They are infinite for the same reason.”40 In this profound respect, “Matter is no longer the final term in degradation. Matter proceeds from God, without an intermediary, for the same reason as form.”41 Matter, along with God and the Soul, is one of the “three indestructible minima to which everything is finally reduced and which ensures the everlastingness of the universe.”42 In the Nolan philosophy the contrary principles of form and matter are reconciled: the formal principle is immanent in the material principle. All contraries are reconciled in an infinite universe and, as Teofilo argues, “since in it everything is indifferent, 37. Ibid., p. vii. 38. Ibid., p. 35. 39. Ibid., p. 39. 40. Paul Henry Michel, The Cosmology of Giordano Bruno, trans. R. E. W. Maddison (London: Methuen, 1973), p. 108. 41. Ibid., p. 87. 42. Ibid., p. 126.
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it is one; and since it possesses all the greatness and perfection that can possibly be possessed, beyond all limit, it is the maximum and supreme immensity.”43 The doctrine of the coincidence of contraries is thus an axiomatic principle of a pantheistic conception of the universe that has no need of a transcendent and personal God. In the opening discussion of the Fourth Dialogue, Poliinnio, an Aristotelian and grammarian and an ardent opponent of the Bruno philosophy, enunciates a tirade against both matter and the feminine. The following passages are quoted at some length, as, I would suggest, the way in which Poliinnio denigrates matter and the feminine has a significant bearing on the composition of “Penelope” and the manner in which the feminine is presented and privileged in this episode. Like Deasy in “Nestor”, Poliinnio slanders women as the source of all imperfection and corruption: POLIINNIO. […] it is not without good reason that the senators of Pallas’ realm have judged it well to set matter and woman side by side, for they have been pushed to extremes of rage and frenzy by their dealings with the rigours of women — but just now an apt rhetorical flourish comes to mind. Women are a chaos of irrationality, a hyle [wood] of wickedness, a forest of ribaldry, a mass of uncleanliness, an inclination to every perdition […] Whence existed in potency, non solum remota [not only remote], but etiam propinqua [also proximate], the destruction of Troy? In a woman. […] O ancient forefather, first-made man, gardener of Paradise and cultivator of the Tree of Life, for what malice were you victim, to have been propelled with the entire race into the bottomless gulf of perdition? ‘Mulier quam dedisti mihi, ipsa me decpit’ [‘The woman that you gave me, it is she, she who deceived me’]. Procul dubio [Without doubt], form does not sin, and no form is a source of error unless it is joined to matter. That is why form, symbolized by the man, entering into intimate contact with matter, being composed or coupling with it, responds to the natura naturans with these words, or rather this sentence: ‘Mulier quam dedisti mihi’, idest, matter which was given me as consort, ipse me decepit; hoc est, she is the cause of all my sins. Behold, behold, divine spirit, how the great practitioners of philosophy and the acute anatomists of nature’s entrails, in order to show us nature plainly, have found no more appropriate way than to confront us with this analogy, which shows us that matter is to the order of natural things what the female sex is to economical, political and civil order.44 After a brief interruption, he continues his misogynistic tirade: 43. Cause, Principle and Unity, p. 89. 44. Ibid., p. 71.
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POLIINNIO. As I was in my little interior temple of the Muses, in eum, qui apud Aristotelem est, locum incidi [I fell upon this passage in Aristotle], in the first book of the Physics, at the end, where the philosopher, wishing to elucidate what primary matter is, compares it to the female sex — that sex, I mean, which is intractable, frail, capricious, cowardly, feeble, vile, ignoble, base, despicable, slovenly, unworthy, deceitful, harmful, abusive, cold, misshapen, barren, vain, confused, senseless, treacherous, lazy, fetid, foul, ungrateful, truncated, mutilated, imperfect, unfinished, deficient, insolent, amputated, diminished, stale, vermin, tares, plague, sickness, death[.]45 In the letter that Joyce wrote to Bugden in August 1921 he describes the “Penelope” episode as follows: There are eight sentences in the episode. It begins and ends with the female word Yes. It turns like the huge earthball slowly surely and evenly round and round spinning. Its four cardinal points being the female breasts, arse, womb and cunt expressed by the words because, bottom (in all senses, bottom button, bottom of the glass, bottom of the sea, bottom of the heart) woman, yes. Though probably more obscene than any preceding episode it seems to me to be perfectly sane full amoral fertilisable untrustworthy engaging shrewd limited prudent indifferent Weib. Ich bin das Fleisch das stets bejaht. (L I 170) Joyce’s description of “Penelope” as a “perfectly sane full amoral fertilisable untrustworthy engaging shrewd limited indifferent Weib” is certainly comparable to the catalogue of the negative attributes that Poliinnio ascribes to the feminine. However, it can be suggested that “Penelope”, in its conscious construction as a feminine text that directly responds to the traduction of women and the feminine in scholasticism, constitutes not only a refusal of the patriarchal and proprietal claims of that discourse, but also its ontological proscriptions. In the final sentence of “Penelope” Molly vows that she will “do the indifferent” (U 18.1529) with Bloom. Indeed the whole episode may be seen as “indifferent” inasmuch as it may be thought an undifferentiated textual space in which the female body and its desire are continuously foregrounded, and in which, in her ruminations, Molly passes “from contraries, through contraries, into contraries, to contraries.”46 As her reveries flit between her life with Bloom, her adulterous relationship with Boylan, the faults of other women, the restricted nature of women’s fashion, the inadequacies of the 45. Ibid., p. 72. 46. Giordano Bruno, The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast, trans. Arthur D. Imerti (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), p. 91.
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Irish cultural revival, her youth in Gibraltar, the lovers she has had, her father, her period, and the deprivations of engine drivers and their families, she registers a despair and frustration with partriarchal society and politics that challenges Poliinnio’s slanderous belief in the detrimental influence of the “female sex” towards “economical, political and civil order.” Although her assertion that “itd be much better for the world to be governed by the women in it” (U 18.1434-35) is usurped somewhat by a later lament about the spitefulness of women, she condemns the lies of men, their drunkenness and profligacy, and propensity for a form of politics resultant in war and destruction; and she expresses resentment towards the powerful and proprietal nature of the medical profession and the Catholic confessional. Hers is a carnivalesque discourse in which mind and body, form and matter, and the spiritual and the corporeal are synthesised as coincident principles, and in which the authority of patriarchy is destabilised and subverted. For Molly, the multiform world is not merely a sublunary sphere of generation, decay, and corruption, and her exultant paeans to the multiform things of the material universe (“God of heaven theres nothing like nature” (U 18.1557-58)) are suggestive of a thoroughly immanentist mode of vision. Although Pascendi dominici gregis condemned the limitation of the entirety of human knowledge and aspiration “within the field of phenomena”, Molly’s habitual appeal to the divine name (“God sweet God” (U 18.1104)) and her exultations to the infinite plenitude of the physical world (“nature it is” (U 18.1763)) occur in a subversive textual space in which the materiality of being is continuously affirmed. “Penelope” is the “flesh that always affirms,” and in it the material principle of reality is “no longer the final term in degradation.” I would like to suggest that the privileging of such a conception of being in “Penelope” is redolent of the ontological immanentism of Giordano Bruno. At a time when an Ultramontane Vatican had re-established the scholasticism of the late Middle Ages as the touchstone of orthodoxy and was vigorously prosecuting any departure from that orthodoxy with force majeure, the episode provides a significant indication of the distance Joyce had travelled in his “open war” with the Church. As the anathematised Irish Jesuit George Tyrrell wrote in Letters from a Modernist, “A heresy is only a rejected variation; but the principle of heresy is a principle of progress and life.” 47 Downside School
47. George Tyrrell, Letters from a “Modernist”: The Letters of George Tyrrell to Wilfrid Ward, 1893-1908, ed. Mary Jo Weaver (Shepherdstown, W. Va., and London: Patmos Press and Sheed and Ward, 1981), p. 67.
FROM THE CONFESSIONAL HOLE TO THE TECHNO-EROTIC: “PENELOPE” AND FINNEGANS WAKE ANDREW NORRIS Abstract: It is argued in this essay that Molly’s body is balanced between the retention and release of its flows, an economy which is similar to that of the confessional. Bloom’s attempt to resist or to control such flows is contrasted with the permeability or “holey-ness” of Molly’s body, which is encapsulated in the prominently repeatedly “O”s of her monologue. This aspect of “Penelope” and its transition into Finnegans Wake is explored through what is seen as a biotechnological revolution traversing contemporary art and literature: a tendency exemplified by the contrasting images of bodily self-enclosure and permeability in Heli Rekula’s “Hyperventilation”, the Chapman Brothers and J.G. Ballard’s novel Crash. The life of the body in “Penelope” is that of a vessel which must be regularly filled and emptied. The alternation of taking in and letting out is the rhythm of life itself, with death figured as a final satiation or evacuation. Molly’s monologue can be seen as an attempt to maintain this balance, to live in short; as the psychic necessity underpinning the physical acts is reformulated in a set of rhetorical strategies which strain against themselves, keeping up a tonic tension between bodily confession and secular resistance. To confess is to put one’s faith in a higher authority, to acknowledge one’s weakness before another and thus to effect a subtle shift of responsibility by allowing the fault to flow out from one limited and fallible system into another more organised and comprehensive one. “The sentimentalist” as Stephen’s telegram to Mulligan reminds us, via a quotation from George Meredith, “is he who would enjoy without incurring the immense debtorship for a thing done”, (U 9.551-2) and the penitent performs a similar trick, cancelling the debt of transgression through an act of submission which automatically restores his or her credit-worthiness. Confession is a neat way of balancing the psycho-sexual books, and Molly can pour out her adulterous afternoon while refilling herself with memories of Bloom’s proposal on Howth Head,
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the erotic highpoint of her romantic career; which in turn won’t stop her from counting off the days until Monday and her next dose of Boylan.1 The refusal to confess, on the other hand, may be taken as an act of secular resistance, a statement of physical independence and embodied scepticism, an assumption of total responsibility for one's body and its acts. In its heroic dimension, it is a materialist acceptance of death. This refusal, however, is difficult to separate from a simple failure to confess, and the materialist hero seen from another angle becomes the sentimentalist who has declined into melancholy, whose sense of his physical being is dominated by guilt and frustration, a faithless subject tormented by the need to confess. Bloom, I would suggest, spends his Ulysses day anxiously hesitating between these modes of resistance and despair, exercising a controlled release of his physicality through defecation, masturbation and a calm consideration of sex and death, while labouring to subdue his unconscious, which threatens at any moment to take possession of his orifices and confess him thoroughly. In “Calypso” Bloom carefully releases his load while taking in just enough text to maintain a living equilibrium: Quietly he read, restraining himself, the first column and, yielding but resisting, began the second. Midway, his last resistance yielding, he allowed his bowels to ease themselves quietly as he read, reading still patiently that slight constipation of yesterday quite gone. (U 4. 506-10) The absence of a comma after “patiently” helps us to appreciate the smoothness of the operation as the counterbalancing of text and shit accomplishes itself in a single movement without pause or punctuation. In Finnegans Wake this regulated economy of in and out is no longer imaginable, as the subject is confessed through every kind of orifice, physical, psychic, stylistic. Bloom’s moment of mastery behind the “crazy door of the jakes” is flushed down the pan and out into the “riverrun” by Joyce’s extraordinary shift of scriptural mode. If Molly drains her body’s vessel to the dregs, all the quicker to refill it, Bloom is a prudent topper-upper, who strives to keep his vessel at as constant a level as possible. The filling and emptying of Molly’s body is the greatest threat to his own equilibrium, as his psyche must negotiate the twin traumas of the loss of Rudy (synonymous with an emptying of Molly’s body through birth and the subsequent closing off of intimacy between them) and the gain of Boylan (who will fill Molly with his penis and, much more drastically, his sperm, threatening to erase the imprint of Bloom’s sex with his own genetic code, usurping the memory of Rudy with a new and foreign plenitude). 1. The eroticism of ALP’s confession in Book IV of Finnegans Wake, is, by contrast, sacrificial and messianic (as required by the estuarine logic of the final monologue); she pours into her father-husband and dies at his re-awakening while recounting their sexual exploits together.
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Bloom carries his brimming vessel through the streets of Dublin adjusting to every jolt, spilling a drop here and topping up there. His exhausted return to the marriage bed is a complicated compromise typical of his day, as he restores the marital balance not through physical repossession of his wife but through the displacement ritual of kissing her bottom. This asymptotic realignment of mouth and arsehole marks the interchangeability of physical appetites in Joyce’s account of the body, where sexual intercourse and the digestive process, from eating to shitting, are all but indissoluble, linked by the common dialectics of voiding and replenishment.2 Bloom’s secularity is inspired both by his fear of confession and its inevitable exposures, and his refusal of the degradations of faith which he sees personified in the maudlin, alcoholic degeneracy of his fellow citizens, filling and emptying themselves incontinently in the pubs and eating houses of Dublin. He is, in relation to his body and the world, both hero and anti-hero, a balanced individual. Balanced, but celibate; and if we translate the sexual malfunction of the married couple into the terminology of eating disorders, we might find that Bloom has an anorexic tendency while Molly is frankly bulimic. Bloom’s physical secularity is circular in fact, his body fills and empties itself in isolation from other bodies, it is in danger of becoming a closed system. It prefers to eat in isolation, consuming the kidney in the company of the cat and fleeing the cannibalistic crush of the Burton for the relative privacy of Davy Byrne’s, where disgust can be homoeopathically relished and washed down with a civilised burgundy. Greedy eating, like heavy drinking, implies a faith in something beyond the body material, something to which the body can be delivered up after its final excess. Bloom’s moderation implies a respect for the body’s limits and limitations, his social reserve is partly an extension of his embodied scepticism. How ironic, then, that it should be interpreted by his more bigoted fellow citizens as a sign of spiritual arrogance traceable to his Jewish antecedents. Molly, by contrast is a communal eater, relishing with Boylan the port and potted meat, the “fine salty taste” (U 18.132) of which connects the food with the sex she has just enjoyed, while she remembers a compulsion to leave something on her plate while dining under the lascivious eye of Val Dillon, as if reserving a place for him alongside the chicken dinner, the dessert and the nuts decomposing inside her. The ultimate communality of sex and food, which Molly’s monologue spirals back to, is, of course, the seedcake episode, which consecrates her first-last “yes”; and if this encounter might recall Brancusi’s famous sculpture “The Kiss” (1916), where the two bodies are carved from a single block of stone, which emphasises the perfect 2. A dialectic which seems to structure the love-making of the Mastianskys, as recounted by Molly: “better for him put it into me from behind the way Mrs Mastiansky told me her husband made her like the dogs do it and stick out her tongue as far as ever she could” (U 18.417)
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complementarity of the embrace, Bloom’s circular predicament might be illustrated by a more contemporary piece of visual art, a photograph by the Finnish artist Heli Rekula. In “Hyperventilation” from 1992, the squatting Rekula is naked except for a gas mask which is connected by two tubes to her vagina and anus.3 As the title implies, this is an extreme image of the secular somatic, where the refusal or inability to confess is a form of suicide, since the body will eventually poison itself with its own excreta. While hardly an image of Bloom, “Hyperventilation” stands as a visual antithesis of the seedcake exchange through which Ulysses comes to a climax, and one way of representing the most radical consequences of social anorexia, where the body is left, quite literally, to its own devices. “O” is for “orifice”, and the numerous “O”s in Molly’s monologue and elsewhere in Ulysses work as an interface between the body and the world. As a radically indefinite signifier, the “O”s also operate as an interface between the rhetoric of retention and the rhetoric of release. While Molly’s body flows out through the “O”s of her discourse, the world flows back in through the same openings, replenishing her pool of experience and setting up the next rhetorical spasm. The body is confessed through this speaking orifice and the beneficent effects of the confession are sucked back in to fill the emptiness: psycho-sexual loss is made good immediately as experience rushes back in over the labial membranes, perpetuating the jouissance of thought and bodily being. On the purely physiological level, the “O” also operates as an interface between inside and outside, evacuation and replenishment. Molly menstruates through her “O”: O patience above its pouring out of me like the sea anyhow he didn’t make me pregnant as big as he is (U 18.1122-3) and receives the fulfilment of Boylan’s sex through the same channel: I can feel his mouth O Lord I must stretch myself I wished he was here or somebody to let myself go with and come again like that I feel all fire inside me or if I could dream it when he made me spend the 2nd time tickling me behind with his finger I was coming for about 5 minutes with my legs round him I had to hug him after O Lord (U 18.584-88) Her physical impressions here take on a confessional tone through the repetition of “O Lord”, as if God is being called upon to bear witness to a pleasure too great for words. The spirituality of erotic delight passes through this “O”, which expresses Molly’s need to consecrate her body and conquer death through sex. The body is “holey” in “Penelope”, which is to say that it exceeds knowledge, and the “O”s in the above passage, while they set up the 3. For a reproduction of this piece see Tracey Warr and Amelia Jones (eds) The Artist’s Body (London : Phaidon Press, 2000), p. 187
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everyday exclamation “O Lord!”, mark Molly’s readiness to swoon into something beyond her quotidian self. The materialism of her monologue, its obsession with possessions and status, is counterbalanced and eventually transcended by this religion of sexual love. The “O”s of her woman’s body are the sacraments of this sexual faith, offering for herself and her partners a way out of the fleshly decline into death. These “O”s are the condensed text of Molly’s physical prayer, and, as such, belong to a special rhetorical category, they encapsulate the confession of a body that doesn’t want to die. Death is conceived of here not just as the cessation of the body’s organic functions, but first and foremost as the waning of its sexual power. This explains the deathliness of Bloom’s reflections on his wife’s adulteries: O, he did. Into her. She did. Done. (U 13.849) This thought occurs after Bloom’s masturbation in the “Nausicaa” episode, and it neatly expresses the secularity of his erotic life, as the open “O” at the beginning of the thought reappears at the end, hedged in by the “D” and “n” of the closing “Done”. As in Rekula’s “Hyperventilation”, an opening onto the world is tapped and channelled back, blocking the subject in a circular oversufficiency of self, a huis clos of its own specific devising. The “Done”, expresses Bloom’s refusal of confession, his fear of living in a world where Boylans roam freely, but while sealing the open “O” against further painful constatations, it also locks him in with Molly and her lover and all their rampant orifices. The secular subject’s circularity can also be unbearably social, it would seem,4 and this takes us a stage beyond Rekula’s imago into the territory explored by Paul McCarthy in his performance piece “Hotdog”. Naked apart from an unravelling loincloth, McCarthy filled his mouth with hotdogs and then taped it shut.5 The open “O” is sealed with food; but the presence of a live audience interferes with the private, perhaps even masturbatory, ritual: if a member of the audience should exhibit signs of nausea, McCarthy might vomit in sympathy and choke to death before the swathes of tape could be removed. McCarthy, like Bloom, has shut himself in with the orifices of the other. The horror of sexual infidelity (for Bloom at least) is this inability to dissociate the entrances and exits of the beloved from those of the usurping lover, one must co-habit and have concourse with all the holes. While, on the physical level, he can flee the social nausea inspired by the chomping gobs at the Burton Hotel, the psycho-sexual complex which triggers such acute anxiety is more difficult to shake off. As usual, we can rely on the “Circe” chapter for a dramatisation of the trauma:
4. As Stephen Dedalus remarks in “Scylla and Charybdis”: “We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves.” (U 9.1044-6) 5. For a reproduction of this piece see The Artist’s Body, p. 104.
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BOYLAN (to Bloom, over his shoulder) You can apply your eye to the keyhole and play with yourself while I just go through her a few times. (U 15.3788-9) The implicit logic of the “Nausicaa” episode is played out as Bloom masturbates to the sight of Boylan and Molly confessing their desires. As Boylan “goes through” Molly, so Bloom’s gaze is channelled through a tunnel of aligned orifices beginning with the keyhole, passing through the portholes of the lovers, before circling back upon itself and the isolation of that faithless “Done.” According to Bakhtin, the lineaments of the grotesque body which “swallows the world and is itself swallowed by the world” share a common function: “it is within them that the confines between bodies and between the body and the world are overcome”.6 As Bloom’s scopophilic gaze takes its place in the loop of desire, so the eye becomes an orifice in Joyce to set alongside the anus, the mouth, and the vagina. The grotesque body, as Rekula and McCarthy show, is a social construct which swallows itself. Back on Sandymount Strand as the light fades and a bat pushes the tawdry romanticism one stage further towards the gothic, Bloom is stranded like a spent condom at low tide, terribly present to himself, almost desperate in the gloaming. He has incurred the immense debtorship for a thing Done by Boylan and Molly. Instead of sexual release, he has experienced the circularity of desire as mediated by the desire of the other, and he is overwhelmed by fatigue: “O! Exhausted that female has me. Not so young now.” (U 13.1253) At the same time, Bloom’s somatic materialism (which resists the double generic pull of the chapter towards the delusional and the sensational) allows him to respond sympathetically to the confession of Gerty McDowell’s handicap: “Tight boots? No. She’s lame! O!” (U 13.849). As he passes from fantasy back into reality, negotiating that bathetic slump so dear to Joyce, his sympathy for those around him only increases, and this contrasts with Molly, whose urgent faith requires a constant heightening of the mundane. She associates atheism with ignorance, complaining: as for them saying theres no God I wouldn’t give a snap of my two fingers for all their learning why dont they go and create something I often asked him atheists or whatever they call themselves (U 18.1563-6) But Bloom has the tact of the unbeliever and his practice of restrained observation allows him to rest assured of certain things; his sense of 6. Simon Dentith (ed), Bakhtinian Thought: An Introductory Reader (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 226.
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limitations provides him with a power of conviction which, on occasion, can raise itself to the level of poetic truth. His claim that “the sun shines for you today” (U 18.1578) might be the creation of a pseudo-scientist with literary pretensions, but it has clearly lodged in Molly’s mind as a defining statement of romantic love which, after all their estrangements, retains its effect. Throughout Ulysses the recurring “O” s of Molly and Bloom suggest that a reconciliation is possible. As abstractions of the kissing mouths that eat, they seem to anticipate a return of the seedcake episode, where the roving orifices rediscover each other and lock on, providing a moment of mutual fulfilment which reconciles release with retention. The self-perpetuating system of mutual desire (which might again recall Brancusi’s sculpture) stands perhaps as the solution to both of their structural imbalances, a double transfer, a mutual confession. In the seedcake kiss Molly can let go and retain while Bloom can retain and let go. It is a double and completely satisfying exchange, the symbolic power of which has clearly survived the vicissitudes of their married life. Taking his place in the bed, Bloom kisses Molly’s bottom and orders breakfast, bringing two “O”s into proximity on the physical plane, and evoking the seedcake again in his conflation of food with sex. The two eggs which he has ordered, if we imagine them sunnyside-up, also suggest the two “O”s, together with the paraphernalia of fertilisation and the means used to frustrate it, which loom so large in Molly’s sense of her body as receptacle. Bloom at this point, as his descent into baby language suggests, is the “childman weary, the manchild in the womb” while Molly is “fulfilled, recumbent, big with seed” (U18.2314). In memory of the seedcake, perhaps, and in order to usurp the usurper’s seed, Bloom is nudging back into the womb, filling Molly, phantasmagorically at least, with his whole being, taking up with her insides. This infantile trajectory imposes itself on the monologue, which progressively empties itself of Boylan and refills itself with images of Bloom and the consecration of their early love. My argument here intersects with the debate about the “O”pen ending of Ulysses and whether Molly’s swoon into affirmative memory will carry over into June 17th and beyond.7 Such a projection implies a phantom extension of Molly’s monologue which, finding no way to kick itself free of material existence and no way to abandon its faith in ultimate release, will simply continue; reminding us, perhaps, of that later incarnation of the orifice with ambitions, the mouth in Beckett’s Not I which, in an act of faith qualified by
7. This is also a question about genre and fictional time. If Ulysses is considered as one accomplishment of a mythic cycle, it may hardly be legitimate to think in terms of the morning after the night before, even less to entertain notions of change and development beyond the limits of the text. Genre, at such moments, seems to depend on how we want to use the text, as Joyce’s work after Dubliners makes particularly clear.
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a distinct lack of alternatives, is determined to “hit on it in the end”.8 If, on the other hand Molly is to wake to a new day, fully determined to keep her Monday assignation with Boylan, the ovulation of the breakfast eggs (assuming he receives them) may, after all, be the nearest Bloom will get to her womb. Her plangent “Yes” may have been nothing more than a hypnagogic glitch, as meaningless or as solipsistically obscure as Bloom’s ramblings about Sinbad the Sailor at the close of “Ithaca”. In this case, we might imagine him at stool after breakfast on the 17th topping himself up with weak writing as his bowels release their load, hoping to relive the highpoint of “Calypso” where the balance between outlay and intake was “just right” (U 4.510). Breakfast or no breakfast, there will still be the absence of Rudy and the more-than-enough of Boylan. Empty memories of fulfilment will not help Bloom hold the time line against the relentless approach of future ritualistic voidings; and if his attempt to be born again (or re-conceived) in Molly’s womb fails, he will have no option but to live out his succession of painful realities in faithless passivity, reading titbits out of the newspaper like Willie from Beckett’s Happy Days. Molly’s determination to enjoy herself even as her body sinks into the mound of middle age is taken up by Beckett’s Winnie, who is characterised by a brittle resolve to look on the bright side of her appalling situation. Act One “will have been another [particularly] happy day” (159) because Willie speaks to her, offering a little something which may be taken in, enjoyed and then released. Willie, for once, contributes to her living. That Beckett’s scenario might be read as an abstraction of the last chapter of Ulysses is perhaps confirmed by its climax, when Willie begins to crawl up the mound and Winnie anticipates a kiss, a meeting of orifices which will free her, however momentarily, from the tormenting effort of saying it right.9 Molly’s backward spiral to the seedcake kiss may be motivated by fear of the mound, “O thanks be to the great God I got somebody to give me what I badly wanted to put some heart up into me…. for being a woman as soon as youre old they might as well throw you out in the bottom of the ashpit” (U 18.747). Meanwhile Beckett’s grotesque reconstruction of the romantic ascent (Molly and Poldy climbing the Hill of Howth?) peters out with Willie, like the Grand Old impotent Duke of York, only half way up. For Winnie, it seems, it is already too late to escape from her daily diachronic horrors. The “O”s of “Penelope”, as we have seen, are portholes through which Joyce’s text penetrates itself, wormholes through the temporal system of Ulysses which reveal the synchronic stresses endured by the characters. They 8. Samuel Beckett, Not I, in The Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber, 1986), p. 383. 9. Happy Days in The Complete Dramatic Works. The French title, O Les Beaux Jours, contains a hole through which the body may slip out of time or through which the bitter mockeries of dead rhetoric may be drained off, leaving a timeless kiss.
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connect the latter with the unconscious of the text and mark the moments at which confession, in the form of a symptom, inscribes itself in language. Molly’s “O”s mark the points at which the orifices of her body release and are released into text. They reveal both the precariousness of the text which at any moment might be swallowed by Molly’s body, and the threat which speech poses to the body, which is being poured out into language, confessed away, emptied. The drama of estranged bodies in Ulysses requires, more often than not, that the potential synchronicity of the “O”s be channelled away into other, less productive energies, such as vengeful lust or avarice. When we speculate beyond the last word of “Penelope” we can perhaps begin to see how the “O”s might be a problem in themselves: that what the body needs in fact is a new or new kind of orifice, a fresh set of options with which to renew the shock effect of the polymorphous perverse and revitalise the physical exchange and its social avatars. Finnegans Wake, I would suggest, meets this need excessively. To historicise the strategic importance of the orifice in cultural schemata of the body, we might note that Bakhtin’s interpenetrative model of the inside-outside body of the medieval and Renaissance eras contrasts sharply with the consolidated surface of the 19th century, where the beating life of the subject is held in and sealed by a taut and palpitating skin. In Jane Austen’s ergonomic prose, for example, the inward agitations of the social and existential subject are registered by blushes, studied gestures of mortification, increased sensitivity to ambient conditions. The only hole to be acknowledged is the mouth, which, in its tessellated depthlessness, might be taken for a speaking part of the skin. Thomas Hardy restored some amplitude to the orifice with his celebrated description of Tess’s mouth, which he imagined in its formative phase shaped by the local dialect and its characteristic “UR” sound: The pouted up, deep red mouth to which this syllable was native had hardly as yet settled into its definitive shape, and her lower lip had a way of thrusting the middle of her top one upward, when they closed together after a word.10 This is clearly a hole which might be connected to other holes, a hole capable of confession. Surface re-asserted itself over depth with the machine aesthetic of futurism, and Wyndham Lewis’s vorticist rejection of Rabelaisian grotesquerie, where an astringent satire seals off the colonic Bergsonian flux: I am not an anatomist. I enjoy the surface of life, if not for its own sake, at least because it conceals the repulsive turbidness of the intestine. Give me the dimple in the cheek of the Gioconda or St.
10. Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles (London: Norton, 1991), p.8.
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John the Baptist, and you can have all the Gothic skeletons and superrealist guts that you like!11 Meanwhile, in the surrealism of Dali, Tanguy, Masson and Ernst, the chrome skin of technology and the skein of satire dissolve into a swirl of biomorphic forms in which the orifice is again given over to a free play of interpenetrations. Such “regressive” advancements in the visual arts coincided with the notorious “phallic hunt” staged by Lawrence in Lady Chatterley’s Lover where Mellors and Connie seem to achieve through anal penetration a dynamic equilibrium of self and other at least as powerful as the seedcake kiss shared by Molly and Bloom: …the deep organic shame, the old, old physical fear which crouches in the bodily roots of us, and can only be chased away by the sensual fire, at last it was roused up and routed out by the phallic hunt of the man, and she came to the very heart of the jungle of herself…. She shared her ultimate nakedness with a man, another being.12 Extrapolating freely from this condensed account of cultural and aesthetic incorporation, we might conclude that up until the mid-twentieth century the orifice was suspended between the biological (which tended to exploit its symbolic power in ways recuperated or inspired by Freudian psychoanalysis) and the technological (which tended to neutralise its force through alienation and abstraction). From the 1950s onwards, a number of productive responses to this jaded dichotomy began to transform our understanding of the human body as a porous entity structured around and through its holes. A first step, perhaps, was Francis Bacon’s fascination with the wound. Through the application of technology, the body can become a site of new orifices, new centres of pleasure and pain: penetration can be reconceived as piercing. The hysterical contortions of the body in Bacon reveal how an orifice, in disrupting the distinction between inside and outside, may give vent to the abject, a phobic confusion between what is me and not me. It is in this sense, perhaps, that the orifice becomes a wound and vice versa; and we should perhaps imagine the body in Bacon as capable of piercing itself (notwithstanding the presence of those idly menacing umbrellas, plinths and trapezes), of extending its repertoire of holes through the application of a psychosomatic technology proper to itself and the art of painting. This image of the self-piercing body might be set alongside that earlier formulation, derived from Bakhtin, of the grotesque body swallowing itself. The tendency in Joyce of the eye to become an orifice, the “eyegonblack” as it is formulated in Finnegans Wake (FW 16.29), is visible in Bacon, where the 11. Wyndham Lewis, Blasting and Bombadiering (London: Calder and Boyars, 1967), p.9. 12. D.H.Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993), p. 258.
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eye in a number of his heads is transformed into a dark or ruddy wound.13 Bacon’s interest in the painterly representation of the wound and its capacity to reconfigure the body may be taken as a point of departure for a host of body artists committed to an exploration of the body’s limits through a confrontation with technology.14 The hole or wound as an aesthetic category and erogenous zone is at the root of the so-called New Primitivism with its crossover between sado-masochistic practices, pre-christian religious ritual, and the prosthetic body of the cyberpunk movement. Pop Art was also an important influence with its incorporation of the still, impenetrable fields and forms of minimalism into discourses of consumption focussed on one orifice or another. The flash billboard friezes of Rosenquist or the slick bas reliefs of Allen Jones would be noteworthy examples. If Rauschenberg’s famous “Monogram”, featuring a stuffed goat and a tyre, suggests new forms of penetration, then William Burroughs’s “Spare Ass Annie” with her “auxiliary asshole in the middle of her forehead, like a baneful bronze eye” offers a further challenge to fixed conceptions of the human form.15 This challenge is taken up and pushed to a grotesque extreme by Jake and Dinos Chapman in their sculpture “Zygotic acceleration, biogenetic, de-sublimated libidinal model (enlarged x 1000)”, where the freakishness of the amalgamated bodies is rendered all the more appalling by the substitution of anuses for mouths and penises for noses.16 The title explicitly engages with the biotechnological intervention in human evolution, while suggesting that the interchangeability of orifices may illustrate or effect a libidinal de-sublimation of the human body and its affective investments. This rapid sketch of what might be thought of as a biotechnological revolution in the arts may be employed retrospectively to re-think the transition between Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. More specifically, it may help us to understand how Joyce’s writing practice in the Wake responds to the social and sexual challenges posed by “Penelope” and the possibility that Molly will decline into a state of domesticated biomorphism while Bloom 13. A motif which spans Bacon’s career from the “Portrait” of 1932 to the “Study for a Portrait of John Edwards I” in 1989. An invaluable site for viewing Bacon’s work is the Francis Bacon Image Gallery at www.francis-bacon.cx/. 14. French artist Orlan, with her video performances of cosmetic surgery, and Stellarc, who combines an interest in cybernetic body extensions with a taste for Native American torture rituals, would perhaps be the most prominent examples of this tendency. 15. William Burroughs, Word Virus: The William Burroughs Reader, eds. James Grauerholz and Ira Silverberg (London: Flamingo, 1999), p. 132. 16. This piece featured in the notorious “Sensation” show at the Royal Academy in 1997 and is reproduced in the catalogue of the exhibition. See Norman Rosenthal and Brooks Adams (eds.) Sensation, Young British Artists From the Saatchi Collection (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 1998), 67.
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will isolate himself in a world of trivial technology, “plottering about the house so you cant stir with him” (U 18.507). A more detailed consideration of a key text in the history of biotechnological erotica may help to clarify this. J.G. Ballard’s projection of a new sexuality in Crash revolves around the creation of new holes through the violent confrontation of bodies and technology: I visualised my wife injured in a high-impact collision, her mouth and face destroyed, and a new and exciting orifice opened in her perineum by the splintering steering column, neither vagina nor rectum, an orifice we could dress with all our deepest affections.17 The suggestion seems to be that the human imagination, bored with the body it is born with and its cultural inheritance of jaded perversions, looks to technology and its deforming force for new configurations which, precisely through the creation of new “deviant possibilities”, allow it to enter once again into affective physical relationships. The classic complexes of Freudian psychoanalysis become, through the application of technology, new occasions for body knowledge and sexual exploration, premises for new kinds of love: I visualised the body of my own mother, at various stages of her life, injured in a succession of accidents, fitted with orifices of ever greater abstraction and ingenuity, so that my incest with her might become more and more cerebral, allowing me at last to come to terms with her embraces and postures. The body in Crash is in crisis, it needs something new to confess or keep back, and Ballard sets out to provide it with a new erotic repertoire. It is interesting that in the last scene of the novel this new sense of the body should begin to organise itself into ritual, suggesting that the new sexuality will, from its inception, be a form of religious expression, extending the model of confession into one of votive offering. James and Catherine have made “brief, ritual love” before seeking out the wrecked car in which Vaughan, the guru of the new sex cult, has died: I found that I was still carrying the semen in my hand…. We stopped at my own car, the remains of its passenger compartment sleek with Vaughan’s blood and mucilage. The instrument panel was covered with a black apron of human tissue, as if the blood had been sprayed on with a paint gun. With the semen in my hands I marked the crushed controls and instrument dials, defining for the last time the contours of Vaughan’s presence on the seat.18
17. J.G. Ballard, Crash (London: Vintage, 1995), p. 180. 18. Crash, p.224.
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In these “crushed controls and dials” we can see how the de-sublimated acceleration of libidinal investment, imagined by the Chapman brothers as a consequence of biotechnology, can extend the interchange of human orifices into an interaction between these orifices and the technology itself, its slots, indentations and deformations. From this perspective, the seedcake in the confessional kiss of Bloom and Molly can be identified as a key component in the technology of erotic ritual, a votive offering which takes its place in a pantheistic pornotopia of desire, the writing of which Joyce was ready to undertake after the final “yes” of Ulysses. Like Crash and the zygotic acceleration of the body frozen into sculpture by the Chapman brothers, Finnegans Wake depends on speed. Its double engagement with technology and desire is determined by a tendency of the signifier to accelerate beyond the escape velocity of the signified (to employ an expressly hybrid metaphor). If “Penelope” confesses, amongst other things, Molly’s boredom with the old taboos and the limited transgressions they subtend, and if Finnegans Wake might be seen as Joyce’s attempt to reconfigure the body’s structure of orifices and to restore it to itself as a matrix of perversion, this re-libidinalisation is achieved through a synchronisation of the old diachronic Freudian narrative of desire. The “O” in the Wake takes its place in a generalised explosion of the symptom, a crowding out of narrative space through sheer speed, where the transition from oral to anal to genital becomes a superimposition of these phases fused with the technology responsible for the acceleration, which is, in Joyce’s case, of course, something which we have to call “style”. Freud’s heuristic narrative gives way to a rampant biotechnology of desire where the secular is confounded with the sacred, where the body moves beyond prosthesis into a promiscuous conflation of itself, other bodies and the world, where the subject falls through itself and meaning itself is libidinalised as porous style, where all, in short, is orifice. The over-productiveness of this system explodes psychoanalytic taxonomies, which depend on recognisable sequences of behaviour. Confession is cross-contaminated with all other rhetorical means as subjective trajectories flow into each other and out again, leaving traces which gradually detach themselves and fall through other holes. In the Gorman and Gilbert schema of Ulysses Joyce marked the hour of “Penelope” as “None ”19 and in the transition to the Wake, and the inscription of a techno-erotics of style, Molly’s open “O” becomes a transtemporal nOw where the moment of desire encounters itself endlessly in every other. Institut supérieur des traducteurs et interprètes, Brussels 19. This document is available as an appendix in Richard Ellmann, Ulysses on the Liffey (London: Faber, 1972).
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Jake and Dinos Chapman Zygotic Acceleration, Biogenetic De-sublimated Libidinal Model (enlarged x 1000) Mixed media (1995). Dimensions 150.00x180.00x140.00. © The Artist. Courtesy Jay Jopling/ White Cube (London)
BEYOND MASOCHISTIC RITUAL IN JOYCE AND DELEUZE: READING MOLLY AS NONCORPOREAL BODY
JAMES DAVIES Abstract: This paper uses a Deleuzian frame of reference to draw out the potential political implications of masochism, contrasting Bloom’s “failed” masochism in “Circe” with the more positively engaged relation to masochistic scripting which is represented by Molly in “Penelope”. It contrasts respective uses of masochism as ritual in the episodes, moving beyond this in order to read Molly as non-corporeal body and in terms of the process of “becoming-woman”. The essay employs a range of concepts from Deleuze which are glossed, including “symptomatology”, “becomings” and the “Body without Organs”. Richard Brown notes with regard to masochism that: “Joyce evidently took this aspect of his work on Ulysses very seriously and there survives considerable evidence of his reading around the subject”.1 This went beyond his interest in the well-known works of Sacher Masoch himself, which found a considerable place on his library shelves, to those of: Jacques Desroix’s La Gynécocratie … an explicit work of masochistic fiction, prefaced, in Joyce’s edition, with a long essay on the history of masochistic literature by Laurent Tailhade, and … supplementary essays on the nature of masochistic love.2 Interestingly, Joyce is held to show less interest in the works of de Sade.3 In his concentration on its “arrangements of desire” Deleuze too privileges the work of Masoch although he has written on de Sade’s novels and the psychoanalytic failure to appreciate the concept of sadism. However, they both highlight the powerful apparatuses of Church and State whose sadistic 1. Richard Brown, James Joyce and Sexuality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p.86. 2. Ibid., p.87. 3. Ibid., p.113.
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forces not only bring into play masochistic rebellion but also paradoxically constitute and reclaim it. Clearly what interests Deleuze in Masoch is the idea that pleasure is postponed in order to release and prolong the positive, immanent process of desire.4 Consequently, “the masochist draws up contracts while the sadist abominates and destroys them”.5 Whilst it is evident that Joyce is concerned with “apparatuses of power” it is also clear that he uses “arrangements of desire” to contest them. Critics such as Suzette Henke and Kaja Silverman make perceptive observations on masochism in Ulysses and in our society in general, but appear to give insufficient weight to the fact that the masochistic rebellion against sadistic societal overcodings is constituted and thus recuperable by the forces of modernity. This is because masochism’s negative controlling aspect is made up of forces similar to, if not identical with, those which constitute the repressive aspects of capitalism. Henke notes that Bloom is “imaginatively colluding in the subversion of marital stability, by up-ending traditional expectations and putting his own phallic powers deliberately under erasure”.6 Silverman too, argues that masochism “works insistently to negate personal power and privilege.”7 Yet neither take sufficiently into account its negative aspect. Although their observations are in tune with one aspect of Deleuze’s appreciation of Masochian subtlety in both advocating and undermining the contract (and, moreover, in diagnosing the marriage contract in particular as the foundation of the nuclear family and contemporary society), this does not complete the Deleuzian picture. These understandings of masochism’s subversive qualities fail to recognise the coldness and control which has to be exercised by the masochist in order to achieve his or her ends. Such coldness is life-denying, consequently, it can only offer a partially successful rebellion against the sadistic control of the State, because both types of control emphasise stasis, as we will see, and stem from the same conglomeration of negative forces. Joyce gives us many early instances of the means whereby the Church exercises sadistic control at the micro level. In A Portrait, Stephen’s unjust pandying is carried out by an evidently sadistic Father Dolan, to take just one illustration of this. Stephen’s courageous attempt to challenge this injustice is defeated by the complicity not only of Fathers Conmee and Dolan, but also 4. Gilles Deleuze, “Désir et plaisir”, in Magazine littéraire, no.325 (Octobre 1994), p. 64. 5. Gilles Deleuze, Masochism: An Introduction to Coldness and Cruelty, trans. Jean McNeil (New York: Zone Books, 1989), p. 13. 6. Suzette Henke, James Joyce and the Politics of Desire (New York: Routledge, 1990), p.119. 7. Kaja Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins (New York: Routledge, 1992), p.210.
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that of his own father in casually relating his and their betrayal to Stephen as if it were of no account. Joyce shows us that the forces of the Church, working through priests and docile father, deal with all such naïve challenges with impunity. Father Dolan’s sadism indicates that such priests have a key systemic role in the Church’s exercise of power. In exercising his sadistic control, Dolan breaks the unwritten contract of fairness and reciprocity that binds student and teacher together. Moreover, he does not seek to root out activities like “smugging”, but rather covertly encourages them in order to ensure further opportunities for the exercise of the Church’s power. In this instance as with the sadism displayed by the priest at the Catholic retreat8 we can clearly see, as Deleuze claims, that “sadism is institutional”.9 It is against this repressive background and Stephen’s childish attempt to overcome it that Joyce, I believe, took his previous societal examination a step further by portraying his main character Bloom in Ulysses as strongly masochistic and in so doing offers a more sophisticated challenge to Church and State. Bloom does not ultimately succeed but he nevertheless, I will argue, sets in train a process which allows Molly in the “Penelope” episode to take liberatory advantage of his frustrated rebellion. Despite its ultimate failure, masochism, according to Deleuze, dismantles constructed individual identity and in this is potentially productive. For this reason, he believes, masochism is ethically and politically potent and serves liberty, because it “at least temporarily” dismantles the imposed desires of the socially constructed self within a capitalist society. However, it is this very fleetingness which places a question mark against it. Clearly, masochism’s very existence is dependent upon societal constructs, is brought into play by them, and ultimately allows its resistance to be recaptured by capitalism. Some instances of the socially-constructed identities which masochism temporarily dismantles include gender – what a man or woman “should” be – and the patriarchal beliefs that a woman’s sexual desire should be solely focussed on her husband, that her body belongs to and is in fact his property. Masochistic rituals consist of the undermining by parody of such social constructs of identity. Consequently in the masochistic ritual, a husband may watch and be sexually aroused while his wife has sex with another man, and a man may be dressed like a woman. Thomas Balázs notes that, for Joyce:
8. Earlier still in Dubliners we can see the parallels between Father Flynn and the “queer old josser” in “An Encounter”. Here too the passionate emphasis of the latter on the whipping of young boys anticipates and forms a link with the sadistic Father Dolan of A Portrait. 9. Masochism, p.134.
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masochism represents a mere flight from negotiations between the sexes through an insupportable inversion of gender hierarchy and through an unfortunate indulgence of self-abnegation.10 However, Deleuze holds that a process of liberation is set in train even though it may not be sustainable. It seems to me that such a process of liberation and of “becoming other”, is taken up by Molly in the final episode, as Bloom the previously central character disappears from view in the final full stop of “Ithaca” and enters the void, swallowed up in the failure of the societal masochism which is imposed on and enacted through him. Processual “becomings”, rather than “being” offer the key to Deleuze’s ontological philosophy. These “becomings” must start with “becomingwoman” as “all becomings begin with and pass through becoming-woman. It is the key to all other becomings”.11 This is because “woman”, as Luce Irigaray puts it, is the Sex Which is Not One,12 and is consequently the primary means for men and women alike to become different from the forces which constitute them and indeed patriarchal modern society. Becoming different is at the heart of Deleuze’s processual philosophy: Becoming woman is... not imitating or assuming the female form, but emitting particles that enter the relation of movement and rest, or the zone of proximity, of a microfemininity, in other words, that produce in us a molecular woman 13 This apparently arcane statement actually moves the focus away from modernity’s culturally constituted men and women to the selection of forces and intensities which have coalesced in such a constitution, allowing us the possibility of change through the unacknowledged but ever-present molecular forces which are available to us. According to Deleuze,14 the masochistic contract generates a type of law which leads straight into ritual. The masochist is obsessed by ritualistic activity, which is essential to him since it epitomizes the world of fantasy and draws on the forces of the virtual whilst prolonging the positive, immanent process of desire.15 Three main types of rite occur in Masoch’s novels: 10. Thomas P. Balàzs, “Recognizing Masochism: Psychoanalysis and the Politics of Sexual Submission in Ulysses”, in Joyce Studies Annual (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002), p.189. 11. Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia II, trans. by Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 277. 12. Luce Irigaray, The Sex Which is Not One, trans. by Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1985). 13. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 275. 14. Masochism, p.94. 15. “Désir et plaisir”, p. 64.
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hunting rites, agricultural rites and rites of regeneration and rebirth. The coexistence and interaction of these three rites sum up the mythical complex of masochism. Deleuze states that we find it again and again, variously embodied throughout the work of Masoch.16 The last would appear to be the essential rite in which the other two culminate and from which they derive their function in the totality of the myth. It is this rebirth, I believe, which Bloom strives for through the mythical body of Molly: the rebirth of his lost son Rudy, his own rebirth, and the rebirth of Ireland. Yet such a revolt is in the end a fantasy as Bloom can gain from his masochistic endeavours only temporary relief and a false sense of self. Deleuze instances Sacher-Masoch’s central point in many of his stories that only after a dominatrix has contractually acted with appropriate ritualised cruelty, with respect to the masochistic male, can it be declared that she has “made him a man”. Through such submissive ordeals the male masochist has sought a ritual rebirth, in which the father is denied a role in his new identity: … what is beaten, foresworn and sacrificed, what is ritually expiated, is the father’s likeness, the genital sexuality inherited from the father . ... This is the real “Apostasy”. To become a man is to be reborn from the woman alone, to undergo a second birth.17 For Deleuze and Guattari, however, any such “becomings” or rebirths would also have to extend to the socius as a whole including the people and “the creation of a future new earth”.18 Masochistic resistance has insufficient intensity to accomplish this.19 Such attempted rebirths are not realised and as 16. Masochism, p.94. 17. Ibid., p.100. 18. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchill (London and New York: Verso, 1994), p.88. 19. A Thousand Plateaus, p. 150. 20. “MB=avarice”, in Phillip F. Herring (ed) Joyce’s “Ulysses”Notesheets in the British Museum (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1972), p.515. 21. James Joyce, Stephen Hero, eds. John J. Slocum and Herbert Cahoon
(New York: New Directions, 1963), pp.202-203. 22.Letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver, 8 February 1922 (L I 180). 23. Ronald Bogue, Deleuze and Guattari (London: Routledge, 1989), p.54. 24. P.F. Mackey, Chaos Theory and James Joyce’s Everyman (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1999), p.197. 25. R.F.Baumeister, Masochism and the Self (Hillside: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1989), pp.13-14. 26. Daniel Dervin, “Bloom Again: Questions of Aggression and Psychoanalytic Reconstruction”, American Imago 47 (Fall-Winter 1990), pp.249-269. 27. Here, Deleuze refers to Nietzsche’s statement which designates “the philosopher as a physician of culture”. See Friedrich Nietzsche,”The Philosopher as Cultural Physician”, in Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the early 1870’s, trans. and ed., with an intro, and notes, by Daniel Brezeale (Atlantic
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we see through Masoch’s novels, and in the “Circe” episode of Ulysses, where the implicit contract with Bella/Bello as dominatrix eventually fails, the masochist then turns on his erstwhile partner and attempts to punish or Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1979), pp. 67-76. He then broadens this to include writers and artists: “[a]s Nietzsche said, artists and philosophers are civilisation’s doctors”. See Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations, 1972-1990, trans. by Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), p.143. 28. Masochism, p.93. 29. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Difference and Repetition, trans. by Paul Patton (London: Athlone Press, 1994), p.114. 30. Manuel De Landa, Lecture, at “Immanent Choreographies: Deleuze and NeoAesthetics Conference” at Tate Modern (London) on 22 September 2001 (www.tate.org.uk/modern/programmes/webcasting.htm). 31. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia I, trans. R. Hurley, M. Seem, and H. Lane (London: Athlone Press, 1984), p.43. 32. A Thousand Plateaus, p.164. 33. Ian Buchanan, “Hitchcock’s The Birds”, lecture at “Immanent Choreographies” (www.tate.org.uk/modern/programmes/webcasting.htm). 34. ‘The Subject and Power’, ‘Afterword’, in Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1982). 35. A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 149-166, passim. 36. Ibid., pp. 150, 152, 155-156. 37. “Recognizing Masochism”, p. 171. 38. L I 170. 39. A Thousand Plateaus, p. 276. 40. My italics for emphasis. 41. Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs, in Gilles Deleuze, Masochism, Appendix I. 42. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. D. Polan (Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p.19. 43. Joseph Valente, “Beyond Truth and Freedom: The New Faith of Joyce and Nietzsche”, James Joyce Quarterly 25.1 (Fall 1987), pp. 88-89. 44. Personal correspondence. (Eugene W. Holland is the author of Baudelaire and Schizoanalysis: The Sociopoetics of Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); and Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘Anti-Oedipus’: Introduction to Schizoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1999). 45. “Beyond Truth and Freedom”, pp. 88-89. 46. “’When in doubt do gender’: Constructing Masculinities in ‘Penelope’: ‘theyre all Buttons men’”, in Joyce Studies Annual (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002),
p. 159. 47.Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael Greco (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p.4.
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abuse her for breaking it. Of course Bloom really wants to establish his wife as dominatrix rather than the fantasised Bella/Bello of the “Circe” episode. In distinguishing between sadism and masochism, Deleuze notes that unlike sadism, masochism is incredibly subtle. It works through patient education, insinuation and manipulation. Thus, Bloom is constantly trying to educate Molly. He was not only concerned about her understanding, vocabulary and pronunciation of foreign words such as “metempsychosis” and “voglio” but in educating/inducting her into masochism through such books as Ruby: The Pride of the Ring (with its “Fierce Italian with a carriage whip”), Sweets of Sin and Sacher-Masoch’s Tales of the Ghetto and also in buying her garters for Boylan/Raoul. Nevertheless, Molly is not to be lightly seduced into becoming a pawn in Bloom’s masochistic plot. We know that Joyce wished to show her as bodying forth the forces and intensities of shrewdness and even greed. His cryptic note equating her with avarice clearly indicates this.20 Cuckolding is a central ritual of sexual masochism, and an essential feature of the masochistic contract. Sacher-Masoch highlights this central aspect in Venus in Furs. In this text, known to Joyce and analysed by Deleuze, Wanda repeatedly asks Severin to disavow his masochism, and to treat her as a conventional lover, but he persists in getting her to debase him and she eventually complies. This constitutes the masochian contract. However, Molly is not Wanda. She is “a little like that dirty bitch in that Spanish photo he [Bloom] has” (U18. 563-4) and she uses Boylan to satisfy her own desires. She undoubtedly encourages and enjoys Boylan’s sexual attentions, but she does not necessarily like or accept his behaviour. At the beginning of the final sentence of “Penelope” she calls him an “ignoramus” who fails to ask permission and consequently doesn’t know his proper place: “standing out that vulgar way in the half of a shirt they wear to be admired” (U18. 1371, 1374-5). Even if we believe that she protests too much at this point and that rather than being offended by Boylan’s rough treatment she may (in her excessive denials) actually appreciate being slapped on the backside, she is nevertheless upset by his failure to admire her. Joyce has earlier subtly informed us that such slaps indicate commodification and ownership within capitalist society. He mentions in “Calypso” that the breeders in the cattle market slapped “a palm on a ripemeated hindquarter” (U 4.161), and again, in “Wandering Rocks”, that Ned Lambert slaps “a piebald haunch” (U 10.451). There is little doubt that, in stating “thats no way for him” (presumably, to behave) and “sure you might as well be in bed with what with a lion” (U18.1376), she has been both surprised and disappointed by Boylan’s sheer brutishness, his complete self-absorption, his lack of even moderately good manners, any
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consideration for her feelings and his total unwillingness or inability to indulge in sweet-talk. He reveals his complete capitulation to capitalist mores by only being able to treat her as a commodity. This is immediately followed in the text by her clear reference to Bloom in “God Im sure hed have something better to say for himself an old Lion would” (U18.1378). It would seem that of the two she might actually prefer Bloom’s amatory attentions, as they once were, had they been available, as indeed Wanda would those of Severin. A point which is given greater credibility in Molly’s later statement in “Penelope” that Bloom truly understands women and a woman’s body: “I liked him because I saw he understood or felt what a woman is” (U18.1578-9). This contrasts with Boylan and the other men she has known who “want to do everything too quick they take the pleasure out of it” (U18.315-6). Such conventional men, constructed from the forces which constitute patriarchal modernity, take no account of women’s needs but are only concerned to satisfy their own desires. Nevertheless, Bloom’s masochistic fetishism drives Molly to make the exasperated remark that if he persists in only wanting to kiss her bottom then she’ll force him to stick his tongue “7 miles up my hole as hes there my brown part” (U18.1522), for which she will charge him either a pound or a pound and a half. In both instances we are reminded of the status to which patriarchal society consigns women as they are forced to trade sex directly for money or possible longer term financial reward without their partners having to give a thought to their emotional needs. As Stephen observes in Stephen Hero: A woman’s body is a corporal asset of the State: if she traffic with it she must sell it either as a harlot or as a married woman or as a working celibate or as a mistress. But a woman is (incidentally) a human being: and a human being’s love and freedom is not a spiritual asset of the State. ... A human being can exert freedom to produce or to accept, or love to procreate or to satisfy. Love gives and freedom takes21 Even in denigrating her husband, and reducing their sexual encounters to that of a prostitute and her client, Molly would like to get Bloom to penetrate her in some way. No doubt this is why, despite his crudity, she still wonders if Boylan will come again at four next Monday as he has promised. After ten years of non-penetrative sex it seems that Molly is very similarly placed to Wanda. Severin uses the love Wanda feels for him to manipulate and instruct her in how to torture him. The same I would argue is true of Bloom. We know that Bloom is actually very upset at the prospect of Boylan’s cuckolding, witness his state of mind at the end of “Lestrygonians” where he goes out of his way to avoid coming face to face with Boylan rather than
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confronting him. Bloom says, “Won’t look. Wine in my face. Why did I? Too heady. Yes, it is. The walk. Not see. Get on.” And his heart pounds (U 8.1171). The contrast with his bravery, even foolhardiness, at the end of the “Cyclops” episode is marked and it points to the need for the masochistic sexual debasement which, in “Circe”, results in his politely thanking Boylan for allowing him to apply his “eye to the keyhole and play with yourself while I just go through her a few times” (U15.3788-9). He even couples this with a further request for degradation in first thanking Boylan and then asking “May I bring two men chums to witness the deed and take a snapshot” (U15.3791-2). This fantastic sequence in the “Circe” episode, in marked contrast to that of “Penelope” I would argue, shows Bloom in complete control of the script through his debasement. Here, his casting of a fantasised Molly in theatrically enacted adultery, and the opportunity for absolute degradation which it offers him, affords that mental and physical torture which he craves, giving him some release from sexual tension. However, Bloom’s fantasy in “Circe” fails to take account of the forces and intensities which constitute Joyce’s depiction of a real-life, actualised, Molly. Joyce wrote to Harriet Weaver that in creating Molly, in the “Penelope” episode, he had “rejected the usual interpretation of [Penelope] as a human apparition – that aspect being better represented by Calypso, Nausikaa and Circe”.22 Molly is something more than Bloom’s fantasy dominatrix and centre-piece of his masochistic script so she is able here to offer an implicit political resistance, both against Bloom and against the disempowering forces of the socius, akin to that shown in Sacho-Masoch’s novels by the disempowered women of the Austro-Hungarian empire. This only becomes apparent in the final episode when she at last is given agency and a voice. Then we are finally made aware that she is both inside and outside of Bloom’s masochistic ritual and, like Masoch, engaged in contesting the sensible world from within in that, like the characters in his works, she occupies “a curious interworld, in which bodies and words, things and ideas interpenetrate and the traditional demarcations between the physical and the metaphysical become blurred”.23 The willing servitude which Severin demonstrates in the rituals he devises is there in order to intensify the shame of his worship of Wanda as masterful torturess. Such masochistic rituals may appear to make Severin insignificant, but he is actually the focus of attention holding in place, controlling and directing the ritual, as Molly herself recognizes with respect to Bloom. This ritual includes organizing one’s own cuckolding whilst railing against it. P.F. Mackey’s assumption, no doubt shared by many a reader, that Bloom wishes to replace Rudy with Stephen, as adopted son within a reconstituted nuclear
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family, is made to seem naive by his own troubled observation elsewhere that: “Having asked Stephen if he is willing to stay over for the night, having offered an enticing view of Molly’s appeal, Bloom can’t help but wonder about the impasse her attraction might create.” 24 Participants in the masochist’s humiliation must rigorously adhere to his script. He often tricks unsuspecting people into participating in his dramas. His humiliation at the hands of Boylan may not be enough for Bloom and Stephen may well be his next “mark” as he persists in seeking further humiliation. We not only need to ask why the masochist does this but, more importantly, from a Deleuzian perspective, what are the wider social results of his action? It may well be that Bloom, since the death of his son Rudy and the guilt which this has engendered in him, can only relate sexually to Molly if he positions her in the extreme masculine dominatrix role, and that as soon as the sympathy which he feels for her as wife and mother returns, as in the first few pages of “Calypso”, the loss of the child intrudes and he loses his sexual desire. Even so, the social consequences can go well beyond this. The scenarios set up by Bloom and by Severin dismantle not only the masochists’s socially-constructed selves, but also (at least temporarily) the sense of social grounding which is held by unwitting participants, including our social grounding as readers. Bloom’s avoidance of carnal intercourse may form part of the same constellation as does his cuckoldry. His sexual arousal is kept distinct from any feeling of love or sympathy. This is indicated in the “Nausicaa” episode where, as he implies, had he known of Gerty’s lameness it would have been impossible for him to desire her sexually, to masturbate and ejaculate. Whenever he empathises with women and their suffering such empathy kills his desire. Yet, unlike Boylan, he cannot help empathising with women’s suffering, as his concern for Mrs. Purefoy in the “Oxen” episode demonstrates. Only by elevating women into the “masculine” position of strength and power can he become sexually aroused. For Bloom such “masculine” women range from the “slavey” with the crooked skirt who whacks the carpet when cleaning it, to Bella/Bello and the upper-class women who bestride their horses and ride and drink like men. In “Circe” Bloom seem to yearn for prolonged degrading cruelty at the hands of three upper-class women: Mrs. Yelverton Barry, Mrs. Bellingham, Mrs. Mervyn Talboys. Mrs. Bellingham claims that Bloom addressed her “with fulsome compliments as a Venus in furs” (U18.1046). All three ladies testify that Bloom implored them “to chastise him as he richly deserves, to bestride and ride him, to give him a most vicious horsewhipping”. However, Bloom also confesses that he “meant only the spanking idea. A warm tingling glow without effusion. Refined birching to stimulate the circulation” (U15.1071-
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2). This accords with Richard Baumeister’s account of masochistic ritual whereby: masochists desire pain in small, very carefully measured doses[they typically] seek pain without injury. In a sense masochists fictionalize pain ... Masochists do not want to be harmed. They want safe pain25 Despite seeking degradation at the hands of a dominatrix masochists wish to retain control of the situation. Bloom becomes Bella/Bello’s “bondslave”, and she/he grinds her/his heel into his neck, grabs his/her hair violently and drags him/her forward whilst squatting on his/her face. However, whilst stubbing out a cigar in Bloom’s ear and bestriding him, she hurtfully squeezes his/her testicles, and has then gone too far as Bloom becomes enraged. Bella/Bello has broken a cardinal rule of the unwritten, but as he believes implicitly understood, contract. “You have broken the spell. The last straw” (U15.3449) he says, and proceeds to hurl insults at her as he demands that she “[f]ool someone else not me” and, in distancing himself from Bella/Bello, Bloom dismisses her/him contemptuously as “mutton dressed as lamb” (U15.3484). Bloom is burdened with social alienation, as a Jew in Ireland, with all of the feelings of impotence which this may engender. It appears that his choice of effective impotence through masochism is also a means of distancing himself from Molly’s suffering at the loss of Rudy, linked to the unwarranted responsibility, guilt and shame he feels at this loss. As Daniel Dervin points out, his masochism may also be an attempt to resolve the guilt which he feels over his father’s suicide.26 By contrast, we are told in “Penelope” that Molly may now have a far more robust attitude to Rudy’s death than Bloom has or than he credits her with. She may, in fact, simply have got over it. In “Penelope” Molly notes that she was in mourning 11 years ago but now believes that there was little good achieved in doing this “for what was neither one thing nor the other” and she observes of Bloom that “he insisted hed go into mourning for the cat” (U18.1308,10). She lovingly buried Rudy in a woollen coat which she had knitted herself, despite knowing it was a futile gesture, but of course her feelings at that time may not be her feelings eleven years later. Bloom is however committed to his guilt-ridden, punishment-seeking, masochistic asexualism. The humiliation and the shame it induces is central to the masochism of the cuckold. The key to the ritualised scenarios Bloom devises in “Circe” is degradation with any pain involved for him as masochist both highlighting and exacerbating his shame. The situations he devises are deliberately unpalatable to the oedipalised heterosexual, and a central objective is to make
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his witnesses uncomfortable and to dislocate their sense of self. In a successful masochistic encounter, the spectators are meant to sense that they are being urged to laugh at the masochist. This enables the masochist to use our laughter to serve his own ends, because the subversion of his masculinity in turn implicitly problematises our unquestioned securities and gendered identities, even if such effects are only temporary.
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Deleuze’s understanding of this masochistic resistance should be understood in relation to his broader concept of societal “symptomatology”. Briefly stated, Deleuze notes that “symptomatology” is the diagnosis of a coalescence of immanent external forces or investments which opens up the possibility of productive change in people and society.27 Masochism is not bereft of such forces but they are in short supply. Deleuze’s Masochism: An Introduction to Coldness and Cruelty, gives us one of the earliest and best examples of his “symptomatological” or diagnostic approach to literature. Here he effectively dismisses as incompatible the psychoanalytic conflation of sadism and masochism in the term “sadomasochism” as complementary forces which belong to one and the same pathological entity. Deleuze clearly distinguishes between masochism and sadism, arguing that they consist of completely separate rituals, aesthetics and intellectual tactics. Joyce’s bodying forth of Church and State sadism offset by idea of the masochistic citizen as personified by Bloom clearly shows that he not only recognised the distinction but exploited it to the full in Ulysses. We are made aware of the fact that whatever Bloom’s sexual peccadilloes may include, “sadism” is not one of them. Psychoanalysts were led to posit such a “crude syndrome” as “sadomasochism” Deleuze argues, in part because they made over-hasty ætiological assumptions concerning the reversals and transformations of an assumed “sexual instinct” and also because they were content with a symptomatology much less precise and much more confused than that which is found in the literary works of Masoch and Sade. Deleuze dismisses these reductive assumptions of psychoanalysis by taking a strictly literary approach in Masochism and returning to the actual writings of Masoch and Sade. He then gives a differential diagnosis of sadism and masochism culled from these texts. Deleuze shows how these new modes of existence and new uses of language are linked to political acts of resistance stemming, in Sade’s case, from the French revolution of 1789 (which he thought would remain sterile
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unless those now in power stopped making laws and set up the sects of libertines as institutions of perpetual motion).28 Deleuze insists that Masoch’s importance lies in his contributions to the development of the novel which now needs to be read in the light of its world-historical dimension. He argues that Masoch brought into focus the minorities of the Austro-Hungarian empire, and the role of women within these minorities. This situates socially and historically masochistic practices as acts of political resistance in “the agricultural communes of the steppe, religious sects, the minorities of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the role of women in these communes and minorities and in panslavism”.29 In so doing Deleuze restores to their historical situation acts of political resistance which, from a psychoanalytic perspective, can only appear as psychopathological symptoms. I would argue that, in employing similar tactics, Joyce does the same in his depiction of the Irish Jew Bloom and Molly his Jewish, Spanish, Irish wife who are both located in a colonial Ireland ruled by Church and State. However Molly, I would claim, moves beyond the masochistic schema in which both Bloom and the State apparatuses seek to entrap her. By taking a Deleuzian “line of flight”, emphasising resistance, she flies beyond their nets. Even Bloom’s faulty strategy allows us to see the “empty Body without Organs”, whose forces coalesce in his masochism, in terms of Deleuzian philosophy. Deleuze and Guattari describe this non-corporeal body or “BwO”, as a set of variously informed “speeds” and “intensities”, albeit here “turned down” to their lowest point and operating at degree zero or zero intensity.30 Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of the body refers to all bodies: animate/ inanimate, human/ inhuman, textual, social, and cultural as well as biological. It is the field of differential becomings: becoming-woman, becoming-animal, becoming-imperceptible, as well as the totality of all unconscious processes. It is the site where life-giving intensities are distributed. The “full BwO” is the body before and in excess of the coalescence of such intensities and their sedimentation into meaningful, functional, organised totalities constituting the unification of the subject and of signification. Deleuze and Guattari note that the “reweaving [of intermittent and opposite fragments] is what Joyce called re-embodying”,31 and they link this to their concept of the “BwO” which goes beyond the individual, never being “owned” by anyone: “The BwO is never yours or mine. It is always a
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body”.32 I, consequently, read the body of Molly in the “Penelope” episode not as simply a corporeal entity but as a “Body without Organs” imbued with life-giving potentialities, finally unconstrained by its necessary actualisation and objectification both culturally and biologically. This “BwO” is an important concept in Deleuze and Guattari’s “schizoanalysis” which although “not completely distinct from psychoanalysis … seeks to correct it”.33 The “BwO” is not seen as opposing or rejecting bodily organs as such, but rather it is opposed to the structure or organization of the body, insofar as it is regulated, ordered, made functional and subordinated to the exigencies of capital and propriety, or in short as it is actualised in our everyday reality. Such opposition to regulation of the body has much in common with Michel Foucault’s micropolitics and his “permanent resistance that guarantees freedom”.34 Foucault aims at the prevention of any solidification of strategic relations into states of domination. In the last analysis it is precisely such an attempt at “solidification” which distinguishes masochistic strategy and makes it untenable as an appropriate strategy of resistance which can guarantee freedom. Deleuze and Guattari in fact recognize two kinds of “BwO”.35 There is the “full BwO” which is characterised by intensities and flows, where power, energies and flows are engendered. The “emptied BwO” on the other hand is evacuated not only of organs, but also of organisation, intensities and life forces. It is almost lifeless. Perhaps the most striking instance of this is the frozen catatonic body of the burned-out schizophrenic. The “empty BwO” is also exemplified by the drug addict, the hypochondriac and the masochist. Thus, the masochist’s body is regarded as being “sewn up”, smothered, filled only with what they call “pain waves”.36 It can therefore only have limited productivity. On this reading Bloom’s masochistic strategy can be regarded as at best only partly successful. Thomas Balázs writes that: Bloom’s masochistic fantasies are less aimed at change than at stability, less concerned with innovation than with adaptation, more concerned with self-protection than political subversion. …these fantasies [are] not [concerned with] the prevailing social structure, but [rather] the need to maintain a coherent sense of self…37 This concurs with Deleuze’s argument that masochism is ultimately unproductive. Bloom, I would argue, is interested in social and political change but has adopted an ultimately unproductive masochistic strategy
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which militates against him achieving it. In Deleuzian terms an “emptied BwO” is working through him. Bloom constructs Bella/Bello as dominatrix in the “Circe” episode, but by contrast, in “Penelope”, Molly resists his attempts to place her in this role. Her rejection takes a number of forms. She explicitly rejects Bloom’s choice of reading matter: “theres nothing for a woman in all that invention made up”. Bloom over-estimates the success of his educational endeavours with Molly. In “Sirens”, for example, he claims that he held her “[h]ypnotized, listening” (U11.1059) by his talk on Spinoza but we learn in “Penelope” that, far from being interested, she was only aware of sitting in a “swamp” (U18.1116) as her menstrual period had just started. Joyce ironically opposes the intensities of the constituent “BwO” which compose Molly, through her actualised corporeal bodily functions, to those constituting Bloom’s attempted masochistic indoctrination. Despite his attempt to gain total control of her, Bloom knows nothing of her girlhood, and of the Gibraltar days and nights, of Mulvey and of Stanhope, which she deliberately keeps hidden from him. In a Deluzian context, it is precisely this hidden “girlhood” of the “full BwO” which Molly, as Joyce’s “universal woman”38 can call upon as the essential step in “becoming-woman”, for, as Deleuze says, “becomingwoman or the molecular woman is the girl herself.”39 The girl is conceived as intensities prior to their coalescence in corporeal woman, or pure life itself. She is a “block of becomings” offering uncountable potentialities and “becomings other”. Molly’s resistance to Bloom’s demands is frequently seen, in such remarks as “Im to be slooching around down in the kitchen to get his lordship his breakfast while he lies rolled up like a mummy will I indeed” (U18.14312),40 and more general expressions of her awareness of women’s powerlessness and confinement in patriarchal society. She remarks that men can “pick and choose what they please ... but were to be always chained up” (U18.1391). Nevertheless, and crucially, she states that “theyre not going to be chaining me up no damn fear once I start I tell you”. Here she is expressing the infinite possibilities available through the “block of becomings” which characterise the “full BwO” as she moves towards “becoming-woman” and ultimately “becoming-imperceptible” as she is to be rhizomatically linked with ALP/Issy in the Wake. Molly knows that Bloom attempts to manipulate her and her sexual situations to meet his own peculiar needs. She is quite clear, in the “Penelope” episode, that the reason Bloom has sent Milly to Mullingar to learn photography is to get her out of the way, so that she and Boylan can
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more easily pursue their adulterous relationship, which Bloom has not only encouraged but helped to set up and effectively choreographed. She sums this up in her understanding of “the way he plots and plans everything out” (U18.1008). We see in Sentence Two of “Penelope” that she is prepared to show Bloom the spot where Bartell d’Arcy kissed her on the choir-stairs not simply to shock Bloom, but to demonstrate to us that Bloom doesn’t know or control everything about her life. I would argue that her awareness of this sets her apart from Wanda, in Venus in Furs,41 insofar as Molly is able, in the “Penelope” episode, to form an escape route, construct a “line of flight” or else “become-woman” by working both within and outside of Bloom’s masochistic plans and stratagems which are not so much his, despite their resistive aspect, but ultimately the sadistic controlling outside forces and intensities of Church and State. Although Molly complains that “its all his own fault if I am an adulteress” (U18.1516), this awareness of his designs allows her a choice. She is never the passive object which Severin forces Wanda to become. Molly’s insight into Bloom’s perversely manipulative tendencies gives her a degree of freedom which she uses. So it is not an “empty BwO” which works through Molly. The immediate object of desire available to her is Boylan, but she uses him in a far more liberatory way than he her. As Balázs suggests, she also maintains her concern for Bloom despite everything; whereas Boylan cares for no one but himself. Boylan is depicted as a caricature of the Edwardian “masher”, who, in a vain attempt to have everything his own way, twice loses out to Bloom’s “throwaway”. He first does this through his over-dependence on conventional wisdom: preferring the “favourite” to Bloom’s “outsider”. Then he fails through his conventional self-satisfied patriarchal disregard of a woman’s feelings he “throws away” any prospect of receiving Molly’s love, and incidentally any prospect of “becoming woman” himself. Consequently, he unwittingly takes on a bit part in Bloom’s script which serves to indicate that he too is entrapped as a masochistic pawn in the culture of a colonial power, despite his complacent failure to recognise this. Although Molly is implicated in Bloom’s masochistic plans, as we have seen, she resists his desires and privileges her own in the episode. In the final sentence of “Penelope”, for example, she expresses her desire to be embraced and to be loved. At other times Molly imagines being picked up by strange men: a sailor, a gypsy, or even a murderer in a language which becomes more and more a “line of flight” as she contests the claims of patriarchal society whether in the form of husband or lover and begins to merge “molecularly” or become one with such outsiders. Deleuze and Guattari ask us “[h]ow to become a nomad and an immigrant and a gypsy in relation to one’s own language?” and they
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answer that one might “steal the baby from the crib, walk the tightrope”, 42 and “become-woman”. Molly may be thought to achieve something like this inasmuch as her final “yeses” relate to and encompass those men who live nomadically and outside of the sadistic constraints of Church and State power, and because his rebellion against these sadistic forces, even though it is ultimately flawed, enables her to include Bloom too in her group. Joyce through Molly privileges life and desire and in doing so, I would argue, offers us a compelling diagnosis of ourselves and the modern world. Although she does not give us a cure for our ills she points the way to where health might lie. According to Joseph Valente, Joyce: opposes to the negative skepticism of mockery the positive doubt of imaginative possibility. Both [Joyce and Nietzsche] sought to redeem the world of becoming and the creative activity it demands from the moribund reification of dogmatic thought – philosophical, religious, and political – and the meager, make-believe experience it fosters. They wanted to discredit static, universal forms and to reanimate the play of appearances of style … to affirm the life-process itself.43 In this redemption of the world from and through processual “becomings”, the positing of creative activity, the opposition to moribund dogmatic thought together with static universal forms, and finally through the stylistic affirmation of the life-process, Joyce, Nietzsche and Deleuze are indeed at one. Despite its negative aspects and ultimate failure, we can now see why Joyce in Ulysses gives the central place to Bloom and masochism that he does. Eugene Holland has written that: the subject within liberal-democratic capitalism is thoroughly enmeshed in structures where nearly every (apparent) act of selfconstitution, of self-affirmation, or even of self-defense turns out to strengthen the powers of capital or the state over that subject – turns out, in other words, to (also) be an act of masochism44 So Joyce is at first here “symptomatologically” diagnosing Irish society through Bloom as a microcosm of capitalist and colonial society and then, through the life-giving forces which constitute Molly, offering a potential alleviation for our “ills”. As we have seen, Joyce demonstrates that the State’s power is underpinned by means of sadistic control. Such “symptomatological” diagnosis in itself offers us the opportunity to reassess our situation. According to Holland capitalism would appear to leave the citizen only the fleeting power of micro-resistance available through masochistic strategies.
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However, such a depressing scenario, always resulting in failure, was not the conclusion which Deleuze or, I would say Joyce, arrived at. Molly’s resistance to the controls of Bloom’s masochism shows us that there is always the alternative of “becoming-other” in a processual strategy beyond the reach of the controls imposed on the corporeal body, by taking a “line of flight” which is not an escape from the problem but a means of successfully combating it. Bloom’s attempt at self-constitution through masochistic strategy finally fails, as such masochism is ultimately recouped and redeployed by the State to serve its own ends but in the “Penelope” episode we are taken beyond this to new liberatory possibilities. In the “Penelope” episode where Molly is depicted less as the ritualised corporeal body of Bloom in “Circe” and more as the non-corporeal “full BwO”, we can see connections to the figure of ALP and to Finnegans Wake and thereby begin to move towards the intensities of Joyce’s full “schizoanalytic” style. That style offers us a further antidote to the negativities of pervasive societal masochism, under capitalism, through the “affirm[ation of] the life-process itself”.45 In Ulysses, I believe, Joyce like all of the great writers instanced by Deleuze, shows himself to be a supreme symptomatologist of capitalist society and the people subjected to and formed by its forces. The “Penelope” episode, through its construction and deconstruction of gender, as Richard Brown has written, both “keeps pace with the contemporary and provides a site for its negotiation and… anticipate[s] the character and direction of subsequent change”46 as we still look forward to a new earth and a people yet to come. Joyce’s symptomatology opens up for us the possibility of productive change in people and society through the “full BwO” and the processes of change and “becoming other” which he has brought to our attention in his “reembodying” of the corporeal body of Molly in the “Penelope” episode as he moves us beyond the ritual masochism of our socially-constructed selves. In doing so he offers us that “health” which Nietzsche and Deleuze spoke of: “[h]ealth as literature, as writing, [which] consists in inventing a people who are missing. It is the task of the fabulating function to invent a people”.47 University of Leeds
THE GEOGRAPHY OF THE BODY IN “PENELOPE” PAUL O'HANRAHAN Abstract: This paper explores the significance of geographical locations in “Penelope” in relation to the form and behaviour of the body. In Molly’s reflections, Gibraltar in the warm south of the continent, tends to be associated with heat, the outdoors and physical expressiveness, while life in Dublin is characterised by a cold climate, illness, disease, and the hardships attendant upon economic privation. However, these polarities are not absolute: Dublin and Gibraltar share colonial histories and the oppressive presence of dogmatic religion. In addition, the two places interweave and overlap in Molly’s reminiscences until it is difficult to distinguish between them. At the episode’s climax, the intensity generated by the warmth of human bodily love fuses the locations, with the fiery sea of Gibraltar subsumed in the sun shining on Howth. Initially, “Penelope” appears disembodied. Beginning in the middle of a thought process, the opening line has the character of a response to a question though it is not yet explicit who is speaking and of whom and where. Indeed, “where?” (U 17.2331), as the last word of the previous episode, clearly resonates in its successor. It is fitting, therefore, that “Penelope” should oscillate between places and times: past, present and future, Dublin and Gibraltar. Dublin, as Molly’s current and recent place of residence is the dominant location in “Penelope”, but she prefers Gibraltar, the place where she was brought up as a child and young woman, and, consequently, it is more intensely evoked by her. At the end of the episode, as she relaxes into sleep, it is the warm and sensuous atmosphere of Gibraltar which provides the accommodating context for Molly to rediscover Bloom, and Dublin, through her memory of the consummation of their love on Howth Head. The impact of the environment on the body is felt in Gibraltar when Molly recalls how the warmth enhanced her appearance: “I had a splendid skin from the sun” (U 18.650). Now, however, in Dublin, she is conscious of being overweight: “my belly is a bit too big” (U 18.450). She is also aware that her skin is showing signs of ageing: “I thought it was beginning to look coarse or old” (U 18.464-5). However, the fact that she has finer skin where it peeled
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off after a burn connects with a seam of fire imagery which runs through the episode and hints at redemptive potential. A connection between place and character is apparent in the very names of Gibraltar's “bits of streets” (U 18.1468): “Paradise ramp and Bedlam ramp and Crutchett's ramp and the devil's gap steps” (U 18.1468-9). For Molly, the mythic resonance of these diverse and evocative place-names contributes to sanctioning her own wildness of nature and she concludes “well small blame to me if I am a harum-scarum” (U 18.1469-70). The City Arms Hotel is a key Dublin location at the start of the episode. The Blooms’ period of residence there represents one of the less happy periods in Molly’s life. From a metaphorical perspective, the name itself combines the city with a part of the body contained within it, as if to encapsulate in itself the repression of the actively physical by the social constraints of the urban environment. The generic name “City Arms” also distinguishes it from other hotels in Joyce’s works, such as the Ormond and the Greville Arms, which have more specific names. Its actual namesake was situated in an unfashionable area in Prussia Street, near the cattle markets. In “Penelope”, however, the hotel’s symbolic urban status is reinforced by the fact that it is always referred to by its full name rather than as “that hotel” or any other synonym. Dominated by the repressive Mrs Riordan, it is associated with illness from Bloom with his “sick voice” (U 18.3) to Mrs Riordan’s “ailments” (U 18.7) and Molly’s own acknowledgement of being “sick then” (U 18.33). The hotel is also the setting for a series of petty bodily malfunctions such as Bloom's nosebleeds, sprained foot and cut toe, the latter, the result of paring corns with a razor. When Molly scorns the pretensions of Bloom’s sense of having an influential friendship with Mrs. Riordan by saying that “he had a great leg of” her (U 18. 4-5), the body is present as a vulgar, comic idiom rather than as a living actuality. As to the hotel itself, Molly is unimpressed by the rural cattle traders who frequent the place, referring to them dismissively as “those country gougers up in the City Arms” (U 18.710-712). Molly deplores the traders’ lack of intelligence, but the word also resonates with the suggestion of surveillance, an impression reinforced when Molly, observing the observer, comments: “Burke out of the City Arms hotel was there spying around as usual” (U 18.965). As the episode progresses, it is confirmed that the time the Blooms lived there represented a particular nadir in their lives, following a series of changes of address reflecting a steady deterioration in circumstances: 16 years how many houses were we in at all Raymond terrace and Ontario terrace and Lombard street and Holles street… and then the City Arms hotel worse and worse (U 18.1217-1220) Tracing arms as a motif over the course of the chapter, in contrast with the various discomforts of the City Arms, Molly recalls the intimacy of sharing a bed as a girl in Gibraltar with her friend, Hester, while a storm raged outside:
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“I slept in her bed she had her arms round me” (U 18.641-2). At the end of “Penelope”, arms are associated with human passion and togetherness. Molly finally shakes off her recurrent discontent and the memory of the reciprocal excitement of making love to Bloom for the first time becomes fully tactile when Molly recalls how first “I put my arms around him” (U 18. 1606-7). The streets of Dublin are often seen as places where crude sexual activity takes place. One example is the case of the copulating dogs in which the street reflects the exposure of the animals: “it wasnt my fault we came together when I was watching the two dogs up in her behind in the middle of the naked street.” (U 18.1446-7) On another occasion Marrowbone Lane is the aptly raw location where lewd cornerboys recite a ribald rhyme which uses the parts of a brush as an excuse to describe the action of the genitalia in sexual intercourse. Dublin has many squalid sites such as the street pissoirs whose decrepitude is evident in their nauseous odours: “the stink of those rotten places”, (U 18.552) as Molly puts it. In observations such as “You've no chances at all in this place” (U 18. 733-4), Molly shows she is under no illusions as to the hardship of living in Dublin and the lack of opportunities in the city. She makes it clear that she has had an unsettled, nomadic lifestyle in Dublin, moving house frequently, the instability of her domestic life linked to the fact that Bloom’s inability to find sustained employment in Dublin. The relative poverty of the Bloom household is, quite literally, brought home when Molly refers to the fact that they do not have many personal belongings to move apart from “our 4 sticks of furniture” (U 18.1219). The presence, or lack, of fire is significant throughout the episode. Early in the Dublin section of Molly’s reminiscences such imagery is scarce. Molly remembers “the candle I lit that evening in Whitefriars street chapel” (U 18.139), conjuring up a picture of small flame in a darkened church interior, while her memory of taking off her stockings and “lying on the hearthrug in Lombard street west” (U 18.226) describes a fireside scene, albeit without an actual fire, and presupposes cold weather. The lack of domestic shelter is emphasized by the omission of any reference here to the four walls of an actual home. On a further occasion the scene is set by the blustery weather after Goodwin’s concert: “so cold and windy it was” (U 18.264) and there is the barest remnant of a glow from the hearth: in Molly’s phrase, “the fire wasn't black out” (U 18.265). She still feels the warmth in her body after the excitement of having sex with Boylan: “I feel all fire inside me” (U 18.585). However, here in Dublin the fire is within, internalised and contained within the body. This image contrasts with the beautiful external simile at the close of the episode where the Gibraltar sea is evoked as “crimson sometimes like fire” (U 18.1598-9) but it also, as another fire metaphor, connects with it and, by extension, associates Molly with the sea.
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She is connected with liquid imagery on a number of occasions. While urinating she thinks of a waterfall, “O how the waters come down at Lahore” (U 18.1148), and just before this she uses a sea simile to describe the release of the menstrual flow from her body: “O patience above me its pouring out of me like the sea” (U 18.1122-3). The flow of blood here also connects with the later description of the crimson sea. Here are the beginnings of the identification between character and landscape which is one of the core concepts of Finnegans Wake as demonstrated by the fusion of geography and personality in the archetypes of ALP and HCE. Cast in the flow of the unpunctuated extended sentences of “Penelope”, Molly is characterised by a womanly fluidity which is comparable to Anna Livia’s status as woman and as the River Liffey. She also prefigures the emergence of Earwicker. The mountainous male principle in the Wake is associated with Howth Head, just as Molly is connected with that promontory in her image of herself as a mountain flower and through the intensity of the experience of her first lovemaking with Bloom on that site. The fact that Molly anticipates both the male and female figures in Finnegans Wake is not inappropriate in a woman who fantasises about what it would be like to take on the male role in sexual intercourse: “God I wouldn’t mind being a man and get up on a lovely woman” (U 18.1146-7). As a figure who embodies both stereotypical masculine and feminine characteristics, her assertiveness complements Bloom’s submissiveness, and to his “new womanly man” (U 15.1798-9), she seems at times a “new manly woman”. If Dublin in “Penelope” is largely associated with cold weather and abrasive experiences, the heat of Gibraltar and its beautiful, open vistas make for a dramatic contrast. From Molly’s first observation of the outcrop, Gibraltar is associated with fire: “it was lovely after looking across the bay from Algeciras all the lights of the Rock like fireflies” (U 18.399-400). The influence of the heat is everywhere. It is apparent in the foliage, as in Molly’s memory of “the poplars and they all whitehot” (U 18.610). The sun itself is almost animate and sexual in the intensity and universality of its presence. Molly recalls “watching the sun all the time weltering down on you” (U 18.611). As someone who has grown up with the garrison around her, her father having served in the British army locally, Molly is aware of Gibraltar’s status as a British colony but is not perturbed by it. If it is a problem for the detested Mrs. Rubio, then Molly is not going to restrain a little schadenfreude at the latter’s discomfiture. Although the place is small, sandwiched between Spain and Africa, Molly is impressed by the scale of the natural vista surrounding it: “the ships out far like chips that was the Malta boat passing yes the sea and the sky” (U 18.794-5). References to Malta and to Morocco place Gibraltar in an exotic Mediterranean setting, and proximity to a radically different order of experience is evident in allusions to Africa, a mere nine miles away. The
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broad panorama of sea and sky which surrounds Gibraltar induces a corresponding sense of physical freedom which is expressed in uninhibited love-making: “yes the sea and the sky you could do what you liked lie there for ever he caressed them outside they love doing that its the roundness there I was leaning over him” (U 18.795-7). There is a natural exchange here in the easy movement from the environment to the influence on the human spirit and thence to the expression of physical love. In comparing Dublin and Gibraltar, Molly’s preference is unequivocal, Gibraltar offering opportunities for glamorous display which Dublin women simply couldn’t imagine: “theyd die down off their feet if they ever got a chance of walking down the Alameda on an officers arm like me” (U 18.8835). Throughout the episode mountains are identified with Molly, and, in a further comparative example, they are used as a gauge of value, Molly favouring the Rock over Three Rock in Dublin: “the rock standing up in it like a big giant compared with their 3 rock mountain they think is so great” (U 18 608-9). Here the numeral serves to emphasise the relatively diminutive nature of the Irish mountain while the use of “they” and “their” make it clear that Molly perceives herself to be different to the native Irish. She shows that she can recall some Spanish expressions (U 18.1471-2), but her Irishness is also clearly evident in the numerous Hiberno-English idioms which colour her speech, such as her scorn for Bloom’s hesitant declarations as a “plabbery kind of a manner” (U 18.195), while other adjectives such as “sloothering” (U 18.1185) have an onomatopoeic quality which contributes significantly to the characteristic physicality of Molly’s manner of speaking. Gibraltar is associated with a lack of inhibition about the body, one example of which is the “fine young men” (U 18.1345-6) whom Molly recalls “standing up in the sun naked like a God or something” (U 18.1347) before diving into the sea at Margate Strand: “and then plunging into the sea with them” (U 18.1347- 48). Developing Molly’s connection with sea imagery, there are strong sexual connotations in the combination of the erect bodies of the young men with immersion in the feminine sensuousness of water. For Molly, they embody an ideal of physical perfection: “why arent all men like that” (U 18.1348). Her romances in Gibraltar generally take place at, or are associated with, outdoor locations. She lies with Mulvey “over the firtree cove a wild place I suppose it must be the highest place in existence” (U 18.790-1). Here “firtree” would seem to allude to both male and female genitalia, with “cove” emphasising the sense of a terrain reflecting female sexuality. Molly’s preference for al fresco sex, preferably at a height, and 1. Writing in the James Joyce Quarterly, Patrick Colm Hogan has shown how “firtree cove” doesn’t exist in Gibraltar, but Fig-Tree Cave does. He proceeds to identify erotic associations between Molly and “fur” in the episode such as the idea of bringing both Boylan and Bloom on a picnic to the “furry glen” (U 18. 948), a location which Hogan describes as “self-consciously vaginal”. See Patrick Colm
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not in a “lumpy old jingly bed” (U 18.1212), is again apparent when she proclaims “Id like a new fellow every year up on the tiptop under the rockgun near OHaras tower” (U 18.782-3). This militarised location, with its phallic guns and tower, evokes the Martello Tower setting of “Telemachus”, Molly’s audacious love-making functioning more as an alternative to war than as a feminine sanctioning of it. Her knowledge of army life makes her critique of war the more trenchant: “you wouldn’t see women going and killing one another and slaughtering” (U 18.1435-6). Molly’s advocacy of high places as appropriate settings for the act of sexual intercourse is commensurate with the elevated status she gives to the act of making love and, without braggadocio, to her own authority as a love-maker. Gibraltar and Dublin are not necessarily antithetical in the thematic construction of the episode. Gibraltar, like Dublin, is subject to thunderstorms which Molly vividly describes as “those awful thunderbolts in Gibraltar as if the world was coming to an end” (U 18.136-7). One of her memories of the climate in Gibraltar, “Gibraltar my goodness the heat” (U 18.607), is stimulated by the weather in Dublin after the thunder and rainfall on the evening of 16 June: that rain was lovely and refreshing just after my beauty I thought it was going to get like Gibraltar” (U 18. 605-7). This is in fact what happens: Dublin in Molly’s mind starts “to get like Gibraltar”. The two places, which at first appeared to embody opposites in her experience, start to converge and “Extremes meet” (U 15.2099), to cite the Nighttown episode. There are further similarities between the two places in their colonial status and in the presence of dogmatic Catholicism in both. Molly makes clear her dislike of the “rock scorpion” (U 18.786) Mrs. Rubio, a Spanish Gibraltarian, whom Molly describes as “with all her religion domineering” (U 18. 753-4). Her overbearing, matronly demeanour has its Dublin counterpart in the puritanical attitudes of Mrs Riordan, whom Molly criticises for her opposition to any display of the body: “God help the world if all the women were her sort down on bathingsuits and lownecks” (U 18.9-10). Towards the end of the episode, Molly imagines herself venturing out early and taking on a more open, public and engaged lifestyle, casting off the recumbent mode to which she has been confined, for as she admits herself: “Im sick of Cohens old bed” (U 18.1498-9). Fruit and vegetables and flowers are associated with a future Dublin, a rejuvenated city around which she foresees herself freely strolling in the morning: “I might go over to the markets to see all the vegetables and cabbages and tomatoes and carrots and all kinds of splendid fruits all coming in lovely and fresh” (U 18.1499-1501). This image of environmental regeneration is immediately linked to Hogan, “Molly Bloom’s Lacanian Firtree: Law, Ambiguity and the Limits of Paradise”, James Joyce Quarterly (Joyce Between Genders: Lacanian Views),Vol. 29, no.1. (Fall 1991).
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rejuvenated sexual energies and not only in Molly, or so she hopes: “who knows whod be the 1st man I d meet theyre out looking for it in the morning” (U 18.1501-2). Later she imagines getting up early to visit the florist's, her impulse to decorate the house with flowers motivated by the prospect of a further seduction, on this occasion the candidate being the young Stephen Dedalus, if Bloom “brings him home tomorrow” (U 18.1549-50). The reference at this point to the bedside lamp is one of the few occasions in which Joyce provides a detail of the bedroom geography, here in order to anchor the scene in reality prior to the layering of locations which is about to take place: “better lower this lamp and try again so as I can get up early Ill go to Lambes there beside Findlaters and get them to send us some flowers” (U 18.1548-9). Here, the freshening up of the house with flowers metaphorically suggests a renewal of contact with Bloom, and provides the basis for the recreation in Molly’s memory of the initial excitement of their courtship. Molly’s offering of the seedcake grows into a breathtaking kiss which leads in turn to Bloom’s reciprocal offering of the sun: “the sun shines for you he said the day we were lying among the rhododendrons on Howth head” (U 18.1571-3). If the sun unites Bloom and Molly, it is also emblematic of Gibraltar arriving in Dublin. Relaxing into the process of remembering this epiphany, Molly’s mind delves into depths and soars to new heights: out of the night and the torrent and the fiery sea she abandons her quotidian anxieties to be reborn as an innocent ‘Flower of the mountain’ (U 18.1601-2). If her experience as a girl in Gibraltar is the declared source of this image, it extends to encompass the bed of rhododendrons on Howth Head, where she lay with Bloom (U 18.1571-3). Places previously opposed combine in a landscape which accommodates the human body and which it, in turn, adorns. Despite all her complaints about her social circumstances and the frustrations of her private life, her imagination is capacious enough to become the catalyst for this fusion. The finale of “Penelope” is interpolated by visual images of a sensuous, somnolent Gibraltar with a strong Moorish influence. Molly recalls how Mulvey “kissed me under the Moorish wall” (U 18.1604) and pictures “those handsome Moors all in white and turbans like kings” (U 18.1593). The discovery of a deeper layer in her private history as reflected in the Howth experience is echoed by the further revelation of Gibraltar’s past, not as a nightmare but as reassuringly ancient “old castle thousands of years old” (U 18.1592). If Molly avoids the tensions of the present by retreating into the past, it is only because exploring the ramifications of her present difficulties has left her completely exhausted. As she relaxes into sleep, however, she allows her instinctive, intuitive being to create inclusive images which imaginatively conflate the places where she has lived and the men whom she has known, her body creating a drama of responsiveness out of their complementary differences.
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CONTRIBUTORS
Derek Attridge has written, edited, and co-edited a number of books on Joyce, most recently the second edition of The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce (2004), James Joyce's "Ulysses": A Casebook (2004), Semicolonial Joyce (with Marjorie Howes) (2000), and Joyce Effects: On Language, Theory, and History (2000). He is the head of the English Department at the University of York, England. Valérie Bénéjam has been a Maître de Conférences in English Literature at the University of Nantes, France, since 1997, and she teaches Renaissance and Modernist literature as well as translation. She has written several articles about Joyce's work which have appeared in European Joyce Studies, in French journals (Etudes Britanniques Contemporaines, Tropismes, etc.) or have been published online (Genetic Joyce Studies, Hypermedia Joyce Studies). She is currently writing a book about Ulysses, tentatively entitled All About Molly. Christine van Boheemen is Chair of English Literature at the University of Amsterdam and General Editor of European Joyce Studies. She is the author of Joyce, Derrida, Lacan and the Trauma of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) and she has has published widely on Joyce, the development of the novel, and literary theory. Richard Brown is Reader in Modern Literature in the University of Leeds the author of James Joyce and Sexuality and James Joyce: A Postculturalist Perspective (reprinted 2005). He co-founded in 1980 and co-edits the James Joyce Broadsheet, currently serves as Trustee of the International James Joyce Foundation and has written widely on James Joyce and on such contemporary writers as Paul Muldoon, Ian McEwan and Bob Dylan. Jim Davies has recently completed a PhD at the University of Leeds on Joyce’s works and Deleuzian philosophy. He has been a librarian in Rochdale and Swindon, for the British Council, the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Establishment, the Hewlett Packard Research Institute, the National Foundation for Educational Research (UK); Southwark College of Further Education; Newham Community College and the National Institute of Education, (Singapore). He is about to teach a short course on “Dubliners” in Newcastle upon Tyne.
198 Contributors
Gareth Joseph Downes teaches English at Downside School, Bath. He was awarded a Ph.D. from the University of St Andrews in 2001 for a thesis on Joyce and Giordano Bruno. A recipient of an IJJF Symposium Scholarship in 2000, he has published articles on Joyce in the Joyce Studies Annual (2003) and on David Jones in Welsh Writing in English (2000) and The Oxford Encycopedia of British Literature (2006). Maud Ellmann is Donald and Marilyn Keough Professor of Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Her books include The Poetics of Impersonality: T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound (1987), The Hunger Artists: Starving, Writing, and Imprisonment (1993), and Elizabeth Bowen: The Shadow Across the Page (2004), which won the British Academy’s Rose Mary Crawshay Prize. Finn Fordham is a Lecturer in English at the University of Nottingham. His publications include articles on Joyce, genetic criticism, modernism and contemporary writing and reviews for the Guardian Review. He wrote his PhD on the effect Lucia Joyce's breakdown had on the composition of Finnegans Wake. His introduction to Finnegans Wake is coming out from Oxford University Press in 2006. Andrew Norris completed a doctorate on Finnegans Wake at the University of Leeds in 1992. A poet and musician, he lives in Brussels and teaches at the Institut supérieur des traducteurs et interprètes. He is co-author (with Michel Delville) of Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart and the Secret History of Maximalism (Salt 2005) and is currently working on a manuscript entitled James Joyce : Subject, Object, Style. Paul O’Hanrahan is a writer and performer who has specialised in adapting and performing the works of Joyce since 1982. Based in Dublin, he has performed Joyce internationally with his theatre company, Balloonatics, for over twenty years. As Artistic Director of Balloonatics, he most recently presented the play Cyclops, based on the Ulysses episode of the same name, for the Bloomsday Centenary in Dublin in 2004 and in London, at the Old Vic, in 2005. His M.A. by research on “City Representation in Joyce” was awarded by the University of York in 2000. Vike Martina Plock finished her doctoral thesis James Joyce and Modern Medical Culture in March 2005. Since January 2006 she has been a lecturer at the Department of English Studies at the University of Durham. Two other of her articles are forthcoming in the Journal of Modern Literature and a collection of essays on Joyce entitled Postcards from Trieste: Risky Readings of Joyce (University Press of Florida, 2007).
Contributors 199
John Smurthwaite is a cataloguer at the Brotherton Library, University of Leeds. His publications include The Life of John Alexander Symington (Mellen, 1995). He has contributed to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and to various Joycean journals.
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INDEX
aesthetics, 12, 19, 85-6, 88, 90-1, 176, 182 androgyny, 19 anti-modernism(Roman Catholic), 148-51 anus, 20, 24, 160, 162 because, 27, 33, 35, 85, 86, 103, 109, 118, 121-3 becoming-woman, 171, 174, 183, 185, biological, 139, 166, 183 body, parts of the, 65, 67, 74, 118, 122-4, 126, 132, 189-91; land-scape of the, 195 body without organs (BwO), 1834 body writing, 47, 56-61, 109 bottom, 33, 69, 73-4, 103, 105, 109, 118, 124-5, 155, 159, 163-4, 178 breast, breasts, 27, 33, 41, 44, 67, 73, 74, 99, 107, 114, 118, 121-3, 139, 142, 155 cardinal or wobbling points, 33, 39, 111, 118-9, 122-3, 126-7 Cartesian division, 14, 17, 89, 110-3 censorship, 13, 34, 125 chloroform, 133, 135 cinema, 64, 79 clitoris, 33 clothes, 66, 73, 78, 104, 141 composition, 26-7, 41, 49, 53-4, 58, 61, 79, 82, 86-7, 93-4, 100, 145, 147, 154 cosmology, 92, 151-3
death, 37, 39, 40, 42, 45, 91, 92, 99, 151, 155, 157-8, 161, 180, 181 defecation, 65n, 158 dematerialization, 31, 33 desire, 14, 26, 27, 35, 36, 43-4, 45, 63, 64, 71, 72, 74, 98, 103, 106-7, 117, 121, 124, 126, 155, 162-3, 169, 171, 172-4, 180, 181, 186 disease, 50, 104, 130, 129-135, 189 dissimulation, 65, 67 domesticity, 138, 139 domestic medicine, 28, 130, 1367, 142 Dublin, 29, 32, 72n, 73n, 90, 92, 99, 115, 133, 148, 159, 18995 passim Dublin, rejuvenation of, 194-5 Dublin, streets and crude sexuality, 191 ear, ears, 79, 81, 112, 141, 181 eating, 107 eating disorders, 159 eroticism, erotic, 83, 113-5, 132, 158, 168-9, 193n eye, 35-6, 38, 49, 55, 58, 59, 70, 71-4, 78, 79, 106, 107, 112, 132, 136, 140, 152 fat, 67, 98, 107, 114, 139 female pathologies, 129, 130, 131, 133, 134, 135, 142 femininity, 40, 100, 101n, 129, 138, 139, 140, 142, 174
202
Index
fetishism, 42, 42n, 45, 48, 52, 54, 65-7, 72, 178 flesh, 14, 14n, 27, 30, 32, 41-3, 88, 97-9, 106, 114, 119, 156, 161 flightpath, see line of flight fluids, 86, 89, 94 foot, feet, 50, 54, 73n, 77, 112, 190, 193 fragmentation, 65-7, 71 Flora Finching, 34-40 Futurism, 85-86, 88, 165 gender, 11, 12, 14-15, 22-3, 29, 42, 45-6, 111n, 112n, 113, 114n, 118n, 123n, 129, 131n, 133n, 134n, 135n, 136-8, 140-2, 173, 174, 188 gender, politics of, 31-2, 129, 136, 138, 140, 141, 142 Gibraltar, 22, 27, 29, 78, 82, 100, 106, 107, 115, 116, 117 132, 156, 185, 189-195 passim Gibraltar, fire imagery in, 191, 193; sensuousness of, 189; colonial status of. 192; merging of Dublin and, 194-5 gynaecology, 129, 130, 133, 136, 142 hair, 14, 77, 79, 87, 104, 107, 112, 181, high places, love in, 193-4 hysteria, 18n, 134 illness, 58, 130-1, 141 illness (associated with City Arms Hotel), 190 Immanentism, Apologetic, 14751; Ontological (Pantheism), 151-6 infinity, 86, 92-3, 101 interior monologue, 34, 75-7
kissing, 27, 106-7, 107n, 124, 159, 163 language of flowers, 36-8, 43 letters, (correspondence), 11n, 25, 43, 47, 48, 49n, 56, 58, 66, 82-3, 97, 97n, 98n, 99-100, 110n, 117, 118, 121, 135156, 156n, letters, (alphabetic), 50, 82, 99, 103, 106, 116 letters (French), 140 line of flight, 98, 183, 186, 188 literature, and body, 12-13, 17, 26, 63, 66, 126, 134, 158 literature, function of, 25, 27, 312, 31n, 62, 64, 66, 182, 188 literature, minor, minoritarian, 31n, 32, 32n, 176 literature, modern, Modernist, 11, 19-21, 29, 33, 111n, 125 love, 23, 25, 37, 66, 68, 71, 73, 74, 82, 83, 86, 92, 99, 100, 105, 106, 111, 112, 117, 126, 140, 156, 168 love letters, 66, 83, 100, 117, 121, 126 male gaze, 43n, 70-1, 74, 111, 162 masochism, 29, 66, 172-189 passim masochistic ritual, 176, 180; cuckolding in, 177, 179, 182; dominatrix in, 181; resistance to, 185, 186; social consequences of, 180 masturbation, 100, 133, 135, 158, 161 materialism, 89, 161, 162 medicine, 12, 28, 125 see domestic medicine
Index 203
memory, 41, 49n, 71, 78-9, 83, 107, 115, 115n, 159, 163, 189, 191-2, 195 menstruation, 35-7, 40, 130, 131, 135 mimesis, 110-1 Modernism, literary, 12-13, 109112 modernism, (Roman Catholic), 147, 149-51 see antimodernism motherhood, 138, 139, 141 mouth, 20, 50, 84, 107, 159, 165, 168 music, 88, 94 nails, 40, 112 naked, 66, 72, 160, 161, 166, 191, 193 neo-scholasticism, 28, 145, 148-9 notebooks, 54-5, 55n, 59, 91, 175n O, 28, 34-6, 41, 60, 71, 98, 103-4, 106, 157, 160-1, 163, 165, 169, 192 orifice, 101, 103, 158-65, 169 pen, 25, 32, 41-2, 43, 47-61 passim, 163 pencil, 25, 47-57 passim phallus, 70-2, 74 philosophy, 11, 14, 25, 31-3, 136, 147, 149-50, 152-4, 174, 175, 183 posthuman, 34-36, 85, 90, 97, 107-8, 110 primal object, 31, 44-6 process, 15, 18, 19, 20, 21, 35, 42, 43, 61, 65, 67, 69, 83, 86, 88, 91, 93-4, 159, 171-4, 185, 189, 195
process (compositional), 27, 47, 50-1, 53, 55, 86, 93-4 psychoanalysis, 13, 16, 33n, 41n, 67n, 71, 122, 166, 168, 174n, 182, 184 rhythm, 45, 85, 87-9, 91, 94, 158 sadomasochism, 32, 182 science, 11-12, 67n, 95n, 130n, 131n, 134n seduction, 36, 67n, 137, 195 seduction, optics of, 63-4, 68, 702, 73n, 74n sexuality, 19, 19n, 23, 25, 34, 34n, 36, 43-4, 43n, 67n, 115, 129, 130, 132-3, 168, 171n, 175, 193 sleep, 56, 72n, 76, 86, 88-90, 190, 195 skin, 40, 66, 70, 98, 104-5, 106, 108, 165-6, 189 somatography, 109, 127 speed, 18, 24, 26, 38, 49, 85-96 passim, 169, 183 staging, 66, 70-4 surgery, 133, 134, 167n symptom, 65, 67, 72, 104, 165, 169 symptomatology, 29, 172, 182-3, 187-8 technology, 19, 19n, 32, 45-6, 88, 115n, 166-9 teeth, 77, 112, 139 typewriter, 48, 54-5 Ultramontanism, 147, 148-50 vagina, 23, 116, 123-5, 132, 160, 162, 168 voyeurism, 66
204
Index
women’s diseases, 129, 131, 1335 writing, 52, 47-62 passim
yes, 33, 120-1, 122, 125
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Berryman’s Henry
Living at the Intersection of Need and Art Samuel Fisher Dodson Amsterdam/New York, NY 2006. XIV, 176 pp. (Costerus NS 158) ISBN: 90-420-1689-2
€ 40,- / US $50.-
Berryman’s Henry: Living at the Intersection of Need and Art offers scholars and students the first thorough and well-researched vehicle into John Berryman’s epic poem The Dream Songs. Through a close reading of the text, an examination of the history of its criticism and some of Berryman’s letters, notes, and pertinent manuscripts, Sam Dodson offers the reader a solid starting point to appreciate the presiding structure and thematic focus of this American classic. This structure, resulting from the poet’s crafting and the poem’s internal growth, is illustrated in the text by more than thirty reproductions of some of the Dream Song drafts in progress. No existing critical work examines anywhere near the number of individual Dream Songs as this reader’s guide, which will enable students and teachers to enter Berryman’s difficult poem with confidence and a proper sense of direction. Its purpose is to provide the beginning reader and the scholar with a map for approaching this large work and finding their way through its elegiac structure and appreciating its unity. A close look at the poem's language and stylistic innovations, epic qualities and author’s poetics, and most especially the elegiac movement of the poem, will allow even the novice reader to enter Henry’s world. The elegies as a whole provide the note of mourning that is at the core of Berryman’s epic.
USA/Canada: 295 North Michigan Avenue, Suite 1B, KENILWORTH, NJ 07033, USA Call toll-free (USA only)1-800-225-3998, Tel. 908 298 9071, Fax 908-298-9075 All other countries: Tijnmuiden 7, 1046 AK Amsterdam, The Netherlands Tel. ++ 31 (0)20 611 48 21, Fax ++ 31 (0)20 447 29 79
[email protected] www.rodopi.nl Please note that the exchange rate is subject to fluctuations
Remapping Reality
Chaos and Creativity in Science and Literature (Goethe - Nietzsche - Grass) John A. McCarthy Amsterdam/New York, NY 2006. 373 pp. (Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft 97) ISBN: 90-420-1818-6 € 75,-/US$ 94.This book is about intersections among science, philosophy, and literature. It bridges the gap between the traditional “cultures” of science and the humanities by constituting an area of interaction that some have called a “third culture.” By asking questions about three disciplines rather than about just two, as is customary in research, this inquiry breaks new ground and resists easy categorization. It seeks to answer the following questions: What impact has the remapping of reality in scientific terms since the Copernican Revolution through thermodynamics, relativity theory, and quantum mechanics had on the way writers and thinkers conceptualized the place of human culture within the total economy of existence? What influence, on the other hand, have writers and philosophers had on the doing of science and on scientific paradigms of the world? Thirdly, where does humankind fit into the total picture with its uniquely moral nature? In other words, rather than privileging one discipline over another, this study seeks to uncover a common ground for science, ethics, and literary creativity. Throughout this inquiry certain nodal points emerge to bond the argument cogently together and create new meaning. These anchor points are the notion of movement inherent in all forms of existence, the changing concepts of evil in the altered spaces of reality, and the creative impulse critical to the literary work of art as well as to the expanding universe. This ambitious undertaking is unified through its use of phenomena typical of chaos and complexity theory as so many leitmotifs. While they first emerged to explain natural phenomena at the quantum and cosmic levels, chaos and complexity are equally apt for explaining moral and aesthetic events. Hence, the title “Remapping Reality” extends to the reconfigurations of the three main spheres of human interaction: the physical, the ethical, and the aesthetic or creative.
USA/Canada: 295 North Michigan Avenue, Suite 1B, KENILWORTH, NJ 07033, USA Call toll-free (USA only)1-800-225-3998, Tel. 908 298 9071, Fax 908-298-9075 All other countries: Tijnmuiden 7, 1046 AK Amsterdam, The Netherlands Tel. ++ 31 (0)20 611 48 21, Fax ++ 31 (0)20 447 29 79
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