Scattered, far from definitive, observations about sex, sounds and characters fumbling for the right word, in James Joyce’s epic modernist novel ‘Ulysses’.
Here’s a reminder of the 18 chapters of ‘Ulysses’ and their Homeric titles i.e. the episodes from Homer’s Odyssey which they are based on or reference. (Always worth emphasising that these titles don’t actually appear in any edition of ‘Ulysses’ where the chapters are just given as plain numbers; they are the names given by Joyce to early promoters of his book and which have been used by scholars and fans ever since they became known in the 1930s.)
Part 1. Telemachiad
- Telemachus
- Nestor
- Proteus
Part 2. Odyssey
- Calypso
- Lotus Eaters
- Hades
- Aeolus
- Lestrygonians
- Scylla and Charybdis
- Wandering Rocks
- Sirens
- Cyclops
- Nausicaa
- Oxen of the Sun
- Circe
Part 3. Nostos
- Eumaeus
- Ithaca
- Penelope
1. Lechery
Joyce’s men think a lot of about sex. Bloom looks down on his bosomy wife in bed.
He looked calmly down on her bulk and between her large soft bubs, sloping within her nightdress like a shegoat’s udder.
In the butcher’s, Leopold stands next to the woman customer before him.
His eyes rested on her vigorous hips. Woods his name is. Wonder what he does. Wife is oldish. New blood. No followers allowed. Strong pair of arms. Whacking a carpet on the clothesline. She does whack it, by George. The way her crooked skirt swings at each whack.
He thinks:
To catch up and walk behind her if she went slowly, behind her moving hams. Pleasant to see first thing in the morning.
He received a postcard from his daughter, Milly, and thinks about her new job in Mullingar, and more generally:
A wild piece of goods. Her slim legs running up the staircase. Destiny. Ripening now. Vain: very.
He gazes idly at a woman standing outside a hotel and compares her:
Like that haughty creature at the polo match. Women all for caste till you touch the spot. Handsome is and handsome does. Reserved about to yield. The honourable Mrs and Brutus is an honourable man. Possess her once take the starch out of her.
His friend M’Coy is talking to him but he moves so he can ogle the woman more clearly:
Proud: rich: silk stockings… He moved a little to the side of M’Coy’s talking head. Getting up in a minute…. Watch! Watch! Silk flash rich stockings white. Watch!
A tramcar obscures his view, but his mind is on this subject now:
Girl in Eustace street hallway Monday was it settling her garter. Her friend covering the display of. Esprit de corps. Well, what are you gaping at?
He pops into a church and kneels for a while:
He stood up. Hello. Were those two buttons of my waistcoat open all the time? Women enjoy it. Never tell you. But we. Excuse, miss, there’s a (whh!) just a (whh!) fluff. Or their skirt behind, placket unhooked. Glimpses of the moon. Annoyed if you don’t.
The moon being a woman’s white buttocks. To balance the account there’s some male nudity. The next chapter famously ends with a vision of himself in the bath.
He foresaw his pale body reclined in it at full, naked, in a womb of warmth, oiled by scented melting soap, softly laved. He saw his trunk and limbs riprippled over and sustained, buoyed lightly upward, lemonyellow: his navel, bud of flesh: and saw the dark tangled curls of his bush floating, floating hair of the stream around the limp father of thousands, a languid floating flower.
In chapter 6, Hades, Bloom thinks of his wife, Molly, begging for it:
She had that cream gown on with the rip she never stitched. Give us a touch, Poldy. God, I’m dying for it. How life begins.
Even when he’s thinking about how a dead body probably decays, he compares it with the plump softness of the living.
The shape is there still. Shoulders. Hips. Plump. Night of the dance dressing. Shift stuck between the cheeks behind.
In chapter 8 ‘Lestrygonians’ he remembers a concert Molly gave:
Corner of Harcourt road remember that gust. Brrfoo! Blew up all her skirts and her boa nearly smothered old Goodwin. She did get flushed in the wind. Remember when we got home raking up the fire and frying up those pieces of lap of mutton for her supper with the Chutney sauce she liked. And the mulled rum. Could see her in the bedroom from the hearth unclamping the busk of her stays: white. Swish and soft flop her stays made on the bed. Always warm from her. Always liked to let her self out…
After he sees the blind man tapping his way across the street, Bloom reflects how women need to be seen.
That girl passing the Stewart institution, head in the air. Look at me.
In chapter 10 ‘Wandering Rocks’, Blazes Boylan buys a basket of fruit from a game shopgirl in Thorntons flower shop:
The blond girl’s slim fingers reckoned the fruits.
Blazes Boylan looked into the cut of her blouse. A young pullet. He took a red carnation from the tall stemglass.
—This for me? he asked gallantly.
The blond girl glanced sideways at him, got up regardless, with his tie a bit crooked, blushing.
—Yes, sir, she said.
Bending archly she reckoned again fat pears and blushing peaches.
Blazes Boylan looked in her blouse with more favour, the stalk of the red flower between his smiling teeth.
Lenehan remembers being in a cab home with Molly.
She was well primed with a good load of Delahunt’s port under her bellyband. Every jolt the bloody car gave I had her bumping up against me. Hell’s delights! She has a fine pair, God bless her. Like that.
And goes on:
[Lenehan in back of a carriage with Molly] He held his caved hands a cubit from him, frowning:
—I was tucking the rug under her and settling her boa all the time. Know what I mean?
His hands moulded ample curves of air. He shut his eyes tight in delight, his body shrinking, and blew a sweet chirp from his lips.
In chapter 11 ‘Sirens’ Miss Douce the barmaid likes flirting:
—Gorgeous, she said. Look at the holy show I am. Lying out on the strand all day.
Bronze whiteness.
—That was exceedingly naughty of you, Mr Dedalus told her and pressed her hand indulgently.
Blazes flirts with the barmaids:
He touched to fair miss Kennedy a rim of his slanted straw. She smiled on him. But sister bronze outsmiled her, preening for him her richer hair, a bosom and a rose…
Miss Douce reached high to take a flagon, stretching her satin arm, her bust, that all but burst, so high.
The same Miss Douce deliberately shows her legs to the customers:
Quavering the chords strayed from the air, found it again, lost chord, and lost and found it, faltering.
—Go on! Do! Sonnez!
Bending, she nipped a peak of skirt above her knee. Delayed. Taunted them still, bending, suspending, with wilful eyes.
—Sonnez!
Smack. She set free sudden in rebound her nipped elastic garter smackwarm against her smackable a woman’s warmhosed thigh.
In the same chapter, Bloom remembers taking Molly to the theatre:
She looked fine. Her crocus dress she wore lowcut, belongings on show. Clove her breath was always in theatre when she bent to ask a question. Told her what Spinoza says in that book of poor papa’s. Hypnotised, listening. Eyes like that. She bent. Chap in dresscircle staring down into her with his operaglass for all he was worth.
It is a man’s world in which women are made to be ogled, stared at, gazed at and defined, with or without their awareness or permission. At least that’s what you’d be justified in thinking until you hit the later chapters…
Chapter 13 ‘Nausicaa’ is covered in stylistic contrivances but what it’s ‘about’ is a young woman on the beach deliberately exposing more of herself (by Edwardian standards: we’re only talking about her stockinged legs and, at the climax, her knickers) to Bloom leaning against rocks nearby as he masturbates (through his pocket, with his trousers kept on) till he climaxes in his pants. Quite a bit beyond occasionally ogling women in the street, this is a carefully contrived chapter entirely based about exhibitionism and voyeurism.
Chapter 15 ‘Circe’ blows everything before it out of the water by consisting of a vast fantasia made out of extended hallucinations, some of which contain explicit descriptions of sexual parts.
And then the final chapter 18 ‘Penelope’, Molly Bloom’s long soliloquy, undermines all preceding chapters by (supposedly) giving a woman’s point of view except that… this woman turns out to be every bit as obsessed with sex as her husband or even more so, with numerous quite graphic descriptions of displaying herself and having sex, in a variety of positions in a number of places.
Here at the end the book undermines all the things we thought we’d learned to date, about all the characters. The really big question is whether the obsession with sex, thinking about sex, and naked women, their bums and bosoms, or stockings and panties, is this all an ‘accurate’ depiction of men’s mental world? Or just one man’s? In which case is it a reflection on fictional Leopold Bloom? Or his creator Joyce?
2. Crude physicality
Of course it’s all of a piece with Joyce’s ideological commitment to human physicality, his Aristotelian insistence on thisness, hereness, the world in all its materiality, in strong opposition to all forms of idealism (as crystallised in the famous theory about Shakespeare he proposes in the National Library in chapter 9 ‘Scylla and Charybdis’. Thus:
- the extended passage where Bloom goes for a poo in his garden outhouse
- the old bookshop-keeper in ‘Wandering rocks’ gobs on the floor and wipes it in with his boot
And he’s not the only one. In 12 ‘Cyclops’:
Ireland my nation says he (hoik! phthook!)
And:
The navvy lurches against the lamp. The twins scuttle off in the dark. The navvy, swaying, presses a forefinger against a wing of his nose and ejects from the farther nostril a long liquid jet of snot.
He thinks of the sound Molly makes when she pees in the chamber pot.:
Chamber music. Could make a kind of pun on that. It is a kind of music I often thought when she. Acoustics that is. Tinkling. Empty vessels make most noise. Because the acoustics, the resonance changes according as the weight of the water is equal to the law of falling water. Like those rhapsodies of Liszt’s, Hungarian, gipsyeyed. Pearls. Drops. Rain. Diddleiddle addleaddle ooddleooddle. Hissss
Suffering from a bloated tummy and wind since his gorgonzola sandwich in ‘Lestrygonians’, it’s only 3 chapters later in ‘Sirens’ that Bloom relieves himself by farting in the street:
I must really. Fff…
Prrprr.
Must be the bur.
Fff! Oo. Rrpr.
Nations of the earth. No-one behind. She’s passed. Then and not till then. Tram kran kran kran. Good oppor. Coming. Krandlkrankran. I’m sure it’s the burgund. Yes. One, two. Let my epitaph be. Kraaaaaa. Written. I have.
Pprrpffrrppffff.
Done.
As Molly, later, in bed, quietly passes wind so as not to wake up Bloom:
always when I think of him I feel I want to I feel some wind in me better go easy not wake him have him at it again slobbering after washing every bit of myself back belly and sides if we had even a bath itself or my own room anyway I wish hed sleep in some bed by himself with his cold feet on me give us room even to let a fart God or do the least thing better yes hold them like that a bit on my side piano quietly sweeeee theres that train far away pianissimo eeeee
And, a favourite moment of mine, in 16 ‘Eumaeus’, the old carthorse pulling a street cleaning chain, pauses in its work to have a big horsey dump:
The horse having reached the end of his tether, so to speak, halted and, rearing high a proud feathering tail, added his quota by letting fall on the floor which the brush would soon brush up and polish, three smoking globes of turds. Slowly three times, one after another, from a full crupper he mired. And humanely his driver waited till he (or she) had ended, patient in his scythed car.
It’s a sweet moment of human compassion. Echoed in a minor scale later, in ‘Penelope’, when we see a goat just as casually defecate.
High on Ben Howth rhododendrons a nannygoat walking surefooted, dropping currants.
So much for poo, in a book obsessed with sex, there are numerous carnal elements:
Of ejaculations there are at least three, as 1) Bloom climaxes in his pants after masturbating to sexy young Gerty MacDowell; and then 2) Bloom imagines more than once Blazes Boylan ejaculating inside Molly that afternoon, and then in the general mayhem of ‘Circe’ 3) Bloom has a demented vision of the Croppy Boy being hanged, getting a spontaneous erection and ejaculating semen on the ground below, which a bevy of posh ladies proceed to mop up with their handkerchiefs.
There is also vaginal mucus as, in the most extreme moment of ‘Circe’, Bloom has transformed into a woman and the brothelkeeper Bella Cohen into a man (Bello) who proceeds to shove his fist deep into she-Bloom’s vulva, then wave his smelly fist round at potential customers.
BELLO: Trained by owner to fetch and carry, basket in mouth. (He bares his arm and plunges it elbowdeep in Bloom’s vulva.) There’s fine depth for you! What, boys? That give you a hardon? (He shoves his arm in a bidder’s face.) Here wet the deck and wipe it round!
That makes the pooing and peeing from earlier in the book feel pretty tame in comparison. And then in amid all the sexual shenanigans in ‘Penelope’, among molly comparing her husband and Boylan’s penis sizes, remembering masturbating with a banana, doing it doggy fashion, having Bloom come on her boobs, how rubbish he is at cunnilingus and so on – amid all this she has to get up from the bed and squat over the chamber pot in order to have her period, and have it at some length, as she comments:
O patience above its pouring out of me like the sea… I better not make an alnight sitting on this affair they ought to make chambers a natural size so that a woman could sit on it properly
Well, those are just some of the crudely physical events and descriptions in the book which bear out Joyce’s determination to present life as she is actually lived, and not refined through the rose-tinted spectacles of the Celtic Revival.
3. Fumbling for the right word
Moving on from all this sexual fumbling, there’s another type of fumbling throughout the book which is where characters fumble for the right word.
There’s whatdoyoucallhim out of. How do you? Doesn’t see.
Bury him cheap in a whatyoumaycall.
One of the old queen’s sons, duke of Albany was it? had only one skin. Leopold, yes.
My kneecap is hurting me. Ow. That’s better.
Through the hush of air a voice sang to them, low, not rain, not leaves in murmur, like no voice of strings or reeds or whatdoyoucallthem dulcimers touching their still ears with words…
—And Willy Murray with him, the two of them there near whatdoyoucallhim’s.
4. Sounds
It is Bloom who, in the giant noisy printing room of the newspaper building in ‘Aeolus’, notes the repeated noise made by the enormous printing printing presses and reflects that everything is trying to speak:
Sllt. The nethermost deck of the first machine jogged forward its flyboard with sllt the first batch of quirefolded papers. Sllt. Almost human the way it sllt to call attention. Doing its level best to speak. That door too sllt creaking, asking to be shut. Everything speaks in its own way. Sllt.
As Stephen walks along Sandymount Strand:
Stephen closed his eyes to hear his boots crush crackling wrack and shells… Crush, crack, crick, crick.
He imagines the sound of the sea:
In long lassoes from the Cock lake the water flowed full, covering greengoldenly lagoons of sand, rising, flowing. My ashplant will float away. I shall wait. No, they will pass on, passing, chafing against the low rocks, swirling, passing. Better get this job over quick. Listen: a fourworded wavespeech: seesoo, hrss, rsseeiss, ooos. Vehement breath of waters amid seasnakes, rearing horses, rocks. In cups of rocks it slops: flop, slop, slap: bounded in barrels. And, spent, its speech ceases. It flows purling, widely flowing, floating foampool, flower unfurling.
These examples demonstrate a principle. Onomatopoeia is a figure of speech where words phonetically imitate, resemble or suggest the natural sound they describe, such as buzz, hiss, bang. Joyce scholar Derek Attridge, professor of English at the University of York, suggests a distinction between two types of onomatopoeia:
- lexical onomatopoeia is the common variety in which pre-existing words are deployed to suggest sounds, as in the rather traditional ‘Crush, crack, crick, crick’ of Stephen and the seaweed.
- nonlexical onomatopoeia is the rarer form where novel, non-word-related letters alone are used to suggest sounds – as in the print machines’ Sllt and the waves’ seesoo, hrss, rsseeiss, ooos
Which type are the following? Leopold Bloom feeds his cat who says:
—Mrkgnao! the cat cried.
Then:
The door of Ruttledge’s office whispered: ee: cree.
He took a reel of dental floss from his waistcoat pocket and, breaking off a piece, twanged it smartly between two and two of his resonant unwashed teeth. —Bingbang, bangbang.
His heavy pitying gaze absorbed her news. His tongue clacked in compassion. Dth! Dth!
Davy Byrne smiledyawnednodded all in one: —Iiiiiichaaaaaaach!
—Prrwht! Paddy Leonard said with scorn.
A monkey puzzle rocket burst, spluttering in darting crackles. Zrads and zrads, zrads, zrads.
Once Attridge starts exploring this phenomenon he comes up with a number of further definitions and variations. The most suggestive, for me, is the notion that no matter how random you try to make any combination of letters, in English, the pattern-finding human brain will always try to approximate them to an existing word. We will pick on the length of the thing, or its most salient letters, and try to match it with words we already know.
Because it’s almost impossible to see a set of letters on a page without straining to discern the nearest word or the word hidden beneath them, it means you can never have pure onomatopoeia. Or to put it another way, that any attempt to do so is always compromised by the eye. The appearance of the letters on the page is almost as important as the literal sounds you’d attribute to them. There is a very strong visual element at play. And this game – of making meaningless combinations of words veer towards existing words, or veer away – playing with our expectations of what the shape and length of a set of letters usually implies for their meaning – this is a game Joyce plays throughout ‘Ulysses’, with very varied and entertaining results.
It’s easy to categorise the following into lexical and nonlexical onomatopoeia – but can you think of any further ways to sub-categorise them?
Nonlexical: a tram passing Bloom in the street says:
Tram kran kran kran. Good oppor. Coming. Krandlkrankran.
Lexical: Stephen hears the bells tinkling during the Catholic Mass:
And at the same instant perhaps a priest round the corner is elevating it. Dringdring! And two streets off another locking it into a pyx. Dringadring! And in a ladychapel another taking housel all to his own cheek. Dringdring! Down, up, forward, back.
And then we’re onto the madness of ‘Circe’ which contains over 40 different sounds which Joyce attempts to capture in onomatopoeic language, including:
THE BELLS: Haltyaltyaltyall.
THE GONG: Bang Bang Bla Bak Blud Bugg Bloo.
(The brass quoits of a bed are heard to jingle)
THE QUOITS: Jigjag. Jigajiga. Jigjag.
(Zoe’s buckles)
THE BUCKLES: Love me. Love me not. Love me
(The bells of George’s church toll slowly, loud dark iron.)
THE BELLS: Heigho! Heigho!
(The trick doorhandle turns.)
THE DOORHANDLE: Theeee!
VIRAG (He chases his tail.) Piffpaff! Popo! (He stops, sneezes.) Pchp! (He worries his butt.) Prrrrrht!
THE BICYCLE BELLS: Haltyaltyaltyall.
THE TRAM GONG: Bang Bang Bla Bak Blud Bugg Bloo.
THE GRAMOPHONE: (Drowning his voice.) Whorusalaminyourhighhohhhh… (The disc rasps gratingly against the needle.)
THE GASJET: Pooah! Pfuiiiiiii!
Molly half awake hears a train whistle blow:
frseeeeeeeefronnnng
And, later:
Frseeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeefrong that train again
Summary
So this has been my own an amateur collection of some of the ways in which Joyce set out to take the naturalistic novel of the turn of the century (Zola, George Moore) and take it to the limits of naturalism:
- embracing for the first time in the form’s history, graphic and explicit scenes of all kind of sexual activity
- setting out to describe all the other human physical processes
- conveying in a myriad ways the mind’s hesitancies and interruptions
- and then, moving far beyond naturalism into delirious hallucination, having not only human characters mix and merge and behave outrageously, but giving all the objects in the world their voices
‘Ulysses’ is an encyclopedic expansion of the novel’s possibilities, a meta-achievement which no-one subsequently has come even close to matching.
Credit
‘Ulysses’ by James Joyce was published by Shakespeare and Company in 1922.
Related links
Joyce reviews
- Dubliners (1914)
- Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)
- Ulysses by James Joyce: introduction
- Ulysses by James Joyce: Wandering Rocks
- Ulysses by James Joyce: Cyclops
- Ulysses by James Joyce: Nausicaa
- Ulysses by James Joyce: Oxen of the Sun
- Ulysses by James Joyce: Circe
- Ulysses by James Joyce: Eumaeus
- Ulysses by James Joyce: Ithaca
- Ulysses by James Joyce: Penelope
Books & Boots 