Leithart
Critics have offered wildly different assessments of the role of sex in the fiction of James Joyce.
On the one hand, many hostile critics his work, especially Ulysses, attack him for obscenity and indecency. They regard sex as one of the main themes of Joyce’s work. This is often allied to criticisms of Joyce’s scatological obsession and his interest in bodily detritus: With defecation (to which he devotes several pages in the “Calypso” chapter); with urination (Stephen Daedalus urinates on the beach; Leopold Bloom and Stephen urinate together in Bloom’s garden at the end); with picking the nose (Stephen picks his nose in “Proteus,” and, having lent his nose rag to Buck Mulligan earlier in the story, he has to leave it on a rock).
These scenes were the basis for the early complaint (Sporting Times, 1922) that the book was “literature of the latrine” betraying a “stupid glorification of mere filth.” Even writers who were sympathetic to Joyce fund his interest in sex and other bodily functions as a sign of indiscriminate and unliterary realism.
On the other hand, many defenders of the book have often downplayed its sexual interest. Stuart Gilbert, who wrote an early book on Ulysses, claimed that there had been “disproportionate” interest in the book’s depiction of sex. Gilbert defended the sexual descriptions as “cathartic and calculated to allay rather than to excite the sexual instincts.” Perhaps that was what Judge Woolsey was getting at with his “emetic but not aphrodisiac” formula.
T.S. Eliot paid a great deal of attention to the interplay of Ulysses and Homeric epic, and said that Joyce had adopted a “mythological method that could be followed by many other writers,” Eliot included. He paid little attention to the sex. Eliot’s analysis anticipated the later legal claim that Joyce was not sexually prurient or indecent, but that he was an “austere Olympian” for whom such matters were in “a position of relative unimportance.”
At the risk of stating the obvious: Sex does play a central role in Ulysses. There is the massive fact of Molly Bloom’s adultery, about which Joyce is very specific: Molly is in the arms of Blazes Boylan at 4 PM on June 16, 1904. Bloom, for his part, is carrying on an erotic correspondence with Martha Clifford. More scandalous has been the scene in “Nausicaa” where Bloom watches a girl on the beach who raises and spreads her legs to show her underwear, while Bloom stands masturbating nearby (at the very time Molly is in bed with another man). There’s the fantastic sado-masochism of “Circe.”
It would be going too far to say that sex is the theme of Ulysses, but it is undeniably an important part of Joyce’s theme, plot, and purpose.
And this points to one of the key issues in Joyce’s ethics and aesthetics and the connections between them. In ethics, he set out to challenge what he saw as the repressive and anti-physical bias of the Catholic church. In aesthetics, one of his main intentions is to press the realism of earlier writers, Ibsen in particular, to include in art everything that is in life.
Explicit depictions of sex aren’t a side issue in Joyce’s ethical realism, but a central one.
In Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen Dedalus attends a Catholic retreat and, convicted by the hellfire preaching of a priest, repents of his sexual sins. Soon he begins to doubt whether he was right to confess. He becomes enchanted with the sheer power of the human, a power strong enough to commit mortal sin:
“The idea of surrender had a perilous attraction for his mind now that he felt his soul beset once again by the insistent voices of the flesh which began to murmur to him again during his prayers and meditations. It gave him an intense sense of power to know that he could be a single act of consent, in a moment of thought, undo all that he had done. He seemed to feel a flood slowly advancing towards his naked feet and to be waiting for the first faint timid noiseless wavelet to touch his fevered skin. Then, almost at the instant of that touch, almost at the verge of sinful consent, he found himself standing far away from the flood upon a dry show, saved by a sudden act of the will or a sudden ejaculation: and, seeing the silver line of the flood far away and beginning again its slow advance towards his feet, a new thrill of power and satisfaction shook his soul to know that he had not yielded nor undone all.”
Stephen’s break with the church is not only a decision against Catholicism; it is a decision for sexual freedom.
In Ulysses, Bloom and Stephen are co-belligerents in the double battle against orthodoxy and for sexual freed: “Both indurated by early domestic training and an inherited tenacity of heterodox resistance professed their disbelief in many orthodox religious, national, social and ethical doctrines. Both admired the alternately stimulating and obtunding influence of heterosexual magnetism.”
According to Richard Brown, this reflects Joyce’s own outlook: “Joyce evidently did reject Christianity, to some extent, ‘to lead the life of a libertine.’ It was the beastly and most of the all the sexual part of his humanity that Joyce felt the Church most excluded and it was highly appropriate for him, in trying to found a new concept of his humanity, to base it upon that rejected but insistent part.” As Joyce himself put it: “How I hate God and death! How I like Nora!”
There’s a Nietzschean note here: Joyce rejects Christianity because it is an enemy of life, and particularly of sexual life. Yet there is also a curious confusion: Joyce accepts the view that he (unfairly) claims was promoted by the church—that sex is dirty and bestial. Instead of renouncing it, he celebrates it. The sexual revolution in Joyce is haunted by the Catholicism he tried to escape.
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