JAMES JOYCE
81
THE
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P E R V E R S IED E A L
edited by
William E . Cain Wellesley College
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"ALL THEWORLD'SA STAGE" Dramattc S e n s ~ b ~ l In ~ t )Mary ) Shell))? Novels Charlene E. Bunnell
WHO REIDS ULISSES? T i ~ eRi~etorlcof the J o ) ce Wars and the Common Reader Julie Sloan Brannon
"THOLIGHTS PAINFLILLY INTENSE" Hawthorne and the Invalid Aztthor James N. hlancall
,AND T H E WORLDOF N'AKED LIEERTY DESIRE Elements of Anarchism in the Work of D. H. Lawrence Simon Casey
SEXT H E O R IAE ~~ TDH E S H A P I O~FG Two A I O D E R ~ ~ Hemtngway and H.D. Delrdre Anne (McV~cker)Pettlp~ece WORDSIGHTIKGS Viszlal Apparatzls and 17erbal Reality in Stevens, Bishop and O'Hara Sarah Riggs DELICATE PURSIIIT Discretion in Henry James and Edith l'harton Jessica Levine
THEMACHIUETH-IT S I ~ G S Modernzsm, Hart Crane, and the C z h r e of the Body Gordon Tapper T. S. ELIOT'SCIVILIZED SAVAGE Rel~gtoztsErotmsm and Poet~cs L a u r ~ eJ. hlacDlarm~d T H EC,AR\,ER CHRONOTOPE Inside the Life-World of Raymond Carver's Fiction G. P. Lainsbury
GERTRUDE STEIN\TIXD WALLACE STEVEKS The Performance of Modern Consciozlsness Sara J. Ford
THISCOMPOSITE VOICE B. Yeats ~ ? zJames T i ~ eRole of Merr~lliPoetry Mark Bauer
LOST CITY Fltzgerald's New York Lauralelgh O'Aleara
PROGRESSAUD IDEVTITk In O F W. B. YE AT^ Barbara A. Seuss
SOCIAL DREA\'II~C; Dickens and the Fairy Tale Elaine Ostry
CO~RAD'S N,ARR,ATI\~ES OF DIFFERENCES NOT EXACTLY TALESFOR EOYS Elizabeth Schneider
P>ITRIARCHYAXD ITSDISCOXTENTS Sexual Politics in Selected Novels and Stories of Ti~omasHard)) Joanna Devereux
GERARD MAXLEY HOPIZINS AND VICTORIAN CATHOLICISM Jill Muller
A NEWMATRIXFOR MODERNSM A Stztdy of the Lwes and Poetry of Charlotte Mew and Anna Wlckham Nelllean AlcConeghe~iRlce
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THE
PLIYS
m~ TRADITIOY THE ARTISTRY OF TEKNYSOX'S BATTLEPOETRY J. Timothy Lovelace
&
THE
P E R V E R S IED E A L
David Cotter
ROUTLEDGE New York and London
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Published in 2003 by Routledge 29 VC7est 35th Street New York, NY 10001 www.routledge-11y.con1 Published in Great Britain by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane London EC4P 4EE ~~~~~~~~~.routledge.co.uk Copyright 0 2003 by Taylor & Francis Eooks, Inc Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper. A11 rights reserved. N o part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now kno\m or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the publishers.
Library of Congress C:atalogii~g-in-PublicationData Cotter, David, 1964James Joyce & the perverse ideal I by David Cotter. p. cm. - (Studies in major literary authors ; v. 2 9 ) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISEN 0-413-96786-4 (alk. paper) 1. Joyce, James, 1882-1941-I<noxvledge-Psycholog. 2. Psychological fiction, English-History and criticism. 3. Masochism in literature. I. Title: James Joyce and the perverse ideal. 11. Title. 111. Series. PR6019.09Z32746 2003 823' ,912-dc21 200303928
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Contents
Abbreviations Acknowledgments Introduction Chapter One: The Cracked Looking-Glass Chapter Two: Daedalus Desexualized: The Determinants of Masochism Chapter Three: Icarus Resexualized: The Consolidation of Masochism Chapter Four: A Darker Passion: The Rituals of Masochism Chapter Five: The Cuckold: A Logician of Consequences Conclusion: The Emperor's New Clothes Notes Bibliography
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Abbreviations
The Critical Writings of James Joyce. Ed. Ellsworth Mason and Richard Ellmann. London: Faber and Faber, 1959. Dub. Dubliners. Crib Street, Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions Limited, Cumberland House. This edition first published 1993, reprint 1995. P.+E. Poems and Exiles. Edited with an introduction and notes by J. C. C. Mays. London: Penguin Books, 1992. S.H. Stephen Hero: Part of the Flrst Draft of " A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man." Edited with a n introduction by Theodore Spencer, foreword by John J. Slocum and Herbert Cahoon. Hammersmith, London: First published in Britain by Jonathan Cape, 1991, Paladin, 1994. Port. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: Complete Authoritative Text with Biographical and Historical Contexts, Critical History, and Essays from Five Contemporary Critical Perspectives. Ed. R. B. IZershner, Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin's Press. 1993. G.J. Giacomo Joyce. With notes by Richard Ellmann. London: Faber, 1968. U. Ulysses: Annotated Student's Edition. Introduction and notes by Declan IZiberd. London: Penguin Books. 1992. F.W. Finnegans Wake. With an introduction by Seamus Deane. London: Penguin Books, 1992. Ltrs.1 / I1 / I11 Letters of James Joyce. Vol. I., ed. Stuart Gilbert, Vol. 2 and 3, ed. Richard Ellmann. London: Faber, 1957-1966. S.Ltrs. Selected Letters of James Joyce. Ed. Richard Ellmann. London: Faber, 1975. Richard Ellmann. James Joyce. New and revised edition. J.J. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982. C.W.
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Acknowledgments
Thank you to Declan Kiberd, Richard Stack, and Desmond Fitzgibbon for supporting my ideas, and helping me to develop them. Thank you to my friends-Dan Burgess, Greg Lainsbury, Warnock Chambers and Grace Pan Zhi Wei-for standing with me. Thank you to my family-my father, my brother and my wife, Chen Xifor their patience with me, and for giving me comfort and love unconditionally.
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lntroduction
The elements of sexual masochism in Joyce are typically either ignored or disdained: they make us feel uncomfortable. Although sexuality is recognized to be at the center of Joyce's work, criticism has addressed this topic from a safe distance, and often with overtones of voyeurism or condescension. When criticism has addressed the topic of sexuality in Joyce, it has tended to focus on the ideological significance of his sexual attitudes, rather than on the nature of the sexuality that he has presented. Although recent criticism has inched closer to this topic, there is nonetheless an abiding reluctance to concede that sexual masochism runs like a core through the center of Joyce, and is the impetus of his writing. The unwillingness to address this sexual perversity is strange, given that Ulysses is the story of a mild man who for ten years has chosen to masturbate rather than have penetrative sex with his wife, whom he finds very sexy. O n the day of Ulysses, Bloom knows that an aggressive man will have sex with Molly, because he has covertly encouraged this event. He is conscious of the time at which Blazes Boylan will arrive at their door, and he considers the moment of their sexual union. Although this causes him much pain, throughout the day he is aroused by masochistic fantasies, which scrutinize this event. At the climax of the book, in "Circe," we are given an only slightly disguised representation of Bloom's masturbatory masochistic fantasy, which the narration dissolves into the pain, sympathy and guilt that Stephen feels before the image of his dead mother. It is in "Circe" that Bloom's masochism is most apparent. Here, in the dream-text, Bello transforms Bloom into a transvestite maid: What you longed for has come to pass. Henceforth you are unmanned and mine in earnest, a thing under the yoke. N o w for your punish~nentfroclz. You will shed your male garments [. . . .] and don the short silk lux~irio~isly rustling over head and shoulders and quiclzly too. (U., p. 647)
He is not, however, to serve only as a domestic servant; he is also to be used as a sex slave:
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James Joyce 6 the Perverse Ideal
2
My boys will be no end charmed to see you so ladylike, the colonel, above all. When they come here the night before the wedding to fondle my new attraction in gilded heals. First, I'll have a go at you myself. (U., p. 651)
When Bloom puts up a token resistance-bending "his blushing face into his armpit" and simpering, with forefinger in mouth, "0, I know what you're hinting at now,"-Bello chides him: "What else are you good for, an impotent thing like you?" She then reminds him of Boylan and Molly: I wouldn't hurt your feelings for the world but there's a man of brawn in possession there. The tables are turned, my gay young fellow! He is something like a fullgrown outdoor man. Well for you, you muff, if you had that weapon with knobs and warts and lumps all over it. He shot his bolt, I can tell you! Foot to foot, knee to knee, belly to bell!; bubs to breast. (U.,p. 652)
Bloom's masocl~ismis not only evident in "Circe," however, but throughout the novel. From the first pages of our meeting with Bloom, we are given clues. On the second page of "Calypso," as Bloom feeds the cat, he thinks: "Cruel. Her nature. Curious mice never squeal. Seem to like it" (U., p. 66). When, on the next page, Bloom asks Molly if she wants something for breakfast, the onomatopoeic nature of her response-"a soft sleepy grunt [. . . .] Mn"-recalls Pussen's "Mrkgnao," and suggests that we should compare the cat to Molly. When Bloom goes to Dlugacz's to get his breakfast, he sees a girl and hopes to "catch up and walk behind her if she went slowly, behind her moving hams" (U., p. 71). It is clear that Bloom has spied on this girl prior to this, while she has beaten carpets: "Strong pair of arms. Whacking a carpet on the clothesline. She does whack it, by George. The way her crooked skirt swings at each whack" (U., p. 70). As we get to know Bloom, we come to understand that his interest in this girl's domestic chores is typical of his erotic imagination. In "Nausicaa," when Bloom masturbates while watching Gerty, his masochism is not obvious, but it is present. Fetishism, which is essential to masochism, is, however, obvious: "As for undies they were Gerty's chief care" (455). The clichC and voluptuous descriptions of lingerie here are echoed in "Circe," but in "Circe" it is Bloom who is dressed in these clothes. Because we are not in Bloom's mind when he masturbates, but in Gerty's, we have to determine the nature of Bloom's masturbatory fantasy from other sources. That we are in Gerty rather than in Bloom while he masturbates may support the contention that rather than objectifying Gerty, Bloom is identifying with her, and objectifying himself in his identification with her. It is not as simple as that, however: Bloom's fantasy is likely to be a riot of identifications, rather than a single identification. The main evidence that we have to determine the content of Bloom's masturbatory fantasy in "Naussica," is what we see of his masturbatory fantasy in "Circe," and what we see to be typical of the tone of his erotic
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Introduction
3
imagination throughout the book. There are, nonetheless, things in the chapter that may trigger Bloom's masochistic imagination. Bloom is more than likely to hear the following interchange: I'd like to give him [Tommy] something [Edy said] so I would, where I won't say. -On the beetoteetom, laughed Cissy merrily Edy Boardman said she was sure the gentleman opposite heard what she said. But not a pin cared Ciss. -Let him! She said [. . . .] Give it to him too on the same spot as quick as I'd look at him. (459)
Later, Bloom thinks: "Like to be that rock [Gerty] sat on [. . . .] Also the library today: those girl graduates. Happy chairs under them" (U., p. 491). The masochism here is not overt, but to be sat upon like an object, smothered by the "lowest," most physical part of a person, and disregarded by the person sitting on you, is certainly masochistic. The face-sitting scene is common in FemIDom literature. In "Circe," Bello sits on Bloom while she eats her thumping big breakfast. At the end of "Nausicaa," Bloom thinks: "I called you naughty boy because I do not like [that other word]," recalling his letter from Martha Clifford (U., p. 498). He then writes "[I.] AM. A." That the missing word may be cuckold is suggested by the rendering of a bell's chiming as "Cuckoo, Cuckoo, Cuckoo" (U., p. 499), immediately after he writes in the sand. The word cuckold is derived from the cuckoo bird, which lays its eggs in the nests of other birds. In "Scylla and Charbydis" Buck, in his running parody of Stephen's theory that cuckolding was involved in Shakespeare's urge to create, uses "cuckoo" for "cuckold" (U., p. 273). Also, it may be argued that "that other word" to which Martha refers is "cuckold." Martha replaces this missing word-which Bloom has asked her to call him when she, at his request, chastises him-with naughty boy. It seems to be the case that Martha does not understand the meaning of the word cuckold, but from the gist of Bloom's request to be called this name, she has gathered that he is not happy in his home (U., pp. 94-5). In "Circe," the humiliation of being publicly cuckolded is shown to be central to his erotic imagination. That the word that Bloom asked Martha to call him may be cuckold is also suggested in "Circe," when we learn that in "five public conveniences he wrote pencilled messages offering his nuptial partner to all strongmembered males" (U., p. 649). After writing I. AM. A., Bloom thinks "frillies for Raoul to perfume your wife." Raoul is a character in one of the erotic novels Bloom has given to Molly. In this novel, Raoul has sex with a woman who dominates her husband. The husband buys lingerie for the wife to wear while she is with Raoul, in the same way that Bloom buys purple garters for Molly, which she wears while with Boylan. In writing in the sand, Bloom intends to exhibit his shame to Gerty, as a typical masochistic gesture.
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James Joyce 6 the Perverse Ideal
Bloom's cuckolding, and his refusal to penetrate Molly sexually, are the predominant elements of his particular masocl~ism.What consolidates the importance of Bloom's sexual orientation to Ulysses, is Bloom's acquiescence to his cuckolding, and the evidence that he has been partly instrumental in bringing it about. He does not mention Boylan's letter to Molly when he delivers it to her, although he recognizes the handwriting, and knows what will result from this letter (U., p. 76). Althougl~he knows what they are doing in his marriage bed, he does not go home and catch or confront them, though the opportunity is there. The very fact that he is so precisely aware of what is going on, supposedly behind his back, suggests not only that he has done nothing to impede this event, but that he has guided it along. Molly too believes that Bloom has acquiesced in his cuckolding (U., pp. 874, 910). The way in which she only partly hides the letter beneath her pillow does not disguise Boylan's letter, but draws attention to it (U., p. 76). Evidence supporting this contention is extensive, but the definitive evidence is that, although they have regularly engaged in mutual masturbation, for ten years Bloom has refused to engage in penetrative genital intercourse with Molly. From Bloom's perspective, and from our perspective, the relevance of his cuckolding is not simply that Molly has had sex with Boylan, but that Bloom has been so powerfully aroused by this. Cuckolding is one of the central rituals of sexual masochism. It is at the climax of Venus in Furs. In The Cold and the Cruel, Deleuze distinguishes between masochism and sadism, arguing that they consist of completely separate rituals, aesthetics and intellectual tactics. A sadist does not seek a masochist, and a masochist does not seek a sadist. What the media commonly presents as masochism is nothing more than what Deleuze would consider to be a silly sort of sadism. Masochism is incredibly subtle, and it works through patient insinuation and manipulation. Although it may seem paradoxical to suggest that a person so much devoted to control as to manipulate his wife or lover into cuckolding him is a masochist, masochism is grounded on such paradoxes. A masochist operates from an apparent position of weakness. Partners of masochists never cease complaining of the selfishness of masochists. Exiles illustrates this, and it also portrays the manipulative nature of the masochist. In Venus in Furs, Wanda repeatedly asks Severin to disavow his masocl~ism,and to accept her as a conventional lover, but he persists in his attempts to convince her to debase him. This is the most typical pattern in masochism. The masochist meets a woman who is attracted to him, and he uses her attraction to him to manipulate her, and to instruct her, invariably against her wishes, to torture him. In this sense, the masochist betrays a selfish unwillingness to exchange affections. Furthermore, in the rituals that appear to make the masochist insignificant, or even invisible, the masochist is in fact the center of attention: he is the director, the ghost who holds the ritual in place. From those who will participate in his humiliation, a masochist demands rigorous adherence to his script. When Bertha visits Robert, they talk mostly about Richard.
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Introduction
5
Masochists are bullies: they trick the unsuspecting into participating in their dramas. These dramas dismantle not only the masochist's socially constructed selves, but also the sense of social grounding held by the unwitting participants. Bloom's avoidance of carnal intercourse is part of the same constellation as his cuckoldry. When he is sexually aroused, he does not want to love or feel sympathy, to be dragged "with her together down." Affection kills his desire: his desire must remain a desert. His sterility is a means of distancing himself from Molly, and it is related to Stephen's emotional exile, and to his emotional refrigeration apparatus. Joyce's own interests in being cuckolded were balanced by an inordinate fear of being cuckolded. Byrne describes Joyce's reactions to the belief that Nora had been unfaithful to him: "He wept and groaned and gesticulated in futile impotence as he sobbed out to me the thing that had occurred. Never in my life had I seen a human being more shattered."l Masochism often serves to overcome fears which are so great as to tyrannize the personality: the reasoning is that if I bring this to pass, I will no longer have to fear it, and in bringing it to pass I will have some measure of control over it. Bloom's reaction to thoughts of Boylan and Molly is by no means always arousal: "Today. Today. Not think" (U., p. 230). Why does Joyce draw a perversity so extreme and so unusual into a character who is, in other respects, meant to be unremarkable; why such a perverse event in the center of a day that is otherwise like every day? This analysis will suggest that Bloom's masochism is not an anomaly, or an arbitrary obscurity, but an illustration of the extreme implications of an equation that is the bedrock of Joyce's writing. Bloom's sexuality is typical of a variation of sexual masochism. This perversity is very difficult to trace as a cultural phenomenon, however, and it is here referred to as sexual masochism partly for want of a better word. Perversity such as Bloom's is documented in the highly stylized and formal models of the pornography and brothels of Joyce's time. These models, however, only serve as compromise for the urges they illustrate. The strongest manifestation of this perversity must be undocumented, in the secrecy of private lives. It is in part for this reason that Joyce's picture of this perversity is so important. The sexual liberations of the past century have not served to make this type of sexuality much less covert, perhaps because in seeking shame these masochists are toying with the essence of secrecy. Although traces of this masocl~ismmay be seen in the media, it exists more clearly in the subcultures of the brothel and the fetish club. It may be found not among top shelf porn in newsagents, but in sex shops, beneath gay, fetish, spanking and transvestite pornography. It had a day in the sun in the clauses and phrases preceding the numbers of sex lines in the British Daily Sport. More recently, it has manifested itself among the proliferation of porn on the Internet. Althougl~often very subtle, and strangely chaste, this perversion is more
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6
James Joyce 6 the Perverse Ideal
censored than even hardcore pornography, perhaps because it engages the taboo more subversively, or perhaps because it is masturbatory and solipsistic. Like bisexuality, this perversity is often scorned, not only by straight society, but by straight gays, straight fetishists, and even straight sadomasochists. This is most likely because this perversity works to bring scorn upon itself. Even at fetish clubs, where men and women are bound and spanked in fantasy torture chambers, the image of a male, dressed as a maid, coyly but willingly serving his wife and her boyfriend is a fringe phenomenon that is not totally acceptable. Central to this type of masochism, the masochism of the cuckold, is sexual humiliation. The key to the equation is shame: if there is pain it serves as an avenue to shame. Once the equation is constructed, there is an obscure tautological plunge into the ramifications of this equation, which ends not with resolution, but with the dissipation of momentum; any added humiliation becomes redundant. The scene is purposely unpalatable; the i n a s o c l h is trying to make his witnesses uncomfortable. The spectators should sense that though they are being urged to laugh at him, the last laugh will be his, because he will use their laughter to serve his ends. A labelling of this perversity as masochism may be misleading, because masochism is such a broad and overdetermined term, that may equally describe prodding a sore tooth with the tongue, playing sports, not getting along with people, sexual subservience, and self mutilation. Of the many terms that describe configurations of desire, there are a number that are of particular relevance to Joycean sexuality. The terms "sadomasochism," "BDISM," "fetishism," and "Fem/Dom," although related to Joycean masochism, are not next of kin. Sadomasochism is an inadequate description of Joycean masochism, primarily because of the distinctions that must be drawn between sadism and masochism. Sadism and masochism should not be viewed as two halves of a greater whole. Rather, they should be considered as independent and distinct, consisting of two coherent rituals that do not interplay. For the most part, sadomasochism is a construct of the sadistic temperament, which is distinct from masochism. The bondage and degradation of BDISM are perhaps closer, but are still a significant distance from defining Joycean masochism. Degradation is crucial to Joycean masochism, but bondage is not; the servitude should be shown to be willing, in order to intensify the shame, and so that it is understood that all is done for love or worship of the torturess. Fetishism in its technical sense is important to Joycean masochism, but in its popular sense (as it appears in magazines such as Skin 11) it is not as relevant. Popular fetishism tends to be a manifestation of fashion, which does not go much further, and is not always aware of its grounding. Although fashion, and the pop cliches of power and submission are important to masochism as a bank of symbols, fetishism rarely if ever looks beneath its own shining surface. Nonetheless, the kitsch tokens of power, control and submission with which it toys are very pertinent to Joycean masochism.
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Introduction
7
FemIDom may be found on tlle Internet, in advertisements for brotllellike establishments run by dominatrixes. It may also be found in magazines such as Cruelln and Goddess. Occasionally, it makes a media appearance as a human-interest story, such as has been the case recently in coverage of a castle kingdom in Czechoslovakia, in which men act as slaves to women.2 FemIDom tends to differ from Joycean masochism, however, in that the punisl~mentsare more physically cruel, and less psycl~ologicallypointed. Furthermore, these brothels serve only as compromise for masochistic urges; as there is no prior emotional engagement, the ritual is devoid of the sense of betrayal and loss that is essential. Taken together, the terms Pageism, Lancelotism, and forced feminization come closer to describing Joycean masochism. In Pageism, a man acts as a houseboy for a woman whom he loves, because he loves her, and she may or may not reward his devotion with sexual fidelity to him. Lancelotism is not unlike Pageism: it is a subversion of chastity and courtly love, through an application of the chivalrous code so extreme as to be absurd. In Lancelotism, the woman regularly engages in sexual intercourse with a third party, a more powerful male, but continues to accept the worship of the masochist. Forced feminization differs from transvestism, in that there must be gestures of reluctance, and the feminization never negates the masculinity of the masochist, but derides it. There may also be elements of reluctant homoeroticism, as the masochist is negated as a possible object of desire for the tortures, and erased as a worthy mate for any woman. All of these terms blur into one another, without being entirely inclusive of one another. Joyce's sexual masochism draws its line through each of these. This is the hall of cracked mirrors in which I am looking for Joyce. Joyce is situated, in terms of the history of sexuality, at a time of profoundly changing attitudes, and tactics of control. A number of key and interrelated issues prominent at his time-marriage, chastity, feminism and censorshipenergized Joyce's imagination. All of these issues were involved in the slow seismic shift from a perception of sexuality as serving the ends of reproduction, to a perception of sexuality as in the service of pleasure. Joyce was deeply engaged in the conflict through which these attitudes were changed. More than simply offering him a heated dispute to which he might address his powers, however, the deeper issues and conflicts regarding marriage, chastity, feminism, censorship, and masculine identity, forged and composed, in a paradoxical fashion, his conscience and the configurations and dynamics of his psyche. The argument presented herein depends upon a recognition of the paradoxical natures of Joyce's sexuality and his subversion. In his youth, Joyce was deeply immersed in, and thorougldy indoctrinated by, tlle most vehement advocate of repression: tlle Church. Georges Bataille, in Eroticism, considers Christianity to be unlike primitive religions, insofar as, from within its frame of reference, that which is taboo is not to be considered sacred, but profane.; In the Christian tradition, there are no official times of inversion, and no sanctioned transgressions. The extreme monism of such a
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James Joyce 6 the Perverse Ideal
tradition means that repression within it will be more thorough. Althougl~ he does not draw from Bataille, Jonathan Dollimore, in Sexual Dissidence, also identifies the monistic position of the Christian tradition, and considers it to be the cause of the perception of perversion as both paradoxical and subversive. According to the Christian monistic world view, the devil is not an entity separate from God, but a portion of God possessing no independent essence, or difference, although subverting God's will from within. The heightened piety of the official position in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly in the Ireland of Joyce's day, might be considered a fierce final thrust on behalf of Christianity, as the twilight of its hegemony became increasingly recognisable. In terms of values, and cultural norms, the period into which Joyce emerged was particularly torn between extremes. On the one hand, the official position intensified its vehemence and its vigilance, and so intensified repression. The voices urging repression were not only those of priests and moralists, but also those of elements which were later-although this is a point of contention-to further the emancipation of sexuality. The extent to which sexologists have emancipated sexuality, or have, on the contrary, merely transformed the repressive Christian discourse of control, and offered it a more viable language, is still a matter of dispute, particularly as regards the apotheosis of the sexological discourse in the writings of Sigmund Freud. In the initial manifestations of sexology, it is clearer that this discourse was intended to serve and sanction the repressive project of the official position with a more viable voice. The pseudo-scientific elements in the antimasturbation campaign, for example, heightened the perceived need for surveillance of the sexuality of children, in order to confiscate their sexual energy, and enable them to be moulded into the sort of subjects that would serve the industrial, bureaucratic and imperial ends of Victorian society. In terms of practical control, its descriptions of tangible symptoms and debilities could supplement waning belief in the prospect of eternal damnation. More ambiguous are the repressive or libertarian alliances of more advanced sexologists, such as Henry Havelock E l l i ~ and , ~ Baron Richard von Krafft-Ebing,.' who developed elaborate, minute and far-ranging classificatory systems with which to describe perverse sexualities. O n the one hand, they described the multiplicities and possibilities of sexuality, and so revealed systematically, for the first time perhaps, the transformative nature of sexuality. O n the other hand, however, their elaborations of the mutability of sexuality served, for the most part, to underline the legitimacy of the only sanctioned form of sexuality; genital discharge in the womb. Sex was still to be perceived to serve not pleasure, but the reproduction of the species. The classificatory systems of Krafft-Ebing and Ellis were more or less intended to enable surveillance, by showing the vigilators what to look for, and by offering them powerful tools of classification, that could also be used as terms of condemnation. ICrafft-Ebing, in Psychopathin Sexualis, for instance, describes sexual perverts as though they were exotic flowers in a
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Introduction
9
botanical garden: an introductory placard briefly describes the species, and is followed by a row of numbered and labelled case studies. Each case study is introduced by inquiries into the health of the parents, and a description of the presence or absence of physical irregularities in the subject. Michel Foucault emphasizes that, contrary to what we might have expected of the repressive atmosphere of Victorian times, sexuality was not an unmentionable, taboo topic, but the object of an obsessively prolific discourse."n putting sexuality into discourse, authority forced it into a narrow channel, and forged the sexuality and, more importantly, the identity of the subject. The discourse of sexology, however, always spoke from beyond its topic, and never from within it, in the first person of desire, thereby not so much putting sexuality into discourse, as enclosing it in discourse. For Foucault, sexuality is "an especially dense transfer point for relations of power." In James Joyce and Sexuality, Richard Brown draws attention to Joyce's interest in the scientific and legal discourses on sexuality.7 This interest, however, was a subversive interest, through which he gathered weapons for his perverse subversion. Joyce's textual engagement with sexuality differs from that of the sexologists, in that his intent is not to speak around sexuality, but to speak from within, and for sexuality. In Dubliners, Joyce demonstrates the ways in which sexuality and the body become situated in ellipses. Through A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and into Ulysses, he learns to speak from within these ellipses. In certain ways, the speech of perverse desire-perceived as a formless energy of subversion, which takes shape as a parodical rendition of that which tries to harness it-flows unrestrained in Finnegans Wake. Coinciding with, but undermining the efforts of the official position to force sexuality into the narrow confines of genital penetration with discharge in the womb, was an underground but popular discourse, alternative to the sanctioned sexological discourse. This alternative and unsanctioned discourse was the forerunner of what has become the industry of pornography: the very nature of this discourse implied that sex was to be seen as in the service of pleasure. Although Dubliners, Portrait and Ulysses were censored, the works of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, and works with less literary credibility, such as A Splendid Sin,8 The World of Sin,9 and A Sweet Sinner,lo and even magazines such as Photo Bits, or Le Tutu,ll were available.12 There was a sense that while pulp writings were relatively uncensored, any work with ambitions to enter the sanctioned discourse of what might be considered literature was subjected to stricter censorship. Any work that straddled these discourses was attacked with heightened vehemence, as it was perceived to subvert the sanctioned position from within. As the output of pornographic material grew, sexuality was increasingly recognized as a crucial target for consumerism, and as an energy that could be utilized to support the proliferation of needs that capitalism demanded. At the same time that the official line on sexuality strove to force it to serve
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James Joyce 6 the Perverse Ideal
the narrow ends of biological reproduction, the emerging tendencies of capitalism suggested the limitless possibilities of sexuality, through widely distributed pornographic photographs, pulp pornographic novels, and titillating magazines, thereby creating for itself a market that could not be exhausted. In "Sex and Credit: Consumer Capitalism in Ulysses," Michael Tratner argues that a strong consumerist market depends upon the ability of this market to create new needs in its consumers through advertisement.13 Joyce's interest in this alternative, underground discourse of sexuality was as great, if not greater than his interest in the sexological and legal discourses on sexuality. Stanislaus suggests, in fact, that the birdgirl was modelled on images of sexy girls given away on cigarette cards. Althougl~he subverts this discourse as well as the discourse of sexology-because both of these discourses attempt to inscribe his sexuality, and compel him to assume and adhere to a conventional identity-the proliferative nature of his later texts suggest sympathy with, as much as a parody of, this new discourse. When Stephen reels home after the hell sermons, he seeks solitude in a room in which he has hidden pornography in the chimney (Port., pp. 107, 123). Joyce's works often consist of a cacophonous echoing between these two ways of conceiving sexuality. Freud's allegiances regarding these repressive and proliferative discourses are increasingly considered ambiguous, and yet it is often this ambiguity that makes him of such continuing importance to interpretations of sexuality. Where the repressive discourse of sexuality sought to identify that which subverted it from within-the perverse-the contemporary discourse of sexuality, which is in certain respects a legitimizing voice for the proliferative, capitalist discourse on sexuality, locates in Freud a subversion from within. There is the worry that, because Freud is the first voice that seems to legitimize sexual profusion, he is a locus through which tendencies of the prior, repressive and limiting discourse may have slipped unnoticed, to subvert this new discourse, and continue to channel sexual energy. Although, on the one hand, Freud introduced the important notion of polymorphous perversity, and to some extent sanctioned it by considering it to be the natural state of the infant, he at the same time developed a prescriptive position, by arguing that in "normal" development the subject leaves behind polymorphous perversity, and moves toward an acceptance of heterosexual genital sexuality. Although Joyce, somewhat contradictorily, claimed to be both ignorant of Freud, and to reject Freud passionately and unequivocally, Suzette Henke, among others, draws attention to the extent to which he may have been influenced by Freud.14 Certainly Joyce and Freud were addressing the same issues, and it is likely that Joyce did not want his thought to be clouded by a powerful contemporary. Although there is no evidence to suggest that Joyce was familiar with the writings of Georges Bataille, this argument will nevertheless draw on Bataille's interpretation of sexuality. Although contemporary with both Freud and Joyce, Bataille is somewhat anomalous in that he straddles a
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Introduction
11
number of discourses, without properly belonging to any. He is of importance to this argument because in his interpretation of sexuality he cuts out a different tract of land than Freud; a tract that is in many ways more similar to Joyce's perspective than is Freud's. Althougl~Bataille's work is nowhere near as comprehensive as Freud's, it offers an alternative focus on sexuality. Despite the fact that Freud recognizes an aggressive and murderous element as intrinsic to sexuality, he often seems to cover over the rawness of this recognition by recourse to the Oedipal drama. Violence and sacrifice are more central to sexuality in Bataille's system. Bataille's works, however, seem to express primarily, or to speak from within, a sadism implicit to conventional male heterosexuality, and so while crucial to this argument, his position will be utilized by inverting its perspective, or point of reference. Current discourses on sexuality consist, in large parts, of a debate between those who more or less adhere to Freud, and those who attempt to locate and dispense of the rigid apparatus in Freud. This work does not in any way intend to adjudicate in this debate, but to borrow from and assimilate these disparate voices. Writers such as Jacques Lacan15 and Daniel Lagache16 may be considered to exist somewhere between the extremes of these tendencies, although toward Freud, and within the framework of psychoanalysis. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, although further removed from Freud, nevertheless-as the title of their major work, Anti-Oedipus,l7 suggests-in an important sense subvert Freud from within. Foucault is yet further removed from Freud; although Freud and Foucault both consider perversion to be a culturally central phenomenon, in almost all other respects their interpretations are diametrically opposed. To a certain extent we may discern what, if Freud is considered the apotheosis of a first wave of twentieth-century discourse on sexuality, may be considered a second wave of this discourse. The most important voices in this second-wave engagement with the topic of sexuality are those of Foucault, and Deleuze and Guattari. The works of Lacan have proved to be a solid critical foundation for many analyses of Joyce. Similar conclusions to many of these Lacanian readings of Joyce are drawn here, but through different avenues, and by utilizing a different terminology. The Lacanian critique intersects this argument most clearly in its conceptions of "the gaze" and castration. The notion of the gaze is significant to this paper's description of sadistic desire as voyeuristic, and masochistic desire as exhibitionistic. Also of importance to this interpretation of Joyce is Lacan's thesis that "what is foreclosed in the Symbolic returns in the Real," and his perception of Joyce as "remaining rooted in the problem of what a father is, while all the while denying it."18 From Lagache, the conceptions of the ideal ego I narcissistic ego, and the ego ideal I superego have been adopted.19 These conceptions are come to, however, priinarily through Deleuze. This argument is most heavily dependent upon the works of Deleuze and Guattari. It is, however, selective in its use of their position; they are followed, but not unquestioningly. In the preface to Anti-Oedipus, Foucault
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James Joyce 6 the Perverse Ideal
claims that the aim or value of Anti-Oedipus is to teach people to resist fascism, within and without: "How do we rid our speech and our acts, our hearts and our pleasures, of fascism? [. . . .] The Christian moralists sought out traces of the flesh lodged deep within the soul. Deleuze and Guattari, for their part, pursue the slightest trace of fascism in the body."20 A paranoiac identification with their text will not be assumed in these pages. To do so would be to demonstrate the way in which-as they argue-subject groups become subjugating. Certainly it was never their intention to become intellectual father figures, establishing new dogmas, and imposing mindforged manacles. One of the major defections from, or modifications of their anti-oedipal position herein is the assimilation of the minoritarian and majoritarian poles of identification, as described in Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, with the masochistic and sadistic poles described in Deleuze's earlier work: Masochism: An Interpretation of Coldness and Cruelty. I feel that it is important to do this, and that the implications of this assimilation are broad, and of immense significance to conceptions of freedom. The work of Foucault is important to this argument-particularly his conception of panopticism-but will remain somewhat peripheral. His reading of sexuality depends upon a more sociological and historical focus than does this argument. This is not to dismiss the importance of the social and historical dimensions to such an interpretation. This argument differs from Foucault's, insofar as masochism is considered here as a sort of ur-force; a formless, transformative energy that manifests itself simply through the tendency to embody the inversion of prescribed ideals of a particular historical milieu. In this way, while masochism is inscribed by the social, it is always in reaction against predominant hierarchies and prescribed ideals. Althougl~I would accept, and will incorporate Foucault's contention that sexuality is drawn by the discourse of power, more important to this reading is the sense in which sexuality is not inscribed so much as circumscribed by discourse. This distinction implies a somewhat unjust oversimplification of Foucault's position; however the scope of this work precludes a more adequate engagement with Foucault's theory. The focus of this argument is different to that of Foucault's. It is not that sexuality is herein perceived to be an unequivocally revolutionary energy, but rather-following Anti-Oedipus, and connections drawn between this and The Cold and the Cruel-that there are both reactionary and revolutionary trends in sexuality. Other theorists who are of importance to this argument are Julia Kristeva, Leo Bersani, and Jonathan Dollimore. I
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Introduction
13
celebration, and not as a refutation of Freud. Bersani considers Freud's repeatedly thwarted efforts to draw conclusions about the subject of his discourse-desire-to replicate the Freudian processes of repression, and the return of the repressed. He considers this aspect of the Freudian text to embody an irresolvable conflict between two contradictory tendencies of thought; the scientific and anthropological project, which seeks to conclude, and an artistic and imaginative agency, which seeks to proliferate and continue. The urge to cancel and conclude may be seen in Freud's uneasy insistence on defining sex and desire through their negation, as genital discharge, rather than as ascending excitement. Sex and pleasure, Bersani argues, are perceived by Freud as the descent from a singular peak, to which desire has driven the subject; it is the release of tension in orgasm, rather than a meandering across "a thousand plateaus." The Freudian text attempts to cancel, or repress, the continuative nature of desire, by forcing it-like genital sexuality-to move toward a conclusion: the repression of desire. Desire, however, will not be cancelled or defined; it inserts paradoxes into the text, and disappears only to re-emerge elsewhere. Bersani's inquiries into Freud's uneasy definitions of pleasure lead him to uncover a masocl~ismthat is implicit in the nature of sexuality. It is this masocl~isticaspect of desire that Bersani considers Freud to shy away from in his efforts to define pleasure and sexuality. For Jonathan Dollimore, in Sexual Dissidence, the sexual, or more specifically, perversion, is the battleground on which is waged a fierce dialectics between dominance and dissidence. It is his position that "the challenge of the perverse lies less in the once influential psychosexual category of the polymorphous perverse than in the paradoxical perverse or the perverse dynamic. If perversion subverts it is not as a unitary, pre-social libido, or an original plenitude, but as a transgressive agency inseparable from a dynamic intrinsic to social process."23 Where Dollimore, however, does not do much more than touch upon the topic of masochism, this argument proposes that the paradoxical nature of the perverse is nowhere so evident as in masochism such as Joyce's. Masochism is a central concern of what has been described as the secondwave of twentieth-century discourse on sexuality. The term "masochism" was coined by Krafft-Ebing, in reference to the writings of Baron Leopold von Sacher-Masocl1.24 There are, however, a number of significant differences between the masochism of Masoch and that of Joyce. The implications of attempting to offer too rigid a definition of masochism will at all times be kept in mind. It seems that there is something in the nature of masochism that resists definition. The topic of masochism always presented difficulties for Freud, forcing him to develop and redevelop a number of contradictory interpretations of sexuality. Masochism presented such difficulties for Freud, because of the fact that it consists in the willing and paradoxical subversion of what Freud considers to be the proper, or normal ends of sexuality; that is, genital discharge in the womb, and the release of unplea-
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James Joyce 6 the Perverse Ideal
surable tension. After Freud, Theodore Reik is the first important voice to offer an interpretation of masochism. His description of masochism is powerful and insightful, and although he works from within Freudianism, he is willing to mangle, although not to dispense of, the Freudian apparatus. The argument herein will often move between the Freudian, tlle Reikean, and the Deleuzian interpretations of masocllism. Deleuze's interpretation of masocllism, in Sacher-Masoch:An Interpretation,2j is without a doubt the most crucial work on masochism, with implications that go far beyond what might-no doubt mistakenly-be seen to be the somewhat narrow topic of his consideration. Althougl~Deleuze does, in this work, for tlle most part operate within the Freudian position, and rely upon Oedipal terminology, the argument is highly charged by what might be considered the growing storm that will occur in the refutation of the essential nature of the Oedipal triangle, in Anti-Oedipus. It is my opinion that, through the vehemence of this attack, Deleuze and Guattari direct readers away from drawing immensely important parallels between The Cold and the Cruel and Anti-Oedipus. I will resist the tendencies, which Deleuze and Guattari encourage, to see The Cold and the Cruel as somehow outdated by Anti-Oedipus, and instead read Anti-Oedipus by the light of, or as an extension of, The Cold and the Cruel. The following manifestations of sexual masochism shall be discussed in relation to Joyce: flagellomania, the sexualization of shame, the sexualization of alienation that drives the willing cuckold, and forced feminization. Although all of these are related, and typically overlapping phenomena, it is perhaps best not to view them first as a unified phenomenon, but as distinct compulsions that move in orbit around the masochistic drive. Of these masochistic compulsions, flagellomania is the most typical and well documented. This paper's analysis of flagellomania is indebted to Ian Gibson's The English Vice: Sex, Shame and Beating in Victorian England and After. Gibson makes it clear that, given the published evidence available to them, and the evidence of their own sense, the schoolmasters of Britain must have been aware of "the dangers and delights associated with flogging children."26 The Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau, and William Acton's The Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs were both widely read, and in both of these it is made clear that corporal punisl~mentapplied to the bottom has a strong sexualizing effect on the beater, on the beaten, and on any witnesses of the beating. Even if these educators and their administrators were unfamiliar with either of these widely read works, there was a plethora of pornography, and newspapers columns where semi-pornographic correspondence revealed the sexual elements involved in the formal beating of children. Given all of this, Gibson asks, how are we to explain "the prevalence of flagellomania in Britain and the survival of beating in schools until our own time?" He also analyses the
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Introduction
15
condition of those wounded by this system: "Not only is [the masochist] sexually impotent without having recourse to a fantasy which places him in the position of a naughty child of six or seven, but he has to live with the shame of knowing that he is unable to reveal his true self to other people."27 Gibson offers a thorough history of the representation and interpretation of the sexually stimulating effects of beating, which may be summarized as follows. The earliest instance of sexually overt beating that he cites is the beating of Encolpius by Oenothea, the priestess of Priapus, in the Satyricon. She whips his belly with green nettles, in order to render his flagging member "as stiff as a horn."28 From the thirteenth century, he refers to the Spanish epic, Poewza de Myo Cid, "in which there is a beating scene (in the "Afrenta de Corpes" incident) with strongly sadistic overtones."29 The English Vice contains a plate of an early fifteenth-century flagellation attributed to the Catalan painter Luis Borrassa.30 In it, Christ is tied to a thin pillar in the center, and there are two men, one to the left and one to the right. They hold the handles of their "cats" at such a level that there can be no doubt that these are intended to suggest erect penises. Furthermore, lashes of the whips are clearly indicative of urine or of semen caught in the trajectory of its ejaculation. The lashes of the left figure, whose eyes are half closed, spray up toward Christ's chest and chin. The figure on right is turned half away, smiling back over his shoulder at Christ. The lashes of his whip arc downward into the lower right corner as though he was urinating. The ropy whiteness of the three lashes, however, suggests semen. Gibson also refers to fifteenth-century misericords at the Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon, Whalley Church, Lancashire, Manchester Cathedral, Sherborne Abbey, and Henry VII's Chapel in Westminster Abbey. In the misericord at Stratford-upon-Avon, a "grotesque hooded figure [ . . . ] is applying the birch to the inverted posteriors of [a] lady," and his penis is uncovered."l Pico della Mirandola (1463-94), the great Italian humanist, refers to sexual beating in Disputationes Adversus Astrologiam Divinatricem (1502, Ch. 27). Stephen refers to Pico in "Proteus" (U., p. 50). In the Disputationes, Mirandola describes an acquaintance of an acquaintance: There is now alive, says he, a M a n of a prodigious, and almost unheard of lzind of Lechery: For he is never inflamed to pleasure, but when he is whipt; and yet he is so intent on the Act, and longs for the Strolzes with such an Earnestness, that he blames the Flogger that uses him gently, and is never thoroughly the master of his wishes unless the Blood starts, and the Whip rages smartly o'er the Wicked Limbs of the Monstec This Creature begs this Favour of the Woman he is to enjoy, brings her a rod himself, soalz'd and harden'd in Vinegar a Day before for the same Purpose, and entreats the Blessing of a Whipping from the Harlot o n his Knees; and the more smartly he is whipt, he rages the more eagerly, and goes the same Pace both
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James Joyce 6 the Perverse Ideal
16
to pleasure and Pain. X singular Instance of one who finds a Delight in the Midst of Torment; and he is not a Man very vicious in other Respects, he aclznowledges his Distemper, and abhors it. 32
An epigram by Sir John Davies (1569-1626) describes the way in which the sexualization of beating may result in fixation and psychic impotence, which may only be alleviated by sexual beating. When Francis comes to solace with his whore, He sends for rods and strips himself stark naked; For his lust sleeps, and will not rise before By whipping of the wench it be awa1zed:j.j
In De Flngrorum Usu in Re Veneria 6 Lumborum Renumque Oficio ("On the Use of Rods in Venereal Matters and in the Office of the Loins and Reins") the German doctor Johann Heinrich Meiboin (1590-1655) attempts to establish as a fact that flogging of the lower back and bottom can cause erection in the person being beaten, and to reconcile this seeming paradox. "This work was first published at Leyden in 1629 and went through numerous editions. It was translated into German, French and E n g l i s l ~ . " ~ ~ Meibom's interpretation of the sexual qualities of beating were widely accepted by the medical world, and the outline of his argument, if not the mechanics of it, continues to be amenable to, if not a source for many efforts to understand the phenomenon. "During the seventeenth century his work was rehashed in several popular volumes of medical divulgation, among the most famous Genenthropeiae (1642) by Giovanni Sii~ibaldi."~.j For Meibom, semen is produced, "not in the testicles, but in two seminal vesicles or vessels" which are located close to the kidneys. Flogging of the lower back and buttocks can warm this fluid, causing it to descend to the testicles, from where it may be ejaculated. A cooling or sluggishness of the lumbar region causes impotence, so that flogging of this part might act as a cure, as a rough but effective aphrodisiac. "It is all very straightforward, very mechanical, a simple matter of hot and cold."36 "By the end of the seventeenth century, Meibom's ideas were well known to the educated men of Europe, including theologians."37 Meibom's treatise on the sexual effects of flagellation implicated the Catholic Church, with its utilization of self-flagellation as a form of penance. This situation was exacerbated when Abbe Boileau published Historin flagellnntium, de recto et perverso flagrorum us apud Christianos ("the History of the Flagellant, and of the Correct and Perverse Use of the Rod among Christians") (Paris, 1700)"s In this book, Boileau uses Meibom's findings to argue that, although beating the shoulders and upper arms-"upper disciplem-might be more dangerous to the body, the beating of the lower back and buttocks-"lower discipline"-was more dangerous to the soul, and so should be discontinued.
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Introduction
17
Many churcl~inenimmediately spoke out against Boileau's insinuations, among them Jean-Baptiste Theirs, who published his riposte, Critique de I'Histoire des Flagellans, at Paris in 1703.39 Theirs does not comment on Boileau's use of Meibom's ideas, because he feels that to d o so would be morally dangerous. He avoids the issue, and argues that Christ was the first practicioner of voluntary flagellation, because He could have prevented His flagellation had He wished to do so. "The contents of Boileau's book, and of Theirs's commentary upon it, became widely known in England as the result of the publication of a volume ascribed to John Lois Delolme: The History of the Flagellants: Otherwise, of Religious Flagellations among Different Nations, and Especially among Christians. Being a paraphrase and Commentary on the Historia Flagellantium of the Abbe' Boileau, Doctor of the Sorbonne, Canon of the Holy Chapel, etc. By one who is not a Doctor of the Sorbonne (London, 1777)."40 Sexual beating is depicted in 1748, in John Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, better known as Fanny Hill. But what yet increased the oddity of this strange fancy was the gentleman being young; whereas it generally attacks, it seems, such as are, through age, obliged to have recourse to this experiment, for quickening the circulation of the juices, and determining a conflux of the spirits of pleasure toward those flagging, shrivelly parts, that rise to life only by virtue of those titillating ardours created by the discipline of their opposites, with which they have so surprising a consent.4' Cleland makes clear in this passage that the sexual compulsion to be beaten cannot wholly be accounted for as a remedy for lack of sex drive, because once this gentleman is well whipped he proves to be sexually potent. Such ideas began to appear in English newspapers and periodicals with increasing frequency. A letter to the editor of The Gentleman's Magazine in 1780 condemns flogging in schools, describing school masters as "birchenscepter'd monarchs," and as "cloistered Dionysii" who inflict "severe, shameful and indelicate" beatings on "the defenceless nudities" of their pupils. He considers this to be "an obscene custom," and "a humiliating treatment." Gibson remarks: "That such a forthright comment could have been published in a respectable and widely-read journal in 1780 prompts one to marvel at the hypocrisy of the Victorian age that was to follow some fifty years later. For 'A.B.' [the writer of this letter] clearly had n o doubt about what nowadays we would call the 'sadistic' element in whipping."42 The first part of Rousseau's Confessions was published in 1782, four years after his death, and it immediately became widely read throughout Europe. Toward the start of the Confessions, Rousseau describes being beaten by an attractive woman at a very young age. He confesses that this had a sexual effect upon him, and that from this point on he could never
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James Joyce 6 the Perverse Ideal
become sexually aroused unless he imagined or placed himself into situations that reiterated the terms of this event. He urged educators not to beat children, so that others might avoid becoming obsessed by this perversity. Gibson comments: "After the publication of the Confessions the dangers of beating young children on their buttocks should have been obvious to all. Where Britain was concerned, Rousseau's warning was heeded by some doctors but not by the teachers or by Parliament. This despite the fact that the Confessions were well known in the country, the first translation having appeared in 1783."43 William Acton's The Functions and Disorders of the Re-Productive Organs in Youth, in Adult Age, and in Advanced Life: Considered in Their Physiological, Social, and Psychological Relations, was first published in 1857. By 1975, it was in its sixth edition. Acton's warnings about the sexual effects of beating are cleat Because beating of the lower back and buttocks could be aphrodisiac, as Meibom had explained, it was best not to expose children to this, because it could lead to masturbation, which he considered to be the gravest danger. Gibson expresses astonishment that the educational authorities of the country still did not listen, and children continued to be flogged, birched and caned on the bare buttocks.44 Some of the tactics employed in this argument will possibly seem objectionable. The most crucial of these is the reading of Bloom's adult sexuality and full-blown masochism as a logical development of Stephen's adolescent sexuality. We do not need to posit Bloom's awareness of the awful humiliations that overtake him, or to equate them with Stephen's hallucination of his dead mother, to see that Bloom's Circean adventure is deeply apposite. The original intention of this study was to limit the scope to the masochism in "Circe," but a linking of Stephen and Bloom through Joyce was arrived at in part through a sense that the death of Rudy was an inadequate explanation of Bloom's masochism. Bloom's Jewishness is often considered to play a part in his masochism but, like Rudy's death, this leads us away from seeking the sources of Bloom's masochism in Stephen, and acknowledging the extent of Joyce's preoccupation with this perversity. The death of Rudy is an example of the way in which Joyce's confession of masturbatory masochistic fantasy utilizes innumerable disguises: it consists of compulsive, exhibitionistic gestures of exposure and concealment. Joyce's letters, and the testimony of Nora, reveal that Joyce had masochistic inclinations. "Araby," "An Encounter" and "The Sisters" present the development of a young man's sexuality, and show us the forces and reactions that produce a sexual masochist. Stephen is an autobiographical character We see in Stephen the growth of a masochistic character, who exhibits his own masochism in many ways. Bloom is not an autobiographical character in any obvious sense, but he is a sexual masochist, through whom Joyce presents many of his own masochistic traits; traits that he explored in Exiles. and to a lesser extent in "The Dead."
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Introduction
19
In "Circe," Stephen's and Bloom's faces become one with Shakespeare's, and they are all three crowned by the horns of the cuckold. Cuckoldry is central to Joyce's masochism, and to the theory of artistic creation that Stephen expounds in Ulysses. It is in this theory, also, that Joyce suggests that we might seek the artist, and his motivations for creating, in his work, but that we should not assume the obvious in determining the author's autobiographical point of reference; he is as likely to be the old ghost as the prince. In Stephen, and the young protagonists of "The Sisters," "Araby" and "An Encounter," we see the forces and reactions that contribute to sexual masochism: in Gabriel, Richard and Bloom, we see the fruition of this masochism. Objections might also be raised to my interpretation of "Circe." In "Circe" we see the desires and fears of Stephen and Bloom, disguised by something like a dream censor. The desires and fears of Bloom and Stephen flow in and out of one another, in the sense that the narration focuses on Bloom, and then moves through an indeterminate middle ground, before focussing on Stephen. It moves back and forth from Stephen to Bloom a few times, passing through the straightforward narrative each time. If the dream show in "Circe" reiterates history, or the text, this is in addition to the apparition of Stephen's and Bloom's fears and desires. If not, why does Stephen attempt to strike his mother, and instead strike the lamp? This is the clearest evidence of the nature of the juxtaposition of the narration of the dream and the narration of the linear, realistic text. It suggests that the distortions are occurring in the minds of Stephen and Bloom, or that these distortions represent what is going on in the minds of Stephen and Bloom. Joyce is not simply spinning a yarn; in his work he is engaging the dragons of his mind. His themes are the battles he has fought with his own conscience, his own desires, and his own fears. Despite what anyone might say, Joyce is a personal writer, and nowhere is this truer than in the searing confessional of "Circe." The chapter may explain the psychodynamic potentialities of the book, or it may be a reiteration of history, but this is avoiding the issue. In "Circe," Joyce is addressing the human condition, and in particular his own. Joyce did not go to the trouble of writing "Circe" to play off of the masochistic, feminine stereotype of the Jew, or so that he could present an experiment in metanarrative, or a parody of the Abbey "style"; he has much more invested. It is the personal commitment, the self-engagement, that drives this chapter out at us. Although we are not to read the psychodrama as in the minds of Stephen and Bloom, this psychodrama represents what is going on in the minds of Stephen and Bloom. The text does not simply represent what is latent, or what is subconscious, however. Stephen sees his dead mother, and Bloom is fantasizing about sexual masochism. They do not see exactly what we see, but we see the gist of what they feel. Stephen does not sit with an empty mind waiting while the text reiterates itself, and then jump up and smash the lamp in order to lead the action out
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of the brothel. Rather, he is engaged in a climactic conflict with the dread and self-recrimination that have swamped him since the death of his mother: "Look. He's white" (U., p. 682). He is not white simply because he is drunk, and has not eaten; he is up against something more. He is not reading the words that we have before us on the page, but he sees something that is represented by what we see written on the page. Stephen smashes the lamp because the death of his mother is on his mind. Bloom becomes, not a woman, but a masochist's parody of a woman, because he has on his mind the fact that the most powerful component of his masochistic fantasy has passed from his dreams into life on this day. In both cases, the dreams are influenced by a kind of empathy for women, and by an excruciating sympathy for the sufferings of women. It is this sympathy, and not the memory of his mother, that Stephen tries to destroy. Bloom has Molly cuckold him because Stephen feared May dragging him "with [her] together down" (U., p. 57), and because Stephen fears Dilly's lank seaweed hair dragging him "with her together down." It is a Daedalean escape. Because of an excess of sympathy and love, Bloom distances himself from Molly, by encouraging his own cuckolding. For Stephen the sea is the agonizingly sentimental goo of the mother goddess. Bloom avoids this abjection by giving Molly wings, and making her one of the birdgirls, subject to a static, but nonetheless sexual, admiration. He makes her seem far off and untouchable to him, not possessed by him, in order to recharge his desire for her. It is humane, but it is also selfish. Despite use of the term masochism, and the linking of Stephen, Joyce and Bloom, this is not an attempt to cinch Joyce's life and works into a reductionist, monistic psychology. I have never considered reducing Joyce's sexuality to a single trait. At least until the conclusion of Ulysses, however, masochism is the predominant sexual trait, and it inverts and overrides Joyce's other sexualities. I will also acknowledge that Bloom is other things than a masochist, just as a gay man is other things than a gay man. Masochism necessarily entails a psychic dualism, or multiplicity; the masochism must work against the interests of the non-masochistic self. Deleuze suggests that, for this reason, masochism serves liberty, in that it dismantles-even if only temporarily-the inauthentic interests of the socially constructed self. In an important sense, there is no such thing as a masochist: masochism is always only a psychic trend, which operates against the construction of individual identity. We call someone a masochist when we sense that this psychic trend is particularly powerful in that person. Masochism can never stand alone: it entails that the subject which it inhabits has interests other than its own. It may only take form, in fact, or become apparent, as the inverse of these interests. Typical examples of the socially constructed identities which masochism dismantles include gender (what a man should be), and the sense that a mate's affections should be monogamous, that his or her body is the property of the subject. Masochistic rituals do not consist of sadism's quantification of strokes, or its mapping
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Introduction
21
of the inert body, but of the parody of social constructs of identity: an adult may be spanked like a child, a husband may watch while his wife has sex with another man, and a man may be dressed like a woman. It is a mistake to look for a consistent stance in Bloom. The best we can do is locate predominances in his character and in his attitudes. Bloom's masochistic traits offer perhaps the strongest impediments to our attempts to define Bloom. A study of masochism in Joyce reveals a psychology that is anything but monistic.
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CHAPTER ONE
The Cracked Looking-Glass
"Dark v ~ r g ~ nsald " ; the hairy j'outh, "thj' father stern, abhowd, "Rzvets rnj3tenfold chams w h d e stdl on h g h n ~ s p m soars; t " S o r n e t ~ n ~an e s eagle screamng 112 the skj; sometunes a lion, "Stalkmg u p o n the mountams, & sometunes a whale I lash " T h e ragmg fathomless abjlss; anon a serpent foldzng "Around the pdlars of Urthona, and round th)' dark l m b s , " O n the Canadlan wdds I fold; feeble rnj3s p m t folds. "For chaln'd beneath I rend these caverns: w h e n thou brmgest food s t o behold th)' face" I howl m)' 1031:and m)' red e j ~ seek " I n vain! these clouds roll t o & b o , & hlde thee b o r n rn)' slght.1
In sadism and masochism, the tools of authority-the whip, the cane and the stern command-and the experiences of loss and betrayal, become objects or conditions of desire. For Deleuze, although masochism and sadism are distinct, they are equally dependent upon a resexualization that mirrors a prior desexualization; a resexualization in which the desexualization is sexualized while retaining its qualities of desexualization. Sexuality traces a path back through its repression, reclaiming lost ground, by sexualizing that which served to shut it off initially. In the Oedipus complex, and in mourning and melancholia, Freud presents two distinct models of loss. The desexualization is based on the loss imposed by authority, in the oedipal triangulation, and on the authority of loss, in n a r c i ~ s i s m . ~ In the Oedipus complex, the subject makes an identification with prohibitive authority. This identification is motivated by a fear that this authority will punish the subject if he does not renounce an object of desire. In order to accommodate the prohibition, psychic energy that was allotted to the desire of this object is negated when another quantity of psychic energy is allotted to the imaginative recreation of the prohibitive authority. When the authority has been internalized, the likelihood of transgression, and thus the threat of punishment, is diminished. The portion of its internality that the subject has given over to the voice and eyes of authority now serves as prison guard in a body that has become a panopticon.
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For Freud, the object of desire in this equation is the mother, and the prohibiting authority is the father. The internalization of the father as the superego is a reiteration of a cannibalization of the fathers in a primal scene, in which primal sons gorged on their fathers, on guilt, and on fear. In the Oedipus complex, the son competes with his father for the presence of his mother. He imagines his own jealousy and competitive ill-will for his father mirrored back at him, and he becomes suspicious that the father might do him harm, as he has imagined doing harm to the father. His fears seem to be confirmed when he sees that his mother has no penis, and he imagines that his father has cut off her penis in order to put her in the position of one who attends to those who have penises. He fears that the father may do this to him also, and so he clings more tenaciously to his own penis, and identifies more strongly with those who have penises, such as the father. He attempts to become more like the father, and a portion of his mind gives itself over to imagining itself to be the father. It displays itself, to say to the father: "I am one of your kind." The familial elements of this equation, however, are perhaps overstated, to the detriment of its credibility. Castration anxiety is perhaps best read as a fear of symbolic castration, and the father and mother as symbolic mothers and fathers: it is all allegory. In "1914: One Wolf or Several," Deleuze and Guattari argue that Freud was wrong to reduce the Wolf Man's tree full of wolves to a single wolf, representative of the father. If the voice of prohibitive authority is internalized, it seems unlikely that it is internalized suddenly, in the trauma of a cataclysmic primal scene. The strength of the Oedipal equation should be its generality, its simplicity, and its tendency to reiterate. Socialization consists of learning to restrict urges and desires that are considered inappropriate by external authorities. Once you know without asking whether something is considered wrong, you have established a superego. The superego is less the father, than a succession of prohibiting authorities. This triangulation describes a dialectical relation between desire, the object of desire, and the prohibiting authority. It denotes the bare bones of a situation in which we must compete, and cannot always have what we want. In his analysis of mourning and melancholia, Freud presents another model of inhibited desire. In this case, energy is directed toward an object of desire that is suddenly removed. In order to take time to adjust to this loss, the subject does not redirect this energy immediately, but withdraws it, and dedicates it to the imaginative reconstitution of the missing object. This is the normal process of mourning; when it continues too long, because of ambivalence toward the missing object, however, there is melancholia. Just as in the Oedipus complex, where a portion of the self is given over to identification, so here is a portion of the self given over as ground on which to conjure the lost object of desire. In this narcissism, the desired object both is and is not distinct from the self. Through attempting to method-act the desired object back into being, an illusory alterity is set up within the self, and he parades before himself.
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For the purposes of this argument, the object of this narcissistic desire will be no more considered to relate to a single external object than the superego is related to the father. The love for the mother is likely to be the first love that is withdrawn in order to create a piece of the mother within the self, a mother whose love may not be withheld or denied. After the mother, however, there will be a succession of objects whose love, for one reason or another, will have to be stolen in this way. Eventually, the object of this narcissistic love will become a zone of conjuring, on which he will become that one who will love him, by dressing in the stolen clothes of women he has known. Loathing, as well as fear, serves to uphold the desexualization. In both of these models of loss, there is a perceived separation of body and soul, that is considered as a wounding, or a potential for wounding of the body of the self, or the body of the object of desire. This wounding comes to be seen as abjection; as a particularly sordid state of non-being, in which the body wallows in indifferentiation. In the Oedipus complex, it is the body of the self that is lost to abjection, and in narcissism it is the physical body of the beloved. In the Oedipal and the narcissistic models, the self gains autonomy by renouncing the external object of desire. The desexualizing identification is founded on these renunciations. Both of these models of loss preclude loving, because in his approach to an external object of desire the subject is stricken with a sense of abjection. This abjection is triggered by the external object's threat to impinge on his autonomy, and blur his differentiation. In the oedipal equation, abjection resides in the perception of the desired object as castrated, and the fear that approaching the desired object might result in the castration of the self. In the narcissistic model, abjection resides in the refusal to redirect love or desire toward an object from beyond the self, because of a fear of renewed loss, and also because of an unwillingness to renounce the internalized object of desire. Matching these two models of loss, are two strategies for coping with renounced desire, and for deploying abjection between identification and projection. Although Freud at times distinguishes between no fewer than four types of desexualization, and at times contains them all within the category of repression,; I will follow the example of a number of writers-such as Deleuze and Bersani-who reduce these to two, and make a sharp distinction between repression and sublimation.4 In The Cold and the Cruel, Deleuze notes these two types of desexualization, and asks whether there might not be "a third alternative which would be related not to the functional interdependence of the ego and the superego, but to the structural split between them?"' He never says so explicitly, but his rejection of the conception of sadomasochism as a single complex makes it clear that this third alternative is itself double sided. In these distinct strategies of self-enclosure and selfsubsistence, either desire is expelled, or desire is withdrawn. The oedipal model of loss results in repression. The identification with the prohibitive authority becomes predominant in the person. Although the
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hydraulic model of desire has been criticized, it is helpful, particularly for a study of Joyce, who uses imagery of liquid so extensively in his pictures of both loathing and desire. In terms of this model, we may see the repression as a seizure or damming of the flowing of the urges. This damming serves not only to negate the anarchic threat of this free-flowing energy, but also to colonize this wild energy so that it may power society's psycho-electrics machine. The repression is dependent upon the establishment of a fixed identity, a static and essential self. The subject dreads the polymorphous quality of his desires, and to evade the abjection that emanates from these urges, he affirms and reaffirms his identity. This identification corresponds to what Deleuze and Guattari describe as the majoritarian identification. The subject situates himself in a series of dominant terms along a grid of binary oppositions. It is the dominant term in which he situates himself, because he is reiterating the choice he made in renouncing his love for the mother. He chooses to stand with power, and to turn aside any threat that power may pose to him, by participating in its oppressive project. The personality thus produced may be described as paranoiac, because the biggest threat, against which it must remain vigilant, is the threat from within: the indifferentiation, and the polymorphous urges which he renounced in order to identify with the master race. His originary state makes suspect his place among power and, because of his own vigilance against this threat arising from within, he can anticipate the vengeance which power would level at his defection. In "The Psychoanalytic Model of the Personality," Daniel Lagache emphasizes that, just as the superego subdivides the mind, so the superego itself may be subdivided.6 Initially, the superego represents the internalization of external authority. Once the superego is established, the subject may respond to its pressure by dividing himself further, into the ego ideal, which seeks esteem before the superego, and the ideal ego, which glorifies the body wounded by the superego. In repression, the superego and the ego ideal, which seeks esteem before the superego through the thoroughness of its repression, gaze at one another. The mother, and desire, are hidden away, and if they make too much racket they are projected beyond the self, where they may be dealt with more effectively. The narcissistic model of loss results in sublimation. In terms of the hydraulic model of desire, although the flow of the urges has been forced underground, it has not ceased to flow. In the sublimation, the predominant identification is with the object of desire. The authority that removed the loved object has been disavowed in the recreation of this object in the imaginary. The goal of the subject is evasion; evasion of the facts, initially, and later evasion of all that threatens to impede the free flow of its desire. His initial contraction has meant that an identification with the father has failed to predominate in the symbolic realm. This failure has resulted in the subject's unwillingness to coalesce into a stable identity. His beloved is dependent upon his ability to resist a singular identification, in that it is his
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ability to be both he and she which animates her; his desire must flow freely as it is the blood in her veins. Where the repressive choice is paranoiac, the sublimative choice is schizophrenic. It is not enough, however, to consider the sublimative identification to be an identification with the mother. Bisexuality, or rather, polymorphous ambivalence, rather than homosexuality, proves to be the factor that disintegrates Freud's attempts to account for desire, and to fix it in a representational structure. The binary pole to which paranoiac identification is opposed is not simply an identification with the mother, but an indeterminacy, or fluidity of desire: An inherent indifference of our desires to their objects makes our desiring relations to the world mobile and experimental. In their important work Anti-Oedipzts, Gilles Deleuze and FClix Guattari have virulently attacked the notion that desire is necessarily "recorded" in the terms of the Oedipus complex. In fact, even within those terms, desire remains unstable [ . . . . ] light, and shifting, identifications may save us from the curse of 'having a character' [ . . . . I 7
Central to Deleuze and Guattari's model of schizophrenic sexuality is the notion of becomings; a metamorphic flowing through minoritarian identifications. The first becoming is becoming woman, followed by, deeper still, becoming animal, becoming molecular, and becoming indiscernible. The becomings serve to evade the closure and the stasis of the majoritarian identification. In terms of the subdivision of the superego that Lagache describes, in sublimation the narcissistic ego looks into the ideal ego, the "glorification of the wounded body." If the wound is the absence of the beloved from the real, in her reconstitution in the symbolic he draws the tenor of her absence into the qualities of her beauty. The sublimative choice constitutes what Deleuze and Guattari describe as a minoritarian identification. In the meeting of the narcissistic ego (that which desires) and the ideal ego (the wounded object of desire), the subject becomes desire itself, lover and loved one unto himself, through a rejection of the authority of the real. In order to continue to produce desire, he must continually seek his position outside of power, and be ready to relinquish any identifications he might make with the real. His desire is always evasive of the truth. It is secretive, because it is internal. Sadistic and masochistic sexualities are tautologies of denial and loss: they are reiterations of a primal wounding, resexualizations of the desexualization. These resexualizations are dependent upon projections, which accommodate a prior identification. Projection, like identification, is a means of dealing with threat, but in the projection the threat to be parried arises from within. In sadism, there is a resexualization of the repression. This resexualization works through the mechanism of the return of the repressed, whereby that
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which is foreclosed in the imagined returns in the real. When the pressure of repressed desire becomes too great to be held back by the identification with authority, the subject projects the desire for which he feels guilty onto an object of desire beyond the self. The desire which he wishes to cancel is considered to originate in her, and he passes the blame for his desire onto her; she shouldn't have been wearing such a short skirt, or whatever. He stands beside the prohibitive authority and says: "look what I have found trying to reach within our walls." Through symbolic gestures, he reiterates the cancellation of his own desire, on the external object onto whom he has projected these guilty desires. Through the thoroughness of this cancellation, the ego ideal seeks esteem before the prohibitive authority, and attempts to re-establish his fraternity with this authority; a fraternity that was jeopardized by the emergence of this threat from within. In masochism, there is a resexualization of the sublimation. The ideal ego, the glorification of the wounded body, is drawn in a sexual tone, and observed with masturbatory earnestness. In the union of the narcissistic ego and the ideal ego there is a union of desire and the object of desire. Authority and prohibition only impede on this virtual perfection, and so he projects authority onto an object of desire from beyond the self. As a double of the father, this external object does not intrude on his production of desire; far from prohibiting desire, she and authority force the subject to produce desire. Through this ritual, he demonstrates that he needs neither him nor her. In sadism, the abjection of the sadist's body is projected onto an object of desire. The masochist, on the other hand, absorbs the abjection of an external object of desire into his own body, with the same movement whereby he projects the superego onto her, and so glorifies her wounded body, showing her to lack nothing. Sexuality is grounded in dualities. It is the nature of sexuality that there must be an object of desire (real or imagined) and a subject of desire. Furthermore, the sexual stands in opposition to the non-sexual: whether or not there exists an energy which may be considered specifically sexual, and how far the scope of what may be considered sexual extends, are issues which must be considered. Patterns of dualism emerge in Joyce's presentation of sexuality. These patterns, and the nature of these dualities, correspond in important ways to those presented by a number of other writers, and it might be useful to compare Joyce's use of dualities to these. The most important correspondence is not so much in the nature of these dualities, as the way in which they are dissolved into one another, and their hierarchical relations are inverted, resulting in a transgressive aesthetic. In his earlier writings, Freud distinguishes between ego instincts and libidinal instincts.8 Later, he proposes a distinction between a death instinct and an Eros instinct.9 The extent of the differentiation between these instincts is a point of contention in this issue, and a point through which a number of
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writers have entered the Freudian body to criticize and deconstruct Freud's argument. The death instinct works to divide, or to disintegrate and destroy composite unities, such as the individual being, or static identity, while the Eros instinct serves to perpetuate and consolidate these unities As soon as he introduces this distinction between the Eros instinct and the death instinct, Freud recognizes that these models are not wholly distinct, and that they are often, if not always, found at some point in a process of fusion or defusion. He argues, in fact, that the death instinct, which is essentially silent, may only be witnessed in fusion with the Eros instinct, as sadism or masochism.l0 Throughout his writings, Freud acknowledges that the issue of sexual energy is a point of confusion for him, as are the natures of the death and Eros instincts. This alignment of dualities influences Freud's definition of sexuality. In the "Three Essays" Freud presents " t w o distinct ontologies of sexuality itself." "From the teleological point of view, Freud will call the 'kind of pleasure due to the excitation of erotogenic zones' 'fore pleasure,' and 'the other kind due to the discharge of sexual substances' will be known as 'end pleasure.' "11 Before the awakening of genital sexuality, all sexuality will consist of excitation. The discharge of excitation will apply only to genital sexuality, but even the end pleasure of genital sexuality is dependent upon fore pleasure being driven to a certain pitch. The release of tension, which Freud eventually defines as pleasure, "consists simply in the extinction of excitement." End pleasure is considered to be the "principal act" of human sexuality, to which the pleasure which precedes end pleasure is subordinate. Sexuality is thereby defined through its negation, through the orgasm that concludes desire. Freud's argument assumes that only the end pleasure of genital emission, the extinction of desire, serves sexuality, while the repetitive, unpleasurable pleasure of foreplay and arousal serves the death instincts. His discussion of pleasure seems to stall at the points at which he recognizes paradox as the essence of sexuality, insofar as it consists of a pleasurable unpleasure. More significantly, when Freud attempts to push through this paradox, he finds it to repeat itself endlessly, or until he cancels its circuitous repetition by a return to the topic of end pleasure. "Generally Freud tends to speak of sexual excitement as if it were something like an itch, or an urge to sneeze. But in sex preceding discharge [ . . . . ] we have an itch that seeks nothing but its own prolongation, even its own intensification." Sex preceding discharge, preceding its own negation, heightens and prolongs pain: this "pleasure is somehow distinct from satisfaction, perhaps even identical to a kind of pain."l2 When, in "Beyond the Pleasure Principle," Freud unites the pleasure principle with the sexual instincts, it seems that he has cancelled out fore pleasure, and so completely accounted for the sexual with its negation. There is a return of the repressed in the sense in which desire becomes inherent to the death instinct. Desire returns to Freud's discourse as a disintegrative force, pushing him toward paradox and oxymoron. He proceeds to trace
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the death instinct in the mysterious tendency to repeat, or even intensify, something unpleasurable, without apparently recognizing the similarities that emerge between the death instinct and the conception of fore pleasure which he had begun to enunciate fifteen years earlier, in the "Three Essays." In "Beyond the Pleasure Principle," "Freud seems almost on the point of suggesting that beyond the pleasure principle we find-sexuality. It is, in any case, repetition-or what we could perhaps call an insistent stasis-which blocks Freud's attempts to define the sexual."l; While Freud often seems to resist an inclination to concede the point, Deleuze and Guattari, like Jung, hold that all psychic energy is libidinal: "Everywhere you have libido as machine energy."l4 "The truth is that sexuality is everywhere: the way a bureaucrat fondles his records, a judge administers justice, a businessman causes money to circulate; the way the bourgeois fucks the proletariat; and so on. And there is no need to resort to metaphors [ . . . . ] Hitler got the fascists sexually aroused."lj In one sense, the perception of all energy as libidinal allows Deleuze and Guattari to dispense of the categories of sublimation and repression, and of desexualization and resexualization. In another sense, however, these categories persist in their writings-with certain modifications-as the molar and the molecular tendencies of sexuality. For Deleuze and Guattari, although all energy is libidinal, a distinction must be made between a function which seizes and colonizes desire for societal purposes, forcing it into extroversion and moralization, and a contrary function which-although an equally social investment-frees desire to flow, to break out of molar aggregates and become molecular. The sexuality of the bureaucrat fondling his records is different from that of the "black beast" escaping, becoming metamorphic and indiscernible: "The decoded flows of desire form the free energy (libido) of the desiring-machines. The desiringmachines take form and train their sights along a tangent of deterritorialization that traverses the representative spheres, and that runs along the body without organs. Leaving, escaping, but while causing more escapes."l6 Deleuze and Guattari's conceptions of the molar and the molecular are, despite assertions to the contrary, not unlike Freud's death and Eros instincts, and the conceptions of repression and sublimation. At times we contrasted the molar and the molecular as the paranoiac, signifying, and structured lines of integration, and the schizophrenic, machinic, and dispersed lines of escape [ . . . . ] At other times, on the contrar!; we contrasted them as the two major types of equally social investments: the one sedentary and biunivocalizing, and of a reactionary or fascist tendency; the other nomadic and polyvocal, and of a revolutionary tendency. In fact, in the schizoid declaration-"I am of a race inferior for all eternity," "I am a beast, a black," "We are all German Jewsm-the historico-social field is no less invested than in the paranoiac formula: "I am one of your kind, from the same place as you, I am a pure Aryan, of a superior race for all time.""
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In rejecting the notion of sexual energy, Bataille's stance, although founded on the opposite premise, is not unlike Jung's, or Deleuze and Guattari's.18 If no energy is specifically sexual, all energy is potentially sexual. For Bataille, all of human life is torn between two opposing purposes; one ultimately sexual, and another which excludes the sexual from its precincts. In his system, sex is of sovereignty and disintegrative violence, while the other of sex is reason and work.19 Civilization is preserved by the mode of thought which counters and denies desire; by work. Practicality, productivity, reason and restraint all serve the end of preserving society and the socially defined self. Behind or beneath this lucidity and composure, however, as the ground on which these systems of preservation are built, there is an opposing purpose, which seeks to overcome restraint, and spend in one self-annihilatory surge all that has been saved. Sex is a squandering of energy, and so opposed to self-preservation; the movement of arousal is violence against the profane self, directed toward a self-inflicted "little death," which in turn represses this disintegrative desire, and announces the re-emergence of the practical, profane self. Deleuze and Guattari's conceptions of preservative molarities, and the disintegrative trend of the molecular, may also be compared to Bataille's conceptions of the tendencies to work and to save on the one hand, and to spend, desire aild destroy on the other. In changing his perspective from an opposition between ego and libidinal energy-a position which would coincide with that of Bataille-to an opposition between the death instinct and the Eros instinct, Freud places difficulties before himself. Freud's revised conception of the sexual differs from Bataille's because he, unlike Bataille, links sex and self-preservation within the Eros instinct, and opposes these to the death instinct. Where, in "Beyond the Pleasure Principle," Freud considers the protozoa as living on in each of the organisms into which it has divided,20 Bataille sees the original protozoa as negated by the two new lives which supersede it:21 for Bataille, sex implies death, while for Freud, sex implies life. In his conception of the sexual, Freud avoids a vision of generation as both creation and destruction; he does not, like Joyce, link tomb and womb, or recognize the "Sheelana-gig." Although he stresses emphatically the importance of a conception of dualities, he is never free from unease about his particular alignment of these dualities.22 In order to account for the most glaring contradiction of his alignment of sex and self-preservation-sexual masochism-Freud proposes a fusion and defusion of the death instinct and the Eros instinct. Of all theorists of dualities, it is perhaps Yeats who presents the most elaborate and developed model of such fusion and defusion, with his image of interpenetrating gyres, and the four-part system of tensions through which he isolates points upon this double flux. In fact, it would be interesting to compare Yeats's Mask, Will, Creative Mind and Body of Fate to the superego, the ego ideal, the narcissistic ego and the ideal ego. Yeats speaks endlessly of dualities, while denying their verity, and collapsing them into one another.
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Nietzsche also stresses the fusion and defusion of these opposites, in his conception of the tragic, in which the Apollonian sinks into the Di0nysian,~3 and in the unmentioned but implied comic moment, in which order steps out of chaos. Within these movements, there is a reversal of the relations of priority between the terms, and as the subordinate terms swell into precedence, the overturned primary terms achieve a moment of almost supernatural purity. Tragedy, although it ends in its opposite, is predominantly classical, while comedy, although it too ends in its opposite, is predominantly grotesque. Joyce adopts his conception of the fusion and defusion of opposites partly from Giordano Bruno, who based his theories upon the premise that "Extremes Meet."24 In his 1903 essay on Bruno, Joyce states: "Every power in nature or in spirit must evolve an opposite as the sole condition and means of its manifestation; and every opposition is, therefore, a tendency to reunion" (C.W., p. 134).It is the fusion and defusion of these opposites that may account for the compulsive complexity and confusion that overcomes any attempts to engage them, and for the hypocrisy and illusion which undermines any efforts to establish a final intellectual coherence regarding these dualities. As soon as a statement is made, its contrary presents itself as equally true, and each thing is shown to contain its opposite. With the partial exception of Freud there is, however, a profound correspondence in these alignments of dualities, which would seem to reveal the limits of these doomed lunges to their ineffable sources. Bataille's poles of self-preservation and self-disintegration correspond in many ways to Yeats's antithetical and primary poles. Yeats's antithetical aild primary poles in turn correspond to Nietzsche's Apollonian and Dionysian poles. Each of these poles correspond in important ways to Deleuze and Guattari's conceptions of the molar and the molecular, and to Deleuze's conceptions of sadism and masochism. Altl~ougl~ language usage and particular interests may disguise their coincidence, all of these poles correspond roughly to western culture's categories of the classical and the grotesque. O n the one hand, we have the conservative and formal, and on the other we have the revolutionary and the formless. Binary conceptions of the high and the low, of symbolic man and woman, of life and death, of identity and difference, of depth and surface, of spirit and nature, and of culture and nature, may be absorbed into these broad dualities of the formal and the formless, or transformative. It is crucial to note that while the formal pole depends upon duality, in that the individuated image is juxtaposed upon the formless, the transformative pole excludes the possibility of stable dualities, by disintegrating differentiation. The opposition between the classical and the grotesque is a deeply rooted duality in Joyce. Patrick Parrinder recognizes the pervasiveness of this duality in Joyce's writings: "Stephen may show a romantic inclination for the classical, but Bloom and Molly [ . . . ] plainly belong to the grotesque."25 Parrinder adopts his definitions of the classical and the grotesque from Bakhtin:
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In his book on Rabelais, Balzhtin shows how the confrontation of the classical and the grotesque may be exemplified by a difference in bodily imagery. Classical art: 'presents an entirely finished, completed, strictly limited body, which is shown from the outside as something individual. That which protrudes, bulges, sprouts or branches off [ . . . ] is eliminated, hidden or moderated. A11 orifices of the body are closed. The basis of the image is the individual, strictly limited mass, the impenetrable facade.' The grotesque bod!; by contrast, 'is cosmic and universal [ . . . . it] can merge with various natural phenomena, with mountains, rivers, seas, islands and continents.'26 In Joyce, there is a movement which blurs distinctions between classical thought and what may be considered grotesque thought. The classical body is the body of repression, and the grotesque body is the body of sublimation. Furthermore, the abject may be considered as the classical perspective on the grotesque body. To visualize these distinctions, we may see the formal, sealed and individuated attributes of the classical in Michelangelo's statue of David. The metamorphic, formless and indifferentiated nature of the grotesque may be seen in the pages of The Book of Kells. In The Cold and the Cruel, Deleuze distinguishes between the speculative thought of the sadist, which imposes form upon the formless, through negation, and by inhibiting flow, and the imaginative thought of the masochist, which transforms the formal, through the disavowal of the real. This distinction is taken over, in Anti-Oedipus, by a distinction between the arboreal, biunivocalizing thought that is practiced by the paranoiac, and the schizophrenic's rhizomic, non-dualistic mode of thought. To set up these dualities simply to live with them is paranoiac; to set them up, however, to undercut them, is an example of the perverse dynamic. It is not so much the alignment of these oppositions that is of interest here, as the manner by which they may fuse and defuse with one another. In the transgressive aesthetic, these dualities are blurred by a parodic reversal of their hierarchical relations of priority. By its nature, transgression is aligned to the disintegration of form, the breaking of boundaries: it is molecular rather than molar, and minoritarian rather than majoritarian. It is grotesque in that the orifices are opened: the prohibition on release is relaxed, and emission flows freely. Transgression is opposed to work, and self-preservation, and tending to violence, play, riot, and orgy. It is not, however, to be conceived of as a return to animal nature. Sex and violence may be considered primary; the state of nature. The prohibition of the taboo is a reaction against this primary nature, an attempt to restrain and control, or desexualize, this primal, disintegrative and wasteful surging. The taboo is secondary, and the transgression, the overcoming, breakthrough or overflowing of the taboo, is tertiary. Here, however, we move back to the binary, as the tertiary becomes the secondary, and this
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mutable ring continues to spin. The first term is now always excluded: the resexualization is founded upon its desexualization. Carnival, for instance, is not a simple unleashing of violent nature. Rather, it parodies and inverts order and convention. In the new urge to order, the hangover, there is an impulse to recoup losses, and a resurgence of paranoia. A working distinction may be drawn between sex and eroticism. Eroticism is transgressional sexuality, in which a resexualization retains the traits of its desexualization. Eroticism, the sexuality of the socialized, is based upon the violence, death, crime or disease with which prohibition has threatened it, aild is therefore knit to elements of punishment and pain. Thus the resexualization of the desexualized produces either sadism or masochism, each of which, in its own way, mocks the conception of law, without ever escaping this compulsion to mock. The sadist mocks law through identification and extension, through an application of the law so extreme as to be absurd. The masochist parodies law through projection of, and submission to law, so extreme as to be absurd. It is arguable that all socialized sexuality will contain some elements of sadism and / or masochism, and that it is only the unsocialized, the solitary animal, that may enjoy the primal aild simple, non-reflective, although nonetheless violent joy of pure friction. When deconstructionist thinkers urged us to step outside of dualistic thought, they proposed an end to history; a closure to the arbitrary tyrannies of the twilight of the idols. History, however, has as yet refused to end. Deconstructive theory recognizes the oppressive potential, and even the innately oppressive nature of the biunivocalizing tendency. It attempts to disentangle thought from the tyrannical illusions perpetuated by dualistic thought. In Sexual Dissidence, Dollimore notes that: It is an achievement of deconstr~ictionto show the limitations of binary logic in theory and its often pernicious effects in practice; to show how binaries, far from being eternal necessities of cultural organization, or essential, unavoidable attributes of human thought, are unstable constructs whose antithetical terms presuppose, and can therefore be used against, each othec Meaning becomes an effect of difference and deferral. Because its terms are vulnerable to inversion and its structure (via inversion) to displacement, the continued existence of the binary is never guaranteed; it has to be maintained, often in and through struggles over representation.2'
There is, however, little consensus regarding tactics by which these "violent hierarchies" might be overcome, and to what extent it is even possible to overcome these hierarchies. Dollimore describes a number of issues central to the debate regarding what can aild what should be done about dualizing thought: we should not deceive ourselves into thinlting that to deconstruct these binaries somehow neutralizes their effect in history and 1 or the here and
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now. This is a n instance of how the indispensability of theory can be deflected into a 'theoreticist' evasion of d a t it might most effectively challenge. Binaries remain fundamental to, and violently active within, social organization and discursive practices, more so than we usually realize as we live and suffer them daily But hon7, then, are they challenged?
Derrida has insisted that metaphysics can only be contested from within, by disrupting its structures and redirecting its force against itself. H e defines binary opposition as a "violent hierarchy" (Positions, 41) where one of the two terms forcefully governs the other, and insists that a crucial stage in the deconstruction of binaries involves their inversion, an overturning, which brings low what was high [ . . . . ] he adds that the political effect of failing to invert the binary opposition, of trying simply to jump beyond it into a world free of it, is simply to leave the binary intact in the only world we have. Despite this emphasis in Derrida, some of his adherents still want to make that jump, insisting that the inversion of the binary achieves nothing.28 Neither Joyce, nor Deleuze and Guattari, considers that there may be a final escape from the biunivocalizing impulse: subject groups become subjugating groups, and the escape is always marked by the point of its departure. Conflict is unavoidable, and escape from tyranny and domination must be perpetually renewed: escape may be the only truly revolutionary gesture. At the end of Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari defend themselves against anticipated charges of fleeing into fantasy, by claiming that they have never stopped saying the opposite.29 That they should feel it necessary to defend themselves in this way might suggest that they have been presenting a transgressive aesthetic, in which the relations of priority between the binaries of depth and surface, and of essence and difference, have been inverted. They are defending themselves against charges similar to those brought against Wilde: "It is said that Wildean inversion disturbs nothing; by merely reversing the terms of the binary, inversion remains within its limiting framework: an inverted world can only be righted, not changed. Moreover, the argument might continue, Wilde's paradoxes are superficial in the pejorative sense of being inconsequential, of making no difference.";o Similar objections have been made about the moral value of Bloom's inasocl~istic inversions in "Circe.";l As transgression is not a return to primal nature, but instead a dismantling of form, it tends to be marked by multiple inversions. The individual is taught that the object of his desire is lowly, sordid and abject: if he is to make this object sacred-as the masochist is inclined to do-the subject of desire must instead emphasize his own lowliness before the object of his desire, and draw her abjection into himself. He must heal her wound of body, by taking this wound upon himself, and emphasizing his own corporeality. Freedom
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and release from oppression are afforded by subversion and irreverence. For the masochist, in resexualization the predominant conception of the highlaw-is viewed with irreverence, while the predominant conception of the lowly-the castrated body-is viewed with reverence. For the sadist, in resexualization irreverence is directed to the castrated body, and reverence to the law: she is abject, and he is pure; he is purified by her abjection. Joyce sets up a number of antithetical pairs in his work, and draws out the tension between them. In his masochistic subversion, he shows how these opposites may blur into one another, and how their hierarchical relations may be inverted. This reversal is most clear in the switch from Stephen to Bloom as the central character of Joyce's fiction. Stephen's protracted Apollonian flight, his refusal to fall into grotesque liquid, is remedied in Bloom's transgressive reversal of this construct. Imagery of liquid and slime are central to Joyce's presentations of the sexual and the abject. In Portmit, Stephen is preoccupied with his reactions to liquid and slime, and in "Proteus" this preoccupation has become paralysing to him. Liquid represents for Stephen death, claustrophobia, and a loss of personal autonomy resulting from the sexual urges, and from sympathy, pity and love. His attitudes toward liquid force him into a misanthropic posture, and his perception of liquid mirrors and upholds his desexualization. In "Telemachus," Buck imposes a classical perspective of the grotesque body as abject, when he says to Stephen: Isn't the sea what Xlgy calls it. "Our great sweet mother. The snotgreen sea [ . . . ] The bard's noserag! A new colour for our Irish poets: snotgreen. You can almost taste it, can't you?(U., p. 3)
This excremental imagery recalls for Stephen the green sluggish bile that accompanied his mother's demise, relating excrement and liquid to decay and death: The ring of bay and skyline held a dull green mass of liquid. A bowl of white China had stood beside her deathbed holding the green sluggish bile which she had torn up from her rotting liver by fits of loud groaning vomiting. Buck Mulligan wiped again his razorblade. (U., p. 4)
When Bloom walks through Hades, he also relates slime to decomposition and death: I daresay the soil would be quite fat with corpsemanure, bones, flesh, nails. . . T~irninggreen and pink and decomposing [ . . . . ] Then a kind of a tallowy kind of a cheesy. They begin to get black, black treacle oozing out of them. (U., p. 137)
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Imagistic analogies are drawn between the cemetery as Bloom sees it, and the beach on which Stephen walks in "Proteus." In "Hades," Bloom thinks: Air of the place maybe.. . Must be an infernal lot of bad gas round the place [ . . . . ] broken heart. A pump after all, pumping thousands of gallons of blood every day. One fine day it gets bunged up: and there you are. Lots of them lying around here: lungs, hearts, livers. Old rusty pumps: damn the thing else. (U., pp. 130, 133)
Bloom's description of the cemetery as a place of broken down, forgotten or discarded things is similar to Stephen's perception of the seashore in "Proteus." Hades is scattered with broken hearts and misread memorials, while the strand is strewn with old bottles and broken hoops. Like the cemetery, the seashore breathes up a gas of corruption: Unwholesome sandflats waited to suck his treading soles, breathing upward sewage breath. A porterbottle stood up, sogged to its waist in the caltey sand dough [ . . . . ] Broken hoops on the shore; at the land a maze of dark cunning nets [ . . . . ] Ringsend: wigwams of brown steersmen and master mariners. Human shells. (U., p. 50)
Tatters, dogsbody and Proteus, the deity of this strand, stand in opposition to the desexualized birdgirl. The birdgirl represents bodily existence at its furthest remove from Proteus. While Proteus represents time, body and change, she represents timelessness, soul and changelessness. She, like Daedalus, has wings to rise above the bitter waters. The birdgirl and Proteus are, however, synthesized in Gerty. The seaweed that clings to the birdgirl's leg becomes the lameness of Gerty, who has been partly pulled down into slime. Where Stephen can find no way of evading the paralysing pull of the beach, which sucks at his treading soles, in the cemetery Bloom thinks: "Feel live warm beings near you. Let them sleep in their maggoty beds. They are not going to get me this innings. Warm beds: warm, fullblooded life" (U., p. 146). Stephen can not find a source of strength similar to Bloom's, because his perception of life and the bodily functions as abject is so predominant as to be almost exclusive. Stephen has considered the bodily functions as abject since a young age. When he visits the cows, early in Portrait, disillusionment and disgust are drawn through images of slime. Aubrey and Stephen had a common lnilltlnan and often they drove out in the milltvan to Carricltlnines where the cows were at grass: and the first sight of the filthy cowyard at Stradbroolt with its foul green puddles and clots of liquid dung and steaming brantroughs sickened Stephen's heart. The cattle which had seemed so beautiful in the country on sunny days revolted him and he could not even look at the milk they yielded. (P., p. 65)
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After the hell sermons, Stephen is tormented by a perception of his bodily functions, the opening of his orifices to the external, as dragging him into abjection, and smearing him with slime. He ate his dinner with surly appetite and, when the meal was over and the greasestrewn plates lay abandoned on the table, he rose and went to the window, clewing the thick scum from this mouth with his tongue and licking it from his lips. So he had sunk to the state of a beast that licks his chaps after meat. (P., p. 115)
Imagery of liquid and slime also represent a sensation of claustrophobia in Joyce. When Stephen is thrown into the slimy ditch, it is his co-occupation of this ditch with a rat, and the mortality of the rat, that particularly revolt him: the way a rat felt slimy and damp and cold. Every rat had two eyes to look out of [ . . . . ] When they were dead they lay on their sides. Their coats dried then. They were only dead things. (P., p. 22)
Later, Stephen withdraws from the sight of his friends swimming, because of a perception of both liquid and the bodies of other men as abject: He recognized their speech collectively before he distinguished their faces. The mere sight of that medley of wet nakedness chilled him to the bone. [ . . . ] H o w characterless they looked [ . . . . ] Perhaps they had taken refuge in number and noise from the secret dread in their souls. But he, apart from them and in silence, remembered in d a t dread he stood of the mystery of his own body. (P., p. 172)
He is disgusted by the body that he has in common with the rat and these other men. It is a lurid truth which he tries to keep hidden from himself, although he cannot help but brood on it. Stephen considers himself and others as immersed in a liquid that is human existence: "my will; his will that fronts me; seas between" (U., p. 279). He dreads losing his freedom in this liquid, being dragged down by another. When he asks himself would he try to save a drowning man, he recalls washing in the basin at Clongowes, and thinks: "Can't see: who's behind me? Out quickly, quickly!" (U., p. 57) Water makes him feel defenseless, its democratic nature submerges the walls between people, leaving all indistinguishable in blind orgy, like the damned pressed together in hell. The hell sermons, and the death of his mother, consolidate Stephen's desexualization, forcing him to perceive the body as wounded, and physicality as corruption: Imagine some foul and putrid corpse that has lain rotting and decomposing in the grave, a jellylike mass of liquid corruption. And then imagine this sickening stench multiplied a millionfold and a millionfold again from the
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millions upon millions of fetid carcasses massed together in the reelzing darlzness, a huge and rotting human fungus.(P., p. 111) The damned howl and scream at one another, their torture and rage intensified by the presence of beings tortured and raging lilze thelnselves [ . . . . ] In olden times it was the custom to punish the parricide [ . . . ] by [ . . . ] casting him into the depths of the sea in a sack in which were placed a cock, a monkey and a serpent.(P., p. 113)
In "Proteus," when Stephen asks himself whether he would attempt to save a drowning man, he is stricken by a fear that he would be dragged down as well. When he thinks "I could not save her" (U., p. 5 7 , shifting suddenly from the drowning man to his mother, we see that he has come to perceive life as a cruel orgy of panic stricken people who are selfish in their dying: it is not only the violence of a struggling stranger that he would avoid, but also the clutching, teary love of his drowning mother. In saying "I want his life to still be his, mine to still be mine" (U., p. 38), he denies malice, but resists sacrificing his individuality to the sordid sea of pain that is community. Dilly's desperation elicits a similar response in Stephen; he feels sympathy for her, but will not allow this sympathy to drag down and annihilate his autonomy. As well as death, body and claustrophobia, liquid in Joyce represents sympathy and love. She is drowning. Agenite. Save her. Xgenbite. All against us. She will drown me with her, eyes and haic Lank coils of seaweed hair around me, my heart, my soul. Salt green death. We Xgenbite of inwit. Inwit's agenbite. Misery! Misery! (U., p. 313)
It is this fear of accepting the pain of a dying other in loving her that is the most powerful desexualizing force faced by Stephen. Liquid imagery is also used to portray the forces that would usurp Stephen's freedom from within: the sexual urges. The desexualization operates by including Stephen's sexual desire in the constellation represented by liquid and slime. Stephen's confession of his submission to bodily lust, is drawn with an image that suggests masturbation and ejaculation: his sins triclzled from his lips, one by one, triclzled in shameful drops from his soul festering and oozing lilze a sore, a squalid stream of vice. The last sins oozed forth, squalid, filthy. (P., p. 148)
Here, his soul festers in the way that bodies do, it becomes like a body, because it has too often acquiesced to the will of the body. Liquid imagery suggests a separation of body and soul, or self. After acquiescence to the
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desexualization, the movement of the body is perceived to be following a will that is distinct from that of the self. Stephen's sense of alienation from his penis is typical of repression: he says of his desire: "it is not mine, it comes from someone else; a devil or a woman." The serpent, the most subtle beast of the field [ . . . ] who made it to be like that, a bestial part of the body able to understand bestially and desire bestially? Was that then he or an inhuman thing moved by a lower soul than his soul? His soul sickened at the thought of a torpid snaky life feeding itself out of the tender marrow of his life and fattening upon the slime of lust.(P., p. 143)
In relation to lust, however, Stephen's loathing of liquid is ambiguous. In Portmit, Stephen toys with the sensation of building tension toward release, letting symbolic water creep toward his feet, and then chasing it away, and so suffering a pain mixed with the promise of pleasure as sexual tension subsides, unreleased and so reinforced (P., p. 136). Stephen is here learning to take tension as delight, by controlling his own rhythm, and forestalling end pleasure, so that he may revel in a self-made rhythm without release. This ritual is a foreshadowing of the masochist's delay of end pleasure. End pleasure is delayed in order to lengthen the duration of excitement, more than to increase the intensity of the postponed release, or the depth of the following rest. Stephen is only half-heartedly resisting the transgression of emission from religious scruples. He is subverting the tools of authority, to use them as toys for stoking and prolonging his desire. As when he recognizes that he enjoys certain horrible smells, he is experimenting with the germinal delights of masochism. Coinciding with Joyce's use of liquid imagery, and also opposed to his conception of flight, is his conception of falling. In Joyce, the motif of the fall conveys the inverted nature of eroticism, in which the resexualization retains the traits of its desexualization. The first fall is the fall from unity and continuity of self and of body, and is brought about by the initial denial, which initiates the creation of the superego and the ideal ego: it is the result of the desexualizing identification, and it coincides with the renunciation or loss of an immanent object of desire. After the initial fall, the indifferentiation which constituted his omnipotence before this fall is perceived as abjection, as the loss or drowning of the volition and the self in a formless background. To fall is now to be drawn toward this abjection. It is from fear of this that Stephen flies. At the start of Portrait Stephen is triangulated when he is removed from the company of his mother. The desiring self, which has until now considered itself to be continuous with the object of its desire, is forced to recognize itself as discontinuous and lacking. Once this initial fall has transpired, and an awareness of prohibition has been implanted in the child as the superego, subsequent falls are mirror images of this initial fall, in that now to fall
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is to move from discontinuity back toward continuity, from isolation back toward unity, from identity back toward indifferentiation, and from orthodoxy back to perversity. The fall is now an always ambiguous attempt to return to the archaic and indifferentiated state from which he originally fell. When he is desexualized, the mother from whom he has fallen is represented by imagery of liquid, as is his desire. It is this liquid-the symbolic mother, body, continuity, immanence and death-into which he both dreads and longs to fall. A tension between extremes holds him triangulated, suspended between desire to approach the mother, or immanence and, at the other angle, pulling into place the triangle, the father repulsing this approach; the soul's disgust with the wounded body. Despite, or perhaps because of this inversion, the initial fall is-as Freud says of the initial demolition of Oedipal designs-echoed in, and in some way definitive of all subsequent f a l l s 3 The subject continues to be triangulated by the tension between the lure of the object of his desire, and the authority or dread which prohibits his approach to the object of his desire. As he learns, adding each subsequent re-enforcement of this triangulation to its predecessor, he builds a complex, which becomes nothing other than his identity: a suspension, a trigonometric equation, rather than a flow. A history is imposed upon him: he is moulded into this shape, and even if flows begin to ooze, and traverse the angles, or if he becomes obtuse or acute, he must continue to inhabit this equation of original sin. In the flight which Stephen learns at the end of Portmit, he is escaping the abject body, the wounded mother, and so acquiescing to the desexualizing authorities which he had intended to evade. It is not only he who seems to fly, but also the object of his desire. In flying he is reiterating the movement of desexualization. In order to learn to fall, to return to sympathy, love and body, he must take Bloom as his example. This is suggested when Stephen connects Bloom to a figure in his dream who pressed a melon to his face as a rite of entry to a brothel (U., pp. 58-9, 647). From what we know of Stephen, who fears closing his eyes in the sink, this is a grotesque ritual. This melon also suggests the "melonous spheres" (U., p. 867) of Molly's bottom, the bodily lowliness and voluptuous physicality to which Bloom returns; the wounded body which he glorifies. The establishment of the superego inhibits the subject's desire by, at one and the same time, designating his object of desire, and forbidding him access to this object. It inflicts a wound which seems to separate body and soul, and compels the subject to either limit and negate his desire, or replace his external object of desire with a transcendent image of desire. In flying, the subject of desire attempts to detach or distance himself from the abject body, becoming either externally directed and involved, or inwardly engrossed and solitary. A sense of isolation, however, makes him long to return to intimacy with the body, but this impulse is countered by a dread of returning to the body. He fears fouling himself with the corruption of the body, and losing the self in indifferentiation. The schizophrenic process of escape has become a
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continuation in the void. Stephen stranded aloft, lost in a protracted deterritorialization, with nowhere to reterritorialize, thinks "I am lonely here [ . . . ] Touch, touch me" (U., p. 61). He longs to fall from the solitude and sterility of flight. The net that Stephen has flown above in escaping, however, remains between him this return, prolonging his disconnected Daedalian flight. In falling, there is always a danger of being stopped short of return, of relinquishing self-mastery, and being molarized, caught in those nets that he has tried so hard to elude; the nets that make Chandlers, Bob Dolans, and Farringtons. The ideal ego is always only a compensatory libidinal cathexis. Until the ego rediscovers some means of reifying this image, it is disconnected and alone. When the focus of desire is separated from immanence, and withdrawn into a transcendent world, then the promised land, an immanent bodily paradise, dries, turns to dust, becomes a barren land that can bear no more children. This is the source of the sense of alienation, and exile from the source, the female, that is focused for both Stephen and Bloom by the matin cloud, that is at first no bigger than a woman's hand, and which, in "Circe," becomes a castrating crab claw (U., p. 682). In Joyce, there is a fluctuation between extremes: Bloom's love of the bodily, and his longing for the relinquisl~mentof self mastery, are as much an aspect of Joyce as Stephen's loathing of body, and his desire to be free of all bonds, to fly above the watery excretions of dung-clotted bodily existence. As well as the dualities of liquid and flight, there are other dualities in Joyce which contribute to this complex. A distinction that Jonathan Swift draws between the diminutive Lilliputians and the gigantic Brobdignagians, in Gulliver's Travels, is significant to a study of Joyce's masochism. The distinction to which I refer constitutes an aesthetics of proximity and distance: the Brobdignagians represent the grotesque, abject body, and the Lilliputians represent the classical, idealized body. When Gulliver watches a Brobdignagian nurse suckle a child, he thinks: I must confess n o object ever disgusted me so much as the sight of her monstrous breast, which I cannot tell d a t to compare with, so as to give the curious reader an idea of its bulk, shape, and colouc It stood prominent six foot, and could not be less than sixteen in circumference. The nipple was about half the bigness of my head, and the hue both of that and the dug so varified with spots, pimples and freclzles, that nothing could appear more nauseous [ . . . . ] This made me reflect upon the fair slzins of our English ladies, who appear so beautiful to us, only because they are of our own size, and their defects not to be seen, but through a magnifying glass, where we find by experiment, that the smoothest and whitest slzins loolz rough and coarse, and ill coloured. I remember when I was at Lilliput, the complexions of those diminutive people appeared to me to be the fairest in the world [ . . .
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It is of significance that Gulliver considers the Lilliputians to be vicious and cruel, and the Brobdignagians to be (in general) gentle and kind, and that Swift here draws the grotesque through a maternal image. The wounding, or fracturing of the self, into the abject, wounded body and the exiled, disconnected soul, accounts for the binocular perspective in Joyce's fiction. In order to appease the superego, which has chased the subject from body into soul in the desexualization, the desired object is drawn as distant, as Lilliputian. When approached, the desired object will become unattractive, as the superego forces a Brobdignagian perspective of proximity, which focuses upon the physicality of the object, its tendency to cling to the subject, and draw the subject down into indifferentiation and abjection. This is the wound he was taught to see in the movement of desexualization. It is from fear of the sight of this wound that the ideal ego is desexualized, and is drawn as non-bodily, as Lilliputian. The bodily disgust forced by the superego causes her to be drawn in opposition to body, as the inverse of abjection; as purity, invulnerability and self-subsistence. She is in this way like the fetish, representative of the female body, and of the denial or disavowal of the female body, at one and the same time. He turns to her to elude the claustrophobic horror and disgust of bodily proximity, so that he may desire without being thrown into the sea "in a sack in which are placed a cock, a monkey and a serpent" (P., p. 87). The imposition of the Brobdignagian perspective is one of the most insidious ways in which the king "in here" perpetuates his power and his prohibitions. Joyce often portrays the binarism of the sublimative and repressive choices through the use of oppositional characters, or ''Shein and Shaun brothers": Cotter opposes Flynn, Mahoney opposes the narrator of "An Encounter," Michael Furey and Bartell D'Arcy oppose Gabriel, Robert opposes Richard, Mulligan opposes Stephen, Virag opposes Henry Flower, Boylan opposes Bloom, and the Ondt opposes the Gracehopper. Taken together, in these binarisms Joyce is drawing two modes of sexuality. Although in "Circe" Virag seems to be aligned with Bloom, he is primarily present as a paternal figure, and so as a spokesman for the repressive perspective. Virag is a scientist, who views women as objects of mechanical gratification, and who sees love as uncontrollable and mechanical bestiality. For Virag, the object of desire is all body. VIRXG: Well then, permit me to draw your attention to item number three. There is plenty of her visible t o the naked eye. Observe the mass of oxygenated vegetable matter on her sltull. What 110, she bumps! The ugly ducltling of the part!; longcasted and deep in keel. (U., p. 629) Insects of the day spend their brief existence in reiterated coition, lured by the smell of the inferiorly pulchritudino~isfemale possessing extendified pudendal verve in dorsal region. (U., p. 631)
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Virag views the object of desire as Brobdignagian; he magnifies her. His desire is coarse, brutal and pornographic: the female body is considered as immanent, pliable and appropriable. His comments are as matter of fact as Buck's remark that 'all redheaded women buck like goats.' (U., p. 26) While for Virag sex is to be understood mechanically, for the "narcississy" Henry Flower, sex is to be understood aesthetically. Henry the fetishist idealizes and worships a lifeless image, a birdgirl. His narcissism draws her as refined, subtle and delicate, but at the same time as distant, cold and cruel, in that she has left him alone with his hopeless longing. For Henry, the object of desire has no body, and his means of loving is a worship of her absence. This corresponds to the Lilliputian perspective on the object of desire. H e w ) ' Flower comes forward t o left front centre. H e wears a dark mantle and droopzng plwned sombrero. H e carrzes a szlverstrznged znlazd dzllczrner and a longstemmed b a m b o o Jacob's pzpe, zts claj, b o w l fashzoned as a female head [ . . . . ] H e has the rornantzc Savzozlr's face wzth flowzng locks, thzn beard and moustache. Hzs spzndlelegs and spawow feet are those of the tenor Marzo [ . . . .I. H e settles d o w n on hzs goffered ruffs and ~nozstens hzs lzps wzth a passage of hzs amorous tongue [ . . . . ] Caresszng on hzs breast a severed female h e a d rnurmers) Thme heart, mine love. (U., pp. 634,637)
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CHAPTER TWO
Daedalus Desexualized The Determinants of Masochism
Oedipus is first the idea of an adult paranoiac, before it is the childhood feeling of a neurotic [ . . . . ] an idea projected by the father, before it is an inner feeling experienced by the son.'
CULTURAL SPECIFICITY AND THE DEVELOPMENTAL APPROACH Although Joyce is the focus of this study, masocl~ismin general should not be regarded as a culturally specific phenomenon: the superficial manifestations may be drawn from a specific culture, but the underlying ritual is pancultural. From this it follows that masochistic tendencies may be more common during particular cultural and ideological moments, but not restricted to these moments. In Psycopathia Sexualis, ICrafft-Ebing, drawing from nineteenth-century German examples, considers sexual masochism to be a surprisingly widespread. In 1996 two American psychoanalysts, Chris and Kerry Novick, found that only 6 of 111 of their indexed cases had beating fantasies, which they considered to be the essence of masochism.2 It is, however, impossible to say whether Krafft-Ebing would have considered 6 of 111 to constitute a surprisingly common figure. This disparity suggests that the cross-cultural presence of masochism is a matter of degree, rather than of absence or presence. Without wishing to oversimplify Gibson's position, there seems to be in it somewhere the position that the banning of institutionalized beating might lead to the eradication of this mania. Of course, the recentness of this banning does not allow us to say yet whether this might be the case. Although it is now against the law to beat children at home or in school, children may still gain access to pornography produced by adults who were beaten as children. Most commentators have noted that such literature can produce this mania as easily as can the actual experience of beating. Gibson's argument suggests that we will face a diminishing vicious circle, and in a few generations masochism will be a rare phenomenon. This, however, seems unlikely. Gibson's model is based upon a limited range of determinants. Beating is only one of these. Bullying and a tendency to idealize women also contribute to the masochistic psyche.
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The Novicks remark that "despite putative shifts in the types of pathology presented to the modern psychoanalysts, our caseloads are in fact very similar to Freud's, since he too grappled with masochistic phenomena of varying intensity and pervasiveness in his daily ~ o r k . Althougl~ "~ the props may be culturally specific, the essence of masochism cuts across cultures. In American pornography, table tennis bats and paddles are the preferred instruments of castigation, while in Britain and Ireland the preferred instruments tend to be canes or straps. The banning of beating is unlikely to eradicate masochism, because masochism defends against other threats than corporal punishment, such as bullying, mockery, unrequited love and alienation. Masochism is at least in part a means of averting threat, or seducing the aggressor. It is likely that we are witnessing the evolutionary origins of masochism in the rump-presentation posture that dogs, cats and monkeys often adopt when attacked by a more powerful aggressor. As this analysis of masochism in Joyce's writing begins by tracing the development of the Joycean object of desire, it is useful here to briefly outline some of the values and limitations of the psychoanalytic developmental approach. Although most of what Freud said about masochism in his 1905 essay on sexual aberrations might be found in Krafft-Ebing, at the end of that essay he applied the developmental point of view, and so diverged from the positions of his predecessors. Psychoanalysis has always been preoccupied with memory, and while this makes it useful for an analysis of a partly autobiographical work such as Portmit, which traces the development of a consciousness, its application also introduces considerable difficulties. When analyzing figures in a literary work, we are faced with gaps in the trajection of the development. Although Freud reconstructed the vicissitudes of the beating fantasy in boys and girls from adult analytic material, his findings were at least partly verifiable, because he had the living subject before him. In the analysis of literature, however, we have only the text, and the text's problematic relation to the biographical material. Freud's position vis-a-vis the patient, however, is not necessarily more insightful than that held by the reader vis-2-vis the text. After all, the unconscious, like the literary work, operates at an implicit, figurative level, rather than an explicit literal one. Nonetheless, the degree of interpolation that the reader must employ tends to be greater than that of the psychologist. This is because the writer's omissions are final, whereas the living patient's omissions may still be teased out over time. In Joyce, there is no account of the earliest months of Stephen's life, because of the formal and thematic demands of the work. Many commentators consider masochism to be determined by disturbances in the earliest months of the subject's life. The Novicks, for instance, found that mutual lack of pleasure on the part of both mother and baby was universal in the fixed beating fantasy, and it recurred in all their subsequent cases of masochistic pathology where social history data was available." There is no evidence of such mutual displeasure in Joyce's writing or in the biographical material.
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Although the Novicks consider the initial determinants of masocl~ismto be preoedipal, they very wisely avoid a "big-bang" theory, stressing instead that adult masochism is dependent upon a series of consolidations. The experience in childhood may have little impact until the memory becomes linked to later sexual impulses. They stress the layering throughout the development of the masochist's relation to pain, arguing that the determinants should be sought "in a series of transformations that both alter and retain earlier determinants."5 These transformations imply further difficulties for an analysis of masochism that is focused on literary texts. Freud describes these transformations as "rearrangements" and "retranscriptions," in which the subject reformulates his life story. It is clear that Joyce does this in Portrait, and more radically in Ulysses. In analyzing literary masochism we have only these experiential reformulations, especially when we consider that much of the biographical material is also subject to rearrangements and retranscriptions. This apparent difficulty, however, is by no means insurmountable. Although we have no access to the actual events, of which the fictions are retranscriptions, in his writings Joyce has done much of the work for us, taking the first sincere steps toward interpreting his own sexual mania. Another issue in psychoanalytic interpretations of masochism concerns whether masochism is primarily a means of drive gratification, a maladaptive mode of coping with traumatic events or an adaptation to a hostile environment. It is the contention of this paper that all of these factors may contribute to sexual masochism. In Joyce masochism may be interpreted as a supportable ethical, aesthetic and political position.
An analysis of the Joycean object of desire should help to determine the nature of the triangular interplay between the desiring subject, the object and the prohibitive forces. Rather than falling into line on either side of the polarized debate concerning whether a normative object of desire exists initially, or is forged by the prohibition, it will be argued that the truth is somewhere in the middle. This is to say that the development of the Joycean object of desire demonstrates the way in which the prohibition distorts the desire so as to produce not an object of desire, but a condition or an equation of desire, in which the normative object is merely a factor. In Portrait, Stephen's first object of desire is the warmth, rest, and peace facilitated by the domestic scene. This is perhaps not so much an object of desire, as a condition of desire. The nurturing and affection of the mother to the child makes the home a place of comfort, and the darkness that he associates with the home allows the objects of his desire to proliferate. This is a world before responsibility, in which desire and attainment are never far apart. The infant experiences a sense of omnipotence because of this lack of duty, and the certainty of gratification. For the Novicks the initial determi-
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nant of masochism is a premature cessation of this condition of infantile omnipotence. When the economy of infantile omnipotence is disturbed before the infant is prepared to renounce this omnipotence, the child utilizes magical modes of thinking in an attempt to retain this condition of omnipotence. In their opinion, this supplementary magical omnipotence is a constant in all cases of masochism. Although Stephen's removal from the home occurs later than would the child's renunciation of infantile omnipotence, the results of these events are similar. It could be argued that in the first disjointed pages of Portrait we are seeing a parable or retranscription of the child's loss of infantile omnipotence. Even if this is not the case, an objection to the psychoanalytic method might be that it situates psychic developments within restrictively narrow historical phases. The same emotional dynamic exists in Stephen's removal from the home to the chastising priests, as in the loss of infantile omnipotence: school brings responsibility. The peace of the home will not be found again in Joyce, and there will be no return, no contentment, until the black dot signifying Bloom's sleep in "Ithaca." Being expelled from the domestic scene initiates longing in Stephen. His new environment is not comforting, but intimidating, and he must console himself with memories and images of his mother and home. When he conjures images of home, he is establishing the ideal ego, recreating what was lost. He becomes homesick, and writes to his mother: "Dear Mother [ . . . . ] Please come and take me home [ . . . . ] Your fond son" (Port., p. 33). This plea is at the root of all of Joyce's writing: it resonates throughout the stories in Dubliners; it is manifest in the eponymous characters of his play; it informs the Odyssean parallels of Ulysses; and it is apparent in the return of the final pages of Finnegans W a k e . In the infirmary, as Stephen's pleas go unanswered, he recognizes his discontinuous self, and begins to understand the sorrow and the horror of separate existences. He sees that, despite his calling out, he is on his own, and he experiences an intimation of mortality, as he dreams of his own death, and imagines that he will be loved again only when he is dead (Port., p. 33). This movement is typical of magical thinking: my pain, or my death, will somehow pay for, or bring back the love that has been taken away. The Novicks describe masochistic patients who conceive of their attempted suicides exclusively in terms of the reactions of sorrow, apology and love that their deaths will produce in the people whose love they consider to be lacking.6 Coinciding with Stephen's expulsion from the domestic scene is the genesis of dichotomies. Once he establishes an opposition of attitudes toward the home and the school, a number of corresponding oppositions fall into line. The serenity of the singular female guardian is contrasted to the rowdiness of the mob of males. The comfort and affection that the mother bestows upon him are opposed to the violence and bullying to which his peers and teachers subject him. Images of darkness, warmth and subterranean fire are abstracted from memories of time spent with his mother by the fire, and
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opposed to the white, the damp, and the cold of the cheerless corridors and common rooms at Clongowes. In an early fetishistic reversal, his mother's glittering, perfumed slippers are contrasted to the bog-colored water that smells of urine in the Clongowes lavatory. Learning as adventure and exploration, as with Dante's geography, is opposed to learning as conflict and competition, as in the awarding of prizes, and the red and white roses at Clongowes. These roses are opposed to Stephen's exotic "green wothe" (Port., p. 19), as the real to the imaginary: imaginative parameters are restricted by experiential growth. At Clongowes, Stephen discovers that play is opposed to pragmatism and law, and that adventure and the exotic are forbidden by the institution. He is pandied by Dolan because he is suspected of playing, of neglecting his work, and of being a "Lazy little schemer" (Port., p. 55). The laws of the world of work erect boundaries within which Stephen is expected to stay, and so he becomes fascinated by, and drawn towards that which is beyond bounds: the para-institutional. In this second stage of his development, the carefree world afforded by infantile omnipotence is prohibited. Also, the self that seeks pleasure, the inward looking, luxuriant self, is outlawed as a schemer. These laws do not define desire, but cut off avenues of approach to boundless desire: law does not define desire, but desire must be approached beyond law. The free flow of play is desired, as is the comfort of home. Rest being the primary manifestation, play constitutes a secondary manifestation of the desired object. Play entails a disavowal of the real, an introversion, and becomings. Stephen must first be taught that there is a boundary to be transgressed, and a forbidden world beyond these boundaries. Although this world is really no more than what is termed his laziness, his desire to sit and recall a condition that is lost to him, he considers this world exotic, because of his dissatisfaction with the world to which he is restricted. The transgression becomes a thrill in itself, a way of playing, or rather, play is the basis of transgression. The desired object is no longer tangible, but an unknown, existing beyond the bounds which confine him, and so the desired object becomes metamorphic, a subjective rather than an objective phenomenon. It is beyond the bounds of language, beyond bounds of discourse and meaning, because it is boundless and formless.7 In this secondary manifestation of the desired object, there is the genesis of eroticism. In this foretaste of resexualization, the desired object wears traits of the desexualization, in that it is forbidden, and always elsewhere. Desire then is a process with no goal, flowing blindly. In "The Sisters," although Flynn is not the object of the boy's desire, he seems, to the boy, to hold a key that would allow access to this object, whatever it might be. He leads the boy toward contemplation of the system of taboo, from a sceptical, playful and eroticizing perspective. When the boy goes to bed, he is frightened and disgusted when he thinks of the priest. This
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fear disappears, or rather, he sinks through it, rather than repressing its source, and begins to dream of Persia (Dub., pp. 4, 6 ) . In Joyce, from Mangan's sister to Molly, oriental images are consistently associated with the desirable other. A conception of the sexual other as foreign, exotic and oriental, is also central to Deleuze and Guattari's anti-oedipal position: choices in matters of love are a t the crossroads of "vibrations," which is to say that they express connections, disjunctions, and conj~inctionsof flows that cross through a society, entering and leaving it, linlting up with other societies, ancient or contemporary, remote or vanished, dead or yet to be born. Africas and Orients, always following the underground thread of the libido.8 With the introduction of the oriental motif, "The Sisters," like "An Encounter," and "Araby," becomes the story of a quest. When Cotter comments: "I wouldn't like any child of mine spending too much time with a man like that" (Dub., p. 4), his discouragement, and his threat of prohibition, serve to heighten the boy's perception of worlds such as that of the priest's as mysterious and forbidden, and therefore enticing. This is a nexus at which truth, the secret, the self and sexuality are conjoined. The priest, about whom so much is unmentionable, begins to represent for the boy an alternative world, a world foreign to the real world, which he is learning, with Cotter's help, to perceive as narrow, stupid and prohibitive. For the boy, the priest's quota of truth and self are increased in a direct relation to his association with secrecy and mystery. The priest, he suspects, knows of some strange light-or rather, some mysterious darkness-which compliant, unquestioning people such as the sisters and Cotter can never comprehend. The boy begins to suspect that these people will not speak of Flynn for fear that he will search in Flynn's direction, and find something there which fascinates him, and leads him to abandon their tedious and fearful tribe. In "An Encounter" also, the narrator finds his quest for the exotic and the foreign to place him in opposition to the sanctioned world. This time, it is the world of work that opposes him, and he must break the rules, and risk chastisement, to take a day off school so that he may seek adventure, and traces of the oriental. At the quays he scans the sailors for the green eyes he believes they should have (Dub., p. 13), but he finds no green eyes until he meets the pervert in the waste ground. The pervert is the adventure he has been seeking unknowingly. Altl~ougl~, like Flynn, the pervert is not the object of desire, he seems to the boy to possess a secret with which he is fascinated. As with Flynn, the narrator is simultaneously repelled by and drawn to the pervert, as an apprentice compelled to learn this strange knowledge. The pervert has transgressed sanctioned bounds, and discovered some engrossing phantom of desire. In "Araby," the boy moves beyond meeting travelers who point out the way to mystery, and embarks upon a quest himself. He sets Mangan's sister
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up over his vague longing, and endeavors to win a way toward her. He does not suspect that this longing is not to be appeased by his possession of her, that it is desire in itself, an end in itself. While gazing at the two empty jugs in the empty hall, he has an intimation that this longing will not be satisfied by the acquisition of a commodity: there is no way of winning, and nothing to be won. The retreat for which Mangan's sister must miss the bazaar, combined with the religious tone of his longing for her, endows the taboo object, the girl, with an aura of sacredness. He behaves as a knight-errant for an idealized woman. As in the two previous stories, that which interests the narrator becomes coincident with images of the orient. Also, as in the two previous stories, this interest stands opposed to the profane world of work. As the narrator becomes more and more deeply engrossed by his desire, moving around it as though magnetized, like the pervert to his dream of discipline, the quality of his schoolwork declines (Dub., p. 19). Gallagher's travels, in "A Little Cloud," also link the foreign to the forbidden. Chandler asks Gallagher "is it true that Paris is so . . . immoral as they say" (Dub., p. 50), and then listens fascinated to tales of the exotic and the forbidden. Afterwards, Chandler suffers from an awareness of the tedium of his own sanctioned, tethered and responsible life. His desire is confined, forced into the shape of his wife. He longs to escape, to free his desire from these constraints, but he is quickly caught by "those nets," and his emotional breakthrough becomes a breakdown. Like Eveline, he cannot escape. The nets of responsibility seize his lines of flight into the foreign. His whole life, like his furniture, is on the 11.p. The foreign is similarly linked to the desired object in Portrait, when Stephen steps toward the "white arms of roads" (Port., p. 218) as though toward a lover. All of these examples support Bataille's contention that the sexual is opposed to work and responsibility, and that the erotic is erotic because it transgresses boundaries. Desire is polymorphous, but law disguises this, and makes it strive against its nature to be triangular and monogamous. Desire is constrained by its unnatural subsumption into the category of love. To escape the father's law, the subject must enter exile, and risk indifferentiation: "We are told that Oedipus is indispensable, that it is the source of every possible differentiation, and that it saves us from the terrible nondifferentiated mother. But this terrible mother, the sphinx, is herself part of Oedipus; her nondifferentiation is merely the reverse of the exclusive differentiations created by Oedipus."9 Joyce's sphinx is called Proteus. To escape the tyranny of exclusive differentiations, the subject must learn to flow, and escape identity. Eileen in Portrait is similar to Mangan's sister as a pre-phallic object of desire. As with Mangan's sister, Stephen has as yet no idea of what sort of consummation he seeks with Eileen, although he feels a vague, inexplicable attraction, which leads him to declare that they intend to be married.
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Stephen soon learns, however, that Eileen is taboo. He gathers this from the unexpectedly harsh reaction of Dante, who threatens him with blinding and, by implication, castration. It is not entirely clear what Stephen is intended to apologize for, or to whom he is intended to apologize. Dante's threat seems to have something to do with the idea of Stephen and Eileen being married. Its particular virulence however, is typically ascribed to the fact that Eileen is a Protestant. That Eileen is a Protestant makes her seem somewhat foreign to Stephen, which would be consistent with the objects of desire discussed so f a t That she is a Protestant would also make her seem somehow immoral, corrupt and corrupting. That this is the case is clear from references to Protestants made during the Christmas dinner (Port., p. 42). We may also recall that Nora told Joyce of an occasion on which she was beaten for dating a Protestant boy (J.J., p. 159). It is easy, however, to overemphasize the sectarian element of this event, and overlook what is really going on here. It is likely that Stephen is hiding under the table because Dante has hit him, or chased after him with the intention of hitting him. The threat of eagles tearing out Stephen's eyes is not the language of the nursery, but of the hell sermons. The tone of this threat, however, is as much Victorian as it is Catholic in its depiction of vengeance extracted by a god of retribution. The image recalls Oedipus, and Prometheus, who was tormented by an eagle for giving men a knowledge that would make them independent of the gods. As with Flynn's sin in "The Sisters," Stephen's transgression is hidden in ellipses, or occluded from the discourse, tainting the event with mystery. The narrative is fragmented here, and although the sentences are linearly conjoined, there is no causal relation between Dante's rebuke and Stephen's belief that he and Eileen will be married. The incident in which Eileen puts her hand in Stephen's pocket and then runs away laughing, is recalled later, between the reference to sexual experimentation at Clongowes, and the anticipation of punisl~mentfor this. Stephen may recall Eileen at this point, not only because of her hands, but also because this memory relates to punishment and, more specifically, to punisl~mentas a rebuke for sexual play. Someone is likely to have seen the hand in the pocket, or a similar experimentation. Perhaps it was explained to Stephen that boys and girls should not do such things until they are married, and Stephen naively replied that he and she intended to be married. Perhaps for Dante this was the final straw, and Stephen ran and hid beneath the table. Whatever the case, it seems certain that Stephen is being punished for sexual play. It is also not entirely clear to whom Stephen is intended to apologize. The offense is not against Dante, although she may be asking him to apologize to God. It seems more likely, however, that he is being commanded to apologize to Eileen, for impinging on her "modesty." The intensity of this event is underlined by the fact that it occurs on the first page of the book. It is more than likely that Stephen is ashamed and crying beneath the table. If Stephen
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is intended to apologize to Eileen, this event caters very neatly to a budding masochist, who is to be pulled out from under a table, still blubbering from chastisement, and compelled to apologize to a pretty little girl to whom he is attracted. There is also an element of fetishism in Stephen's perception of Eileen. When Stephen associates Eileen's hands and hair with the images of the Virgin Mary as a "Tower of Ivory" and a "House of Gold" (Port., pp. 43, 49), we see him trying to make the tabooed object sacred. As in "An Encounter," and "Araby," the hands and the hair of the desired girl are abstracted from the whole as signifiers of the feminine. The hands and hair become fetishes in the same way as women's undergarments become fetishes for Bloom. They are less forbidden and more attainable than the girl herself, and therefore may allow a small degree of open admiration, a small measure of conciliatory consummation. For Stephen, the fetish as hair and hands represents what he does not recognize or understand, while for Bloom the fetish as feminine undergarments represents and disguises what he wishes to consider unattainable. The paradoxically compensatory and disavowing nature of the fetish suggests that it is closely related to the ideal ego, which also represents at the same time that it disguises the forbidden object of desire. The aesthetic sense of beauty and ugliness, rather than the superego's moral sense of right and wrong, are the motivating factors in the creation of the fetish. As is characteristic of the Joycean object of desire, Eileen tempts Stephen, and then withdraws. When Eileen puts her hand in Stephen's pocket and then runs away laughing, she seems more knowing than Stephen and, in this way, in control (Port., p. 49). By the time Stephen meets Emma Cleary, his genital drives have become united with the shapeless longing that has until now been associated with the objects of desire. Somewhere in the masochistic equation, there is a normative drive that is underlined by its negation. Emma, like Molly, is voluptuous (S.H., p. 51,72), and Stephen longs to take pleasure in contact with her body. Although this, he believes, is what she desires also, she is much more acquiescent than he to their society's prohibition of this union outside of marriage. He attempts to convince her to ignore this dictate, but finds that she is acquiescent to social mores, to the extent that she not only concurs with the dictates of prohibition, but also considers even the suggestioil that she might transgress to be deeply insulting and implicitly insane. As when his mother and Simon leave him at school, he feels that he has been cuckolded, that she has chosen the father's authority over him. When he considers this, he sees her as a temptress, teasing him. He believes that she is "obliged to insist on the forbearance of the male and to despise him for forbearing" (S.H., p. 73). It is not as clear in Stephen Hero as it is in Portrait, however, that Stephen is a product of his society, just as is Emma, or her more abstract form E-
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C-, and that it is not only she who impedes their bodily union. As Stephen has also internalized the prohibitions of his society, and been desexualized, his desires are erotic rather than sexual, and so it is essential to him that EC-seems to be out of bounds or forbidden. There is a sense in which in his blunt proposition to Emma-that she and he spend a night together-he is provocatively and masochistically courting rejection (S.H., p. 203). Whereas in Stephen Hero Emma is drawn as primarily bodily, in Portrait, when it becomes clear that he will achieve no consummation with her, E-C-is described as birdlike (Port., p. 188). She becomes a forerunner of the birdgirl: he draws her as Lilliputian. She and the superego conspire to compel him to consider her in this way. He desires and admires her qualities of unattainability by default, as compensation for his inability to achieve bodily contact with her. Altl~ougl~ clearly unable to achieve consummation with Emma without giving himself up in marriage, Stephen nonetheless extends and tinkers with the notion of her unattainability. When, in Portmlt, E-C-and Stephen stand together on the tram, and she seems to ask him to kiss her, but he does not, it is possible that he does not do so because a kiss would merely frustrate him, knowing that more fulfilling contact will not follow (Port., pp. 70-1). Suzette Henke suggests that he will not kiss her because he is in fact in love with an aspect of his own mind; his creative imagination, or image-making faculty.10 He is already closed in the narcissistic ego 1 ideal ego system; man and wife unto himself. Stephen desires E-C-, and the tight form of the villanelle (Port., pp. 189, 193-4), which he substitutes for the kiss, suggests a sort of self-bondage, a self-inflicted restraint. He constrains himself, to keep a powerful image of unattained desire, instead of an impotent, diminished object of desire attained. We may recognize in this an early initiation of the mechanism of masochism, in which expectant frustration is favored over disenchanting achievement. Reik argues that the masochist pre-empts punishment by engineering his own punisl~ment,thereby controlling any sudden increase or decrease in excitement, and preparing himself for the expected displeasure.ll In denying a kiss to E-C-, Stephen pre-empts frustration, in order that he will feel less helpless when it is forced upon him; in order that he will feel more in control, and less at the mercy of this displeasure. Issy, like the already mentioned Joycean objects of desire, is taboo. She is taboo to H.C.E. because she is his daughter, and to Shem and Shaun because she is their sister. John Gordon suggests that "the twinkly way [ . . . . ] winking at me in bed" (F.W., p. 148.13-4) implies that there are stars painted on the ceiling of Issy's bedroom, and that "herewithin [ . . . ] like the blue of sky" (F.W., p. 238.28-30) suggests that the walls of her bedroom are covered in blue wallpaper.12 In this way, Issy is associated with the sky, the stars and flight, and drawn as an ideal to strive toward: "Belisha beacon, beckon bright! Usherette, unmesh us!" (F.W., p. 267.12) 'Unmesh us' suggests to pull us up out of abjection and bodily squalor, as represented in Joyce by
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liquid, which sucks downwardly, and in which the mutually immersed clasp blindly at one another as they drown. Issy is like the birdgirl in this respect, but perhaps more like Gerty in others. In her we see the object of desire considered as sacred, instead of profane. She is drawn as precious and sidereal, as luring and untouchable. As well as being a virgin, in the sense that she is beyond bounds, Issy is, in a certain sense, considered a whore by H.C.E.-or rather, a predatory, active virgin-in that she is a dangerous temptress luring him toward her. Gerty is another figure of the active or cheeky virgin. In "Nausicaa," she either wants Bloom to masturbate while looking at her, or is aware that he is already doing so. After Gerty recalls the gentleman lodger in Bertha's house masturbating to images of skirtdancers, she thinks of Bloom looking at her: "he couldn't resist the sight of the wondrous revealment half offered like those skirtdancers behaving so immodest before gentlemen and he kept on looking, looking" (U., p. 477). Gerty is also a precursor of Issy in her preoccupation with mirrors. Gordon considers there to be three mirrors in Issy's room-one above the bed (F.W., p. 327.13-14), one on a dresser (F.W., p. 561.16), and a "priceless pearlogs," that may be a "scrambling of pierglass."l; These three mirrors suggest that she objectifies and offers herself as a sexual object, luring the male with signifiers of the feminine. Like a cat, Issy is sleek and beautiful, but innocently cruel. It is in many respects her cold, amoral and selfish narcissism that constitutes her desirability: "You want to be slap well slapped for that. Your delighted lips, love, be careful! Mind my duvetyne dress above all! Its golded silvy, the newest sextones with princess effect" (F.W., p. 148.6-8). Crucial to understanding Issy's place in Finnegans Wake, is the situation of her room above H.C.E.'s. John Gordon notes that: Issy's room contains a fireplace (F.W.,p. 461). It is this fireplace down wllich Issy tries to call birds on behalf of her cat 'decoying more nesters to fall down the flue' (F.W.,p. 28.09), presumably with the birdcalls re-enacted at (F.W.,p. 359.31-360.16). A nester is also a Nestor, H.C.E. in his old man incarnation, who falls for Issy every time, and to whom Issy's voice repeatedly calls from above, by virtue of one simple crucial fact: his room is directly below hers, so that their fireplaces share a common chimney. The chimney which passes from the second-story bedroom of H.C.E. and A.L.P. to Issy's room has its origin in the downstairs kitchen, location of the servants. The route wllich brings a voice from above can also carry noises from below [ . . . . ] ' 4
The chimney is the nexus of tensions between extremes. It is in his chimney that Stephen hides pornography, his "fluefoul smut" (F.W., p. 183), in Portmit. Like Molly, Issy is associated with her cat. When Issy whispers up her chimney to call down birds to feed her cat, H.C.E. believes that she is calling him. Issy, like the sirens, is tempting and dangerous, urging him to trans-
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gress. She is irrational and impulsive, like Stephen's image of E-C-as a bird, and she calls him to lose himself in her irrationality, to transgress bounds and dissolve the order of his life. The birds she calls down represent his discontinuous self, his Daedalian moments, his disconnectedness. She beckons him to return, and to die a little death in the vagina dentata of her cat. Issy's mirrors, and the interchangeability of the bird image, also suggest that she, like the birdgirl, is a manifestation of the ideal ego, a portion of the self set up as a sexual object to the self. The big blue bedroom is the space of the soul in which Daedalus the birdman loves his female image, the birdgirl, in which the artist is man and wife unto himself. There is a flowing between he as she and she as he, as we see the beloved dressed in the subjective criteria of the lover's desire. Issy exists as a fragment of H.C.E.'s mind, just as the birdgirl exists as a fragment of Stephen's. It may be posited that that the predatory or active virgin, as seen in the birdgirl and Amelia Popper, and more clearly in Gerty and Issy, is the essential other in the masochistic equation. Although she is typically absent from the inasocl~isticscene, the whole performance, the theatrics of shame and submission, is for her benefit. Molly and the prostitute are defaults for her absence. There is, however, a recurring disillusionment with, or renunciation of the active virgin, which is consolidated again and again in the indifference due to masturbation. When Stephen encounters the prostitute, he is again uncertain of what he is seeking (Port., p. 95-6). He is like a more daring Chandler, who sometimes "courted the causes of his fear [choosing] the darkest and narrowest streets [ . . . ] he walked boldly forward [ . . . ] at times the sound of low fugitive laughter made him tremble like a leaf" (Dub., p. 47). By the time of Ulysses, we know that visits to prostitutes have become habitual for Stephen (U., p. 510). By drawing close to the forbidden, and by wandering along the margins of transgression, he hopes to escape the tedium of his life: to deterritorialize, and draw a line of flight. The Jews' quarter through which Stephen passes bestows an element of the oriental on his adventure (Port., p. 95). As with Eileen, Stephen proves to be passive in his initial encounter with the prostitute; it is she who approaches him, she who is active. She takes the conventionally masculine role, and he the conventionally passive, feminine role. The issues of inversion and passivity are crucial to an understanding of masochism. He becomes her virgin, "Shy but willing" (U., p. 661). When the prostitute takes him "firmly" in her arms, and presses her "softly parting" lips to his, he feels that what he has sought is the sexual entwinement of bodies. He learns that his quest has been toward this paradoxically exciting rest, this surging relaxation of the classical, the opening of orifices, and the return to body. The doll in the corner of the prostitute's room, however, is ominous (Port., p. 95). Stephen finds that he and the prostitute have only mingled bodies,
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and that no lasting contract has been made. He cannot afford to pay for sex with any regularity, and so when he leaves her room, he finds himself still hungering. In Ulysses, we find Stephen still craving, thinking: "I am lonely here. 0, touch me soon, now" (U., p. 61). Sexual entwinement is only a part of what he needs. He needs, more than this, an emotional alliance with a woman, by which she would touch and be touched freely: by which she would become alive for him. The prostitute is, however, not a real girl for him but a fetish, a symbol that he situates in relation to himself, in the alchemical process of his desire. She is a symbol of body, without being a body, a symbolic token rather than a flesh and blood other. More than by this, however, Stephen is isolated because his first love is internal, a portion of himself, his creative imagination. The doll in the corner of the prostitute's room is the pure virgin, the virgin that is within watching his descent into squalor. He is compelled by the fantasy, because his imagination, his image-making faculty, is predominant. When, in "Circe," Bloom half hears the unconscious Stephen's mumblings, and thinks "A girl. Some girl. Best thing could happen him" (U., p. 702),the irony of Bloom's assumption is that Stephen is not thinking of "Miss Ferguson," but recalling the poem he recited to his dying mother: a declaration that despite exile, Fergus is alive, and perhaps closer to the heart of life, as king of an internal and alternative kingdom. An exile such as Fergus seeks becomings, not communion. He draws a line of flight and remains molecular, refusing to be grasped by molar aggregates. His inner world and his inner struggles, and the echoes of the initial losses that necessitated the composition of his ideal ego, and drove him into exile, still stand in the way of Stephen's attaining the affection of any flesh and blood girl. Bloom is a progression on Stephen, and it is suggested that if Stephen is to mingle his life with another, and so evade his isolation, the terms will have to be no less complicated, and compensatory, than Bloom's. Molly is voluptuous, like Emma. Just as Cranly calls Emma fat (S.H., p. 221), so there are some who consider Molly to be fat. There is a tendency for interpreters to read large breasts as representative of the mothet Stephen's mother, however, is represented primarily by sickness and cancer, and even in Portrait she is not represented by her breasts. A distinction must be drawn between the mother and the earth mothet Although Molly is mother earth (Joyce tells us so), May is not. Large breasts often represent not the mother, but an immanent, bodily nature, and, perhaps, the normative object of desire which masochism makes the subject work so hard to reach. Molly, the Jewess, is also associated with the oriental qualities that have hovered around each of these Joycean objects of desire. As Bloom does not accept marriage's consignment of Molly to the role of his commodity, she maintains the mystery of the other, of another world. Although these factors contribute to Molly's desirability, they are in
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danger of being negated for Bloom by the fact of his marriage to her. Without the sense of transgression, and the illusion of untouchability, Bloom's desire for Molly would be diminished. In order for his desire for Molly to persist, she must be for him both an ideal ego and a flesh and blood other. The elaborate mechanisms of Bloom's inasocl~isinallows for this sense of untouchability and taboo to fall upon Molly. Through this cuckolding, Bloom recharges the desire which marriage kills. Molly may become a combination of the first desired object and the second, by offering the comfort and rest of the domestic scene, and by remaining the tabooed, foreign, and untouchable temptress. In the Joycean world, there can be no final resolution, or absolute unity in life. The notion of monogamous love is a myth, at best, or a lie, at least. To be more specific, for Joyce there may be a compensatory monogamous love, but never a monogamous desire. Society restricts free-flow by suggesting that love and desire should be one and the same, but they are not. The sorrow and pain of separate existences is inescapable in this world. The other who will make the solitary man whole does not exist as anything but a figment of mind, like the princess Selene in "Circe" (U., p. 605). The object of desire inhabits the subject, and the external other is attractive in so far as she approximates, or mirrors, this subjective criterion. This subjective criterion can never be fully satisfied by an object from beyond the self, and so symbols and rituals are incorporated to help minimize the compromise, to traverse the tension between the inner and the outer, and to summon and make real the ideal. This is why Molly cannot be fully considered except in relation to Boylan. Such troilism is central to Joyce; it is central to Ulysses, and to Exiles, and it is apparent when Stephen begins to suspect that E-C-and Cranly are attracted to one another. A description of the Joycean object of desire that did not mention Robert, Boylan and Cranly would be inadequate, but there is a tendency to overemphasize the lability of Joycean desire. Of course, it is metamorphic, but it is also dependent upon a structure. Bloom and Robert are not revealing homosexuality, heterosexuality, or even bisexuality in their respective urges to be cuckolded. The masochist is not bisexual, because that would mean that he wanted to find a beautiful man, or a beautiful woman, and take pleasure in that person's body. The masochist is seeking the inhuman in sexuality; the object of his desire is not a body, but an alchemical equation, a structural ideal. "Man delights him not nor woman neither [ . . . . I " (U., p. 273) Nonetheless, there is a normative object hidden in this equation, and it is perhaps the always-futile purpose of the ritual to call this object back from the symbolic realm, to which it has been lost. The masochist's sufferings would be meaningless if they did not ultimately serve to call back the woman whom these same rituals have already distanced. He struggles to approach his goal, knowing that if he ever reaches it, it will lose its power to compel. His deliberately plotted path is an amalgam of Sisyphuen struggle and Tantalean desire.
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Krafft-Ebing considers the sadist's active flagellation to be a substitute for sexual intercourse with a female, although such flagellation is: also practised o n other living, sensitive objects-children and animals. There may be a full conscio~isnessthat the impulse is really directed towards women, and that only as a lnalzesl~iftthe nearest attainable objects (pupils) are abused. But the condition of the perpetrator may be such that the imp~ilseto cruel acts enters the consciousness accolnpanied only by lustful excitement, wllile its real objects (which can alone explain the lustful colouring of such acts) remains latent."
It is different for the Joycean masochist, however, because the ritual serves not only as an attempt to summon the missing object, but also an effort to recreate a relation to society, to recreate the conditions under which alienation became sexualized. The eyes of the community are also utilized as an object of desire. Masochism and sadism are more than simply shadows of, or defaults for the normative act. This may be partly the case in their inception, but it is never long before the perversities take on independent lives.
The following is an examination of the general prohibition of contextually specific sexual urges as it is drawn in Joyce, and the way in which the prohibition interplays with the Joycean object of desire. Central to this analysis is Deleuze's conception that in sadism and masochism there is a resexualization of the desexualized, in which the qualities of desexualization are retained. Desexualization is a problematic term, but it has been retained here despite its shortcomings. Desexualization is a movement whereby the normative drive is disguised or repressed, and sexuality is attached to something else. Apart from the fact that desexualization is dependent upon the presupposition of a normative drive (the difficulties of which have already been touched upon), the conception also assumes that the something else to which sexuality is attached-violence, cruelty, domination or submission-is not already sexual in its own right. For this reason, it is perhaps impossible to distinguish between desexualization, resexualization and sexualization. The resexualization is written into the desexualization, and sexualization might describe both desexualization and resexualization. Despite these apparently insurmountable difficulties, these terms will nonetheless be utilized, in part to retain a link between this work and Coldness and Cruelty, which, through its use of these terms, comes closer than any other study to an adequate understanding of sexual masochism. For the sake of clarity, desexualization may be considered the determinant, and resexualization the transformation. Sexualization might highlight the sense in which these both partake of a single, continuous movement. It is perhaps appropriate that a perversity so paradoxical as masochism should be best described in terms so plagued by paradox.
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Fathers Interpreters of masochism tend to stress the primacy of either the mother's or the father's role as a determinant of the perversity. The mother initiates the process, by undermining the normal course of the child's renunciation of infantile omnipotence. The father becomes a determinant in one of two ways. According to the simpler of these, masochism is simply an extension of the child's submission to Oedipal conditions. The more sophisticated of these explanations describes the father as weak or missing and, for this reason, the superego as a reduced force in the psyche of the child. It is an oversimplification to consider masochism to be determined solely by the mother or the father. Even if we consider that both the mother and the father play a part in determining the child's masochism, it is also an oversimplification to consider these influences in terms of too neatly defined developmental phases. As "Simon" is an anagram for "Minos," it is suggested that in Portrait it is the father who impedes the individual's quest for what he desires, by incarcerating him in a maze of laws. Simon, however, is merely a dim emanation of the principle of fatherhood: behind him stand more solid fathers, who confine him as much as they confine Stephen. The father is the maze itself, the pervasive force behind triangulation of the subject between lack and desire. These more ubiquitous fathers are those who hold power because they uphold and embody inherited systems of power: the systems of church and state. Stephen declares to Lynch that "[a] Church is not a fixture like Gibraltar: no more is an institution. Subtract its human members from it and its solidity becomes less evident. I, at least, will subtract myself" (S.H., p. 239). Emancipation, however, is not so simple. Not only do these institutions hold power, unrecognized, over a portion of his mind, but also his subtraction of himself from these congeries will not be perceived as passive escape from, but as the active disintegration of these selfsame congeries. For this reason, he will be branded a heretic, or a pervert, and be considered to be the worst type of threat-a threat arising from within. Those who uphold the system do so because it offers them power. The removal of solitaries will only assist the slow erosion, or metamorphosis of these systems. In order to topple them, a new system of power must oppose and replace them. These new systems, however, will merely fill the space vacated by the old system, and give power to new fathers. The revolutionary investment will become colonizing in its turn. Although, in "Circe," Stephen breaks the lamp with his stick, it is not his intention to topple the walls of the inherited systems through violence. His quietism leads him instead to remove himself, through exile from these systems. He recognizes escape as the only truly revolutionary gesture. He cannot avoid the fact, however, that the taboos, values and prohibitions of his society were stamped upon his psyche before he was old enough to ques-
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tion this inheritance. History may deliver a back kick (U., p. 42), or kick from within. Exile is not simply a question of a singular choice, but a stance that must be perpetually renewed, in a struggle against aspects of the mind, the king and priest 'in here.' That he considers his enemy to be the king and priest, rather than the father, emphasizes that for Joyce this struggle for psychic emancipation is political rather than oedipal. Although Simon is merely a dim emanation of the fathers who stand behind him, he is a manifestation of Minos nonetheless, and therefore he has helped to force Stephen's desexualization. When Stephen travels to Cork with Simon, he is preoccupied with the frustrated desire boiling within him, and feeling disconnected, lost and loveless. Before his genital sexuality awakened, his society trained him to resist such release. Once it has awakened, and he has found the urge for such release irresistible, he experiences a crisis in the opposition between his own desires and the mores of his society. When traveling to Cork with Simon, Stephen considers his lust as loveless and, because of the essential secrecy of masturbatory release, he feels alienated and ashamed. The intensity of Stephen's shame when traveling with Simon should be recognized. His shame is visceral, and it relates to the open secret that sits between them. Stephen is aware that he is the product of Simon's arousal, that he is alive because of Simon's sexual urges. Stephen's later claim that a man of genius is repulsed by other males of his flesh calls back to, and waters down, or intellectualizes, the bodily disgust that Stephen feels in Cork beside his father. He and his father can never be friends. There is a paradoxical sense in which his shame and his alienation from his father result from his recognition of what he has in common with his father. That none of this may be spoken of, or compared, makes him feel alone with his lust, and causes him to consider this tendency to be excessive in himself. He feels that if he could simply have sex and be done with blind longing, the depravity of his masturbatory imagination might be tempered. To sin with a woman, however, would signify his adulthood, which is a possibility at which Simon sneers. Simon recognizes, unconsciously, that as long as Stephen is a child, he himself is able to retain and prolong his youth. Simon suggests that he, like his father to him (Port., p. 88), would be more a brother to Stephen than a father, but that Stephen is peculiar, unlike Simon or his father. It is not enough for Simon to prove that he is young; he wants also to prove that he possesses more attributes of youth and virility than does Stephen. He proposes libidinal, homosocial challenges to Stephen. He says that he would "vault a fivebarred gate against [Stephen or] run with him after the hounds across the country" (Port., p. 91). He puts himself forward as Cotter's ideal sporty boy, and presents Stephen as the unhealthy boy who spends too much time in his room alone, a potential masturbator. This is just what Stephen is afraid he has become. When Simon says that Stephen is "not built that way" (Port., p. 90), he is directing the conversation away from the topic of female objects of desire, to suggest that Stephen is a child, too young to hear such things.
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Somewhere here, with them in Cork, is Stephen crouched beneath the table, repenting for having thought that he and Eileen might be married. The shame that hovers between these events is obscure, and so it blurs into the sexuality that touches it everywhere, and shame becomes sexualized. Stephen's prospect of sinning with another seems far off and futile-his lust secret, sordid and unnatural. Although never fictionalized, it would be in Simon's nature to have sometime made some witty remark about Stephen hidden beneath the table, and his proposed marriage to Eileen.
Beating At the start of Portrait it is more than likely that Stephen hides beneath the table because he is evading a physical attack from Dante. Nowhere in Portrait do we see May or Simon earnestly disciplining Stephen: May dotes on him, and Simon entertains and ridicules him. In the absence of parental discipline, Dante, the traditionalist, believes it is beholden upon her to censure the child. May says that Stephen must apologize, but it is Dante who adds that if he does not the eagles will pull out his eyes. Until very recently, it has been traditional for parents to beat children. It has typically been considered as not simply a right, but also a responsibility. It was argued that if children were not disciplined through physical punishment, they would not be sufficiently socialized, and would lead immoderate lives. Gibson notes that "Beating has always been common in British schools, the schoolmaster's legal right to administer corporal punishment deriving from the fact that society has considered him to stand i n loco parentis to the children under his care."l6 Typically, scholastic discipline in these islands has consisted of the caning or birching of the bare or clothed buttocks while the victim is in a bent over position. This is where sex comes into play. Gibson notes that, according to the Report of School Commission Enquiry (1968), canings were more often inflicted in public than in private, presumably to enhance their alleged deterrent value. This is where shame becomes mingled with sexuality. This practice, he remarks, "is likely also to have had a stimulant effect on the spectators, given the strongly voyeuristic component in flagellomania."l7 In Portmit, it is clear to Stephen and the other boys that Corrigan is likely to be flogged on the bottom in a bent over position by Mr. Gleeson. It is unclear, however, whether this punishment will occur in public or in private. The song they sing suggests that it is likely that he will be flogged on the naked bottom. It can't be helped; It mist be done So down wzth )'OZW breeches And out wzth )lour b z m . (Port., p. 3 3 )
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As evidence that some people were aware of the sexual nature of the flagellation of the buttocks, the pandy batting of the hand was considered to be a more modest, delicate means of castigation. This is the punishment to which Stephen is subjected in Clongowes. Stephen's recollection of this event in "Circe" suggests that he sexualizes it retrogressively, although at the moment it is inflicted he takes no delight. Such an instance stands as proof that Meibom's ideas of masocl~ism,though possibly sound once the mechanics are modified, must be supplemented to acknowledge that the masochistic compulsion is due not only to a mechanical response, but also to a psychic response to the idea of submitting to a beating.
The Debate Justifications In Victorian Britain and Ireland, parents and educators who were in favor of corporal punishment believed that God had directed the corporal punishment of children, through the mouth of Solomon. They held that the references to beating in the Old Testament were to be taken literally. The maxim that was repeated most frequently was "Spare the rod and spoil the child." Gibson's research reveals, however, that although universally attributed by the Victorians to Solomon, this phrase comes from Samuel Butler's satirical poem Hudibras, published in 1664 (part ii, Canto I, 1.884). In this section of the poem an amorous lady urges Sir Hudibras to undergo a whipping on her account as a proof of knightly love. But since our sex's modesty Will not allow I sshould be by, Bring me, on oath, a fair account, And honour too, when you have done it; And I'll admit you to the place You claim as due in my good grace. If matrimony and hanging go By dest'n!; why not whipping too? What medicine else can cure the fits Of lovers, when they lose their wits? Love is a bo!; by poets styled, Then spare the rod and spoil the child. (1885)18
The topic of whipping children was in the air throughout the nineteenth century, and well into the twentieth century. Gibson documents the debates on the topic that filled the editorial pages of many newspapers and journals throughout this period. The pro-beaters found Divine example in the Old Testament rather than the New. They emphasized the retributive aspect of authority. The just God of the Old Testament is harsh and exacting, and to
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Victorian parents he offered a satisfactory disciplinary model. The following passages from the Family Herald are typical of this position: As human parents created in His image it is our duty to emulate Him in treatment of our children who 'are given in charge to us in order that we may teach them the nature of the Divine Law, and prepare them for manhood and ~vomanhood'( 1 7 November 1849). The world is a battlefield, an arena of fierce, or animated, or interested conflict. It is a world of authority and obedience, a world in which all must learn to obey before they can be authorised t o govern. (24 November 1849)'s
Support for the policy of whipping children was heard not only in the editorial columns of the papers, but also in the discourse of educated people who must have been familiar with the more sophisticated arguments against the beating of children. In 1835 Dr Arnold of Rugby School, the father of Mathew Arnold, argued that the "proud notion of personal independence . . . is neither reasonable nor Christian," and that pride and self-will in children should be met with corporal punisl~inent:"Impatience of inferiority felt by a child towards his instructors, is merely wrong, because it is at variance with the truth: there exists a real inferiority in the relation, and it is an error, a fault, a corruption of nature, not to acknowledge it" ("On the Discipline of Public Schools").2~Tom Brown's Schooldays makes it clear that Dr Arnold put his ideas into practice at Rugby. Pro-beaters addressed the arguments against corporal punishment in tones of righteous indignation. Here is an example from Dublin in 1905, written by Colonel P.F. Robertson: "Think what the members of the Humanitarian League will have to answer for if they are able to induce weak men and silly women to disobey God's command-to whip naughty children under their colltrol."2~
Objections The sense of urgency and indignation was strong among the anti-beaters also. The main concern of the anti-beaters was the sexual nature of beating for both the beater and the beaten. Gibson quotes from one of the earliest attacks on the practice of beating in British schools, The Children's Petition; Or, A Modest Remonstrance of that intolerable grievance our Youth lie under, in the accustomed Severities of the School-discipline of this Nation, published in 1669. "In this, the sexual nature of 'lower discipline' was made explicit by the author. He argued that beatings 'were of that nature as to make our schools to be not merely houses of correction but of prostitution, in this vile way of castigating in use, wherin [sic]our secret parts, which are by nature shameful, and not to be uncovered, must be the Anvil exposed to the immodest eyes and filthy blows of the smiter."22
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Anti-beating sentiments were, however, much stronger on the continent. In 1769, in the article 'Verge. Baguetter divinatoire' ('Rod. Divining Rod') in the Dictionnaire philosophique, Voltaire writes: It is shameful and abominable that such a punish~nentshould be administered to the buttoclts of young boys and girls. It used to be the punish~nent of slaves. In our colleges I have seen barbarians strip children almost naked, and a brute, often drunk, lacerate their flesh with long rods, which made their groins bleed and swell fearfully. The two nerves wl~ichjoin the sphincter to the pubis being irritated, emissions were produced; and this has often happened to young girls.23
In the Confessions, published in 1782, Rousseau begins his description of his sexual obsession with being beaten by declaring: "How differently people would treat children if only they saw the eventual results of the indiscriminate, and often culpable, methods of punishment they employ! The magnitude of the lesson to be derived from so common and unfortunate a case as my own has resolved me to write it down."24 In "Aphrodisinque externe, ou Tmite' du fouet," (178 8) Franqois-AmedCe Doppet states: I suppose it is necessary, in certain cases, to inflict corporal punish~nenton children; but should we beat the miscreants on the lower back and loins? We are taught during our first five or six years to hide our buttoclts and pa~tleshonteuses ['shameful parts']; then, after this period, along comes a teacher who forces us to unbutton our trousers, push them down, lift our shirt, show everything and receive the whip in the middle of the class. And don't these parts become even more 'shameful' when it's some u ~ ~ o u t h pedant who's loolting at them and touching them?2'
Doppet believes that the beating of children prematurely enflames their sexuality. Furthermore, he considers the beater to be expressing sodomistic desire on the buttocks of the beaten child. French educationalists heeded his message, "and it was not long before the beating of children was outlawed in French schools."26 In England and Ireland, those who spoke out against corporal punishment were greeted with contempt until a much later date. George Bernard Shaw was one of the most persistent opponents of corporal punishment, and he entered into a series of debates in the letters column of the papers. Mathew Arnold, no doubt the recipient of Dr Arnold's program, writes that corporal punishment "will more and more come to appear half disgusting, half ridiculous, and a teacher will find it more and more difficult to inflict it without a loss of self-respect. The feeling on the continent is very strong on this point."27
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Nonetheless, despite an awareness of the sexual implications of corporal punishment, it continued to be accepted by the English and the Irish. In My Early Life, Winston Churchill says the following of a teacher who administered a severe flogging to him: "My reading in later life has supplied me with some possible explanations of his temperament."28 Clearly the explanation of which he is speaking is the psychological study of sadism. Like Old Cotter, he connotes but does not name this temperament, using euphemism and ellipses.
Beating in Pol-&ait When the boys at Clongowes discuss the crime for which "five fellows out of the higher line," and Tusker Boyle and Simon Moonan (Port., pp. 48-9) are to be flogged and / or expelled, the sexualization of beating seems to be determined by the profusion of paradoxes in which this incident is embedded. It is suggested that the crime was to drink the wine of the sacrament, and Stephen is stunned by the immensity of such a transgression. He feels himself wither at the thought of transgressing against God, and a vortex spreads inside him, drawing him into desexualization, along with the impressions that latch onto his feat Although he cannot comprehend how the boys could have dared to use the wine for profane purposes (inebriation) he cannot stop himself from an act of imaginative empathy with their sacrilege. He sublimates rather than represses his shock. He configures the sacred as profane, and vice versa, and so becomes guilty by infection. When it is revealed that the boys did not steal the sacred wine, their crime ("smugging") retains an aura of inverted sacredness. This is due as much to the fact that the two explanations of this crime follow hard upon each other, as to the mystery that shrouds this crime. As these impressions enter the rent in his consciousness, which has been opened by his fear, they are conjoined. When he hears that the iniquity related to the lavatory, and not the tabernacle, his mind continues to reel before the enormity of such inversions (Port., p. 48). Within moments, he has considered the most sacred of things as profane, and the most profane of things as holy. For Stephen, the cloaca1 and the sacrosanct are now commingled. Although it is never made explicit, it is clear to us, as it seems to be clear to Stephen, that "smugging" entails some sort of sexual experimentation. Stephen is tainted further as his curiosity, enticed and compelled by the unspoken nature of the crime, attempts to recreate, and so understand this mysterious transgression. His efforts to conjure the crime in his mind, and comprehend these contradictions, excite him, both bodily and intellectually. One of the participants in the crime was "Lady Boyle," who is always paring his fingernails like a girl; whose hands then are fetishes, like Eileen's (Port., p. 49). More significantly, Mr. Gleeson, who is to administer the flogging, has "long and pointed fingernails," and Stephen thinks: "Perhaps he pared them
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too like Lady Boyle" (Port., p. 51). The entwinement of human bodies, the feminine, the sacred body of God, and the sordidness of bodily emissions, are all drawn together in a cluster of associations, as compelling but forbidden, and drawn down together into the vortex of Stephen's desexualization. His imagination is driven to a peak of excitement trying to assimilate such contradictions, and then the notion of flogging is introduced, as the boys wonder whether Corrigan will be flogged or pandied, and how many strokes he will get.29 (Port., pp. 50-1) The thought of flogging joins the series of paradoxical associations, as Stephen contemplates M r Gleeson's hands: So long and cruel they were though the white fattish hands were not cruel but gentle. And though he trembled with cold and fright to think of the cruel long nails and of the high wl~istlingsound of the cane and of the chill you felt at the end of your shirt when you undressed yourself yet he felt a feeling of queer quiet pleasure inside" (Port., p. 51).
His pleasure is related to the openness and the objectification that comes with nudity. The sense in which to strip is to prepare for the sexual act, or sacrifice, and the transgressional drawing together of bodies, all leap into Stephen's mind, flooding the notion of flogging with tones of pleasure. His imagination, already aroused by this exotic dream of discipline, broods on self-conjured images of flogging, becoming further aroused by its undertones of ritual: "It made him shivery: but that was because you always felt like a shiver when you let down your trousers [ . . . . ] He wondered who had to let them down, the master or the boy himself" (Port., p. 51). To submit to whipping and objectification is, like sexual congress, a means of escaping the discontinuous self, and achieving continuity; it is a communion, a connection. All of these impressions are tied together in Stephen's mind, as aspects of submission, the sacred, the forbidden, the lowly, the exotic, the feminine and the cruel.
The Church In leaving him at Clongowes, Simon expels Stephen from the domestic milieu, and passes him into the custody of the priests. Simon's role in Stephen's triangulation seems to be of less relevance than that of the priests. It is the priests, and not Simon, who teach Stephen that it is wrong to desire bodily. Simon is never really a superego figure for Stephen. Stephen's Oedipal father is, in the Deleuze and Guattarian (anti-oedipal) scheme of things, many wolves, not one. According to Deleuze and Guattari, when Freud assumes that the wolf man's wolves are representative of his father, he overlooks the fact that the wolf man sees not one, but several wolves. That these priests, with their vows of celibacy, are so deeply desexualized themselves, means that their repressed libidinal energy is likely to be released as sadism or m a s o c h i s m . ~In~ Coldness and Cruelty, Deleuze argues that just
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as the alliance is the niche of the masochist, so is the institution the sadist's milieu.31 It is suggested that these priests are sadists, because it is their role to identify with authority, and negate desire as it reveals itself in the world beyond them. They repress their own desire, but it appears again, in the return of the repressed, projected onto the children. They are frustrated that they cannot negate desire altogether. They grow red or white of cheek, tremble, throw tantrums, and Stephen notices this, and is suspicious of their piety (Port., pp. 53, 135). These easily frustrated priests adopt a condescending, taunting, mocking tone with the children, which will be adopted by Bello in "Circe," and reiterated obsessively in Finnegans W a k e . This droll, mechanical sneering becomes identified as the voice of the superego, as the voice of denying authority. The masochist makes this voice a plaything. The priests attempt to obliterate the children's interiorities, their senses of privacy. D o h declares: "I can see schemer in your face" (Port., p. 55). In suggesting to Stephen that his privacy is translucent to them, they suggest that they know what he does not, because he is only a child. When Stephen reaches an age at which they can no longer convince him of their omniscience, they remind him that though they may not be omniscient, God is omniscient, and so push him back into Catholic guilt. Student and priest alike utilize this power politics. When Wells asks Stephen if he kisses his mother before going to bed, and then laughs at him whether he says he does or does not, he is identifying himself with the fathers, and restricting Stephen's longing toward the object of desire through mockery (Port., p. 25). This bullying is libidinally and oedipal charged, as Wells is attempting to establish a relation in which he is the father who knows what Stephen the child does not, and so forcing Stephen to embody the passive role of a child. Wells is suggesting that to desire the feminine is weak, womanly or childish, and that in order to be accepted into the male world of his new community he must consider affection unmentionable. For Wells, the only right answer would have been no answer, to repress the answer entirely. This does not dawn on Stephen yet, although he will later learn to shield himself in silence. Instead, he sees desire again shrouded in mystery. Secrets, paradox, confusion, and the sense that something is 'queer' are all signs of sexualization in Joyce. Here, there is a sexualization of the relation of knowing and not knowing. The unspoken nature of the topic of desire does not deter Stephen from transgression, or desexualize him as thoroughly as the moral world has hoped, but instead prompts him to conceive of the tabooed object as sacred. To speak the unspeakable will become a factor in his resexualization. In his resexualization, he will make parodic play of pulling that that is beyond the gaze of the panopticon into a parody of its scope. Even before the hell sermons, Stephen is sufficiently a product of his society that he feels shame and self-loathing for masturbation, for the rampant tenor
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of his desire, and for his encounters with prostitutes. After the sermons, he willingly enters a second childhood, purposely subjugating himself, and attempting to repress, rather than sublimate his desire. He feels selfish and degenerate for succumbing to the callings of his lust, and he is frightened and amazed by the riotous nature of his fantasies, which feed on their own freedom, proliferating in darkness, and dropping him ever deeper into obscenity. He is alienated, and his secrecy is like an abyss between him and all others: "Nothing moved him or spoke to him from the real world unless he heard in it an echo of the infuriated cries within him" (Port., p. 89). As his sins are unspeakable, enclosed by, but occluded from discourse, he imagines that no one but he could find delight in such sordid rioting, could revel so before sagging into the slime of emission. By making desire unspeakable, the panopticon has effectively isolated and alienated each subject. Furthermore, the condition of alienation becomes sexualized, in both bodily and intellectual terms. The Church, in its capacity as a bastion of control, more than as a repository of myth, understands the age at which the lust of boys becomes focused and irresistible, and so it makes a massive push at this time to remind them of the prohibition on emission. The Church denies these boys the right to discharge, because masturbation entails privacy. The imaginative flow of the fantasy wastes the energy they intend to colonize and confiscate, to serve the ends of society. Shame has served so far to keep this act hidden, has driven it into privacy, and expelled it from discourse. Now, however, the priests tell the boys that nothing may be hidden. God has seen them pulling at themselves, and worse; he has viewed the dreams in which they have rioted. He has witnessed the obscenity of the images they have called up, and pushed further and further against prohibition, into madness and obscenity, just to prove themselves masters of their own inner worlds, to prove themselves free to desire and dream anything. Now it seems as though the shameful thoughts will stick. The slime of these emissions has left an ineradicable mark. The priests reinforce the shame they have been teaching, and pull the covers away from the masturbators. The superego, God, the father, is recharged. The hell sermons condemn the fluid flowing of one image into the next, the imagination thrilling in the freedom and spontaneity of its own desire. The priests would prefer the boys to repress desire, and became neurotics, denying their instincts and their interiorities, than that they should transform desire, and let it flow inwardly, when they shut themselves off, and withdraw from the world. In the hell sermons, the proximity and the entwinement of bodies is drawn as abject and disgusting, as is the clinging reek of bodily emission. The useless dream is perceived as wasteful and sordid expenditure. The boys are urged to restrain their image-making faculties, to control the flow of one image into the next, just as they are urged to restrain and control bodily emissions. They evade this repression by magical thinking. We may envision here the flow of dreams as escaping through what
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Bataille describes as the "solar anus."32 The solar anus, or pineal eye, situated at the peak of the skull like a volcano, allows psychic emission. This psychic spew is the production of desire. The emission of the "solar anus," the free-flow of dream, is prohibited because it jeopardizes the prohibition, by allowing disguised representations of desire to enter into discourse. Ellinaim notes that when Stanislaus offered suggestions about Portmit, Joyce replied: "is the novel to be your puke or mine?" (J.J., p. 264) The sermons meet desire on its own ground, in the imagination, and counter it, transforming lust into disgust. Body, and all that is liquid, all that oozes out of the body, and flows in the body, is said to be corrupt. Physical desire is bestial, lacking in understanding, possessing no light of soul; it usurps volition and identity; unable to resist flow, the subject drowns in his own mire. The priests threaten the boys with indifferentiation and abjection. The binary opposition of the high and the low is reinforced, but from the sadist's perspective, in which desire, and the object of desire, are lowly and profane. The fathers force the ego ideal on the boys, and the ego ideal seeks esteem before the superego, by disdaining, expelling and negating desire. In urging the boys to be manly and forthright, they urge the boys to denounce the feminine and covert ideal ego. Although they compel the boys to participate socially, they urge them to eschew any contact that might be private or intimate. The prohibition on privacy is, however, double sided. A certain sort of privacy is prohibited, while a certain sort is enforced. In Stephen Hero, Stephen is interested to hear that at Clonliffe, where Wells is studying to be a priest, the students are told not to walk in twos, but to be in groups at all times: "Companions are not allowed. You must join the first group you meet" (S.H., p. 77). By forbidding flow, and the entwinement of bodies, and by encouraging a certain sort of isolation before all things except God, the priests confine each boy in the cell of his own body. At the same time, they place each boy under the surveillance of an all-seeing God, so that they cannot hide themselves in imaginative riot. They incarcerate the boys in mind-forged manacles. Altl~ougl~ Stephen is deeply affected by the hell sermons, and for some time afterwards sees the tabooed object as corrupt and profane, the confusion and the sense of mystery already surrounding the taboo for him will ultimately counter these renewed efforts of the priests. It will not be long before he again begins to consider the object of desire as sacred. The hell sermons drive Stephen to the depths of desexualization. It is Stephen's vision of the birdgirl that is the first spark of his resexualization, promising his release from the gaze and the denials of a tyrannical superego. In the first Portrait, the essay, the prostitute occupies the place of the birdgirl. That Joyce wrote the essay in a flurry of creativity after the death of his mother (J.J., p. 144), may suggest that the hell sermons and the death of the mother are somehow twinned events in the Joycean world. In Ulysses, Stephen is desexualized by the memory of his mother's death. Both the hell
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sermons and the death of the mother have drawn the body, and therefore the desired object, as lowly, abject, corrupt and bestial. In both the birdgirl and the prostitute of the essay, there is an effort to re-establish the desired obiect as sacred.
Homosocial Bullying: Beating by Older Students As well as in the home, and from the priests, Stephen is chastised by his schoolmates. In Victorian schools, particularly boarding schools, it was often the case that "senior boys were empowered to inflict corporal punishment-characteristically of the 'lower discipline' sort-on their fellows [ . . . . ] Every so often during the century accounts would appear in the newspapers of flogging excesses committed in the schools-often by boy against boy.":: In Joyce, there is no evidence of boys administering whippings as a formal function. The first time Wells bullies Stephen, however, it is over a point discussed at school, and the tone of the event is distinctly pedagogical. The second time, the mirroring of formal school discipline is more obvious. In both cases, the bullying is erotically charged. Heron bullies Stephen because Stephen is guilty, by infection, of Byron's immorality (Port., p. 80), in the same way that he is guilty of Parnell's transgression, and the narrators of "The Sisters" and "An Encounter" are guilty of Flynn's and of the pervert's transgressions respectively. The bullies do not understand the exact nature of Byron's immorality, but accept the word of their elders, imagining him to have accessed-because of weakness of will, or perverse wilfulness-forbidden objects of desire. As Deleuze says of the sadist, these bullies identify with the superego, locate desire in the world beyond them, and attempt to negate this desire. They, like Stephen, have been desexualized, but this bullying affords an example of the resexualization of the desexualized as sadistic. The purposes of bullies are always libidinally charged. As Heron identifies with the father, he must, by punishing Stephen, the compensatory object of his desire, assume the role of the father to the child, or the husband to the wife. He wants to become the active party, and put Stephen into the passive position. The condescending, playful, ironic tone he adopts as he punishes Stephen is similar to the tone that D o h adopts when he punishes Stephen. This tone will be echoed again by Bello, its note of condescension serving to underline Bloom's weakness. Later, when Heron quizzes Stephen on E-C-(Port., pp. 76-7), he assumes the role of the father in a double sense. In so far as he lets on to be an authority on such matters, he pretends to be a father in that he may claim access to the sexual object. When he suggests that Stephen is naughty to have a girlfriend, he assumes the role of the father as moral judge. Stephen understands the pantomime that is being played here, and he begins to confess to
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Heron, as he soon will to a real priest for his consummation with prostitutes, and his masturbation. As it turns out, it is the bullies, or "Shaun brothers" such as Heron, who become priests. Tellingly, Wells, who pushes Stephen into a ditch in Portmit, and Dillon from "An Encounter," the robust boy who is the most aggressive in games of Cowboys and Indians, both become priests. Bullying in itself, in isolation from its mimicry of pedagogical methods, is also a sexualizing phenomenon. Stephen considers himself to be at a disadvantage among his fellow students, and at the mercy of bullies, whom he cannot emulate. The exclusive maleness of Clongowes contributes to making it seem cheerless, cold and damp. It is not the mother per se, but comfort, warmth and affection that have been replaced by discomfort, cold and bullying. He interprets this as the replacement of the female by the male. Clongowes is well lit, because privacy and concealment are prohibited here. The school strives to be a panopticon. As they are so thoroughly banished from the object of desire, the feminine, the boys at Clongowes console themselves by establishing libidinal ties among themselves. In his 1909 essay on Wilde, "Oscar Wilde: The Poet of Salome," Joyce utilizes the logic of the perverse dynamic to argue that the English educational system produces homosexuals: "Wilde, far from being a perverted monster who sprang in some inexplicable way from the civilization in modern England, is the logical and inescapable product of the AngloSaxon college and university system, with its secrecy and restrictions."+' (C.W., p. 204) The point, however, may be extended to cover also the schooling system of Irish Catholicism.3j The boys at Clongowes try to recreate Oedipal ties among themselves, and triangulate themselves tighter still. Power and lack of power become defaults for male and female, as sexual currents continue to flow, despite the absence of the feminine. Certain boys become identified as feminine; some willingly, such as Simon Moonan, who offers himself as an object of desire in return for sweets, and some unwillingly, when forced to adopt a passive posture toward bullies (Port., p. 49). The most overt expression of this system is seen when Bertie Tallon is dressed in female clothes, and addressed as though he were a little girl (Port., p. 74). Bertie Tallon is here a parody of the ideal ego. The female object of desire is absent from, or denied to this community, and so they create female objects of desire, not only by bullying and dominating one another, but also by toying with the energies of transvestism. This is a foreshadowing of masochistic transvestism, and of Bloom's emasculation. Bloom notes that it was Gerald who introduced him to cross dressing, when they prepared for a school play: Vice Versa (U., pp. 648-9). The masochistic transvestite hopes to be laughed at, as is Bertie Tallon. Within the framework of the fantasy, the masochist accepts humiliation, and adopts a female posture toward male power.
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Shauns Bullying Shems "Shaun brothers," who emulate the fathers, push "Shem brothers" into the positions of the female or the child. "Shaun brothers" are extroverts, and sadists, while "Shem brothers" are introverts and masochists. Being extrovert, and therefore preoccupied with their appearances, the "Shaun brothers" preen themselves, and reach out into the world, to capture the desired object. In Schopenhauerian terms, Shaun lives the "World as Will," and Shem the "World as Idea."36 While Bloom and Stephen are dressed in black, as they are both in mourning, Mulligan wears a "primrose waistcoat" (U., p. 320), and Molly thinks of Boylan's clothes: "lovely stuff in that blue suit he had on and stylish tie and socks with the sky blue silk things on them hes certainly welloff I know by the cut of his clothes" (U., p. 887).Where Bloom is an outsider, slipping along margins, Boylan is a folk-hero, watched and admired by everyone. The sirens flirt very openly with Boylan. In Joyce's world, women tend to favor "Shaun brothers" over "Shem brothers" as sexual objects. This is fair enough, as Shems do not try as hard to impress or to catch, because they are inwardly preoccupied. In the notes to Exdes, Joyce writes that "women find Robert unceasingly attractive because unceasingly aggressive" (P.+E., p. 352). In the game of colors, in Finnegnns Wake, the rainbow sisters admire Chuff, the Shaun brother, and laugh at Glugg, the Shem brother.37 When Glugg answers a question wrongly, the Maggies gather round, and ''theirs is a little tittertat of hilarity (Lad-0'-me-soul! lad-0'-me-soul, see!) and the wordchary is atvoiced ringsoundingly by their toots ensembled" (F.W., pp. 224.36-225.1-2). Glugg is described as a "Warewolff! Olff! Toboo!" (F.W., p. 225.8) From the rebuke of these girls, Glugg goes into exile, and becomes morbidly obsessed. "So olff for his topheetuck the ruck made raid, aslick aslegs would run; and he ankered on his hunkers with the belly belly prest [ . . . . ] Breath and bother and whatarcurss. Then breath more bother and more whatarcurss. Then no breath no bother but worrawarrawurms" (F.W., p. 225.9-14). The "whatarcurss" here suggests Spencer's description of the dying Irish eating watercress, as Shaun and Shem take the roles of conqueror and conquered. Issy urges Glugg to guess again, "Speak, sweety bird" (F.W., p. 225.20), recalling the way in which she lures birds down her chimney to her cat. Glugg's responses suggest that he now associates her with damnation, with "monbreamstone" and "Hellfeuersteyn" (F.W., p. 225.22,24). His answers are wrong, and the girls dance around Chuff: "Ring we round, Chuff! [ . . . . ] All's rice with their whorl!" (F.W., p. 225.30-1) Glugg enters another exile and, in this darkening, through a masturbatory preoccupation with his own body, takes up writing: "He would jused sit it all write down just as he would jused set it all writhefully rate in blotch and void [ . . . . ] reading off his fleshskin and writing with his quillbone" (F.W., p. 229.26-30). This is the same darkening which Stephen describes Shakespeare as having undergone.
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Chuff, by contrast, is praised and admired by the Maggies, and so free to take a normative route toward a normative object of desire: Of all the green heroes everwore coton breiches, the whitemost, the goldenest! H o w he stud theirs with himselfs moolzst lzevinly [ . . . ] whiles his host of spritties, l~isspillerinderlznees,they went peahelming a ripidarapidarpad around him [ . . . ] alluding to him by all the liclznames in the litany [ . . . . ] we certney like gurgles love the nargleygargley so, arrahbeejee, tell that old franlzay boyulz to bellows upthe tombuclzy in his tumtum argan and give us a gust of his gushy old (F.W., p. 234.8-11, 18-9, 31-3).
In "An Encounter," although it is most likely that neither boy has a girlfriend, while the narrator admits to having no girlfriends, Murphy claims to have "three totties" (Dub., p. 14). This is the winning attitude that ensures the success of the "Shaun brother." In Portmit, Cranly, with his "handsome face" and his "strong and hard" body, is a Sean brother, while Stephen is a Shem brother. In Ulysses, Boylan is a "Shaun brother," and he cuckolds Bloom, a "Shem brother," just as Mulligan usurps Stephen's place on a number of levels. Mulligan is attended to by the milkwoman, who all but ignores Stephen (U., p. 16).Mulligan takes the key to the tower. He is invited to George Moore's house as a promising young writer, and Stephen is not, in the same way that Gogarty was invited to Moore's literary evenings while Joyce was not (J.J., p. 135). Mulligan, with his nickname "Buck," usurps Stephen's relation to Joyce as the proud, lonely stag described in "The Holy Office" (P.+E.,p. 105). Mulligan first recites, and makes comical, the poem that Stephen sang for his dying mother (U., p. 9), and Joyce sang for both his dying mother and his brother: Yeats's "Who will go with Fergus" (J.J., pp. 94, 135). Mulligan even usurps the start of Ulysses, from both Stephen and Bloom, just as Simon does in Portrait. The struggle between these brothers repeats itself throughout Joyce, and at all times possesses a more or less sexual subtext. That these brothers may be found throughout history, in all relations of power, is underlined by the Viconian construction of Finnegans Wake. In Joyce's notes to Exiles, Robert, the Shaun brother, is described as a sadist, while Richard, the Shem brother, is described as a masochist (E.,p. 356).
THESUBALTERN POSITION: METAPHORICAL RELATIONS OF PARENT AND CHILD Gibson describes the way in which Britain's flogging system was given prestige by the public schools, and imitated elsewhere, the assumption being that what was good enough for public school boys was good enough for everyone else.38 The British flogging system was founded on the extension from the home, into the school, through the metonymical sidestep which enabled the schoolmaster to act in loco parentis. Gibson points out that:
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The English vice began in the home, spread to the home's most obvious extension, the school (particularly the boarding school), and thence to the courts, the prisons, the Army and Navy, the colonies-and the brothels. The British Empire, it might be argued, was founded on the lash." 39 He argues that, of the colonies, India suffered the most from this imperialistic flagellomania. For example, in 1878 alone 75,223 floggings were inflicted. "These floggings were habitually administered with a rattan or a cane to the naked buttocks in public." After the Morant Bay riots in Jamaica, in 1865, Governor Eyre's troops embarked on a three-week binge of hangings, torture, rape and floggings[. . . . ] It was the floggings inflicted on the negro women, however, wl~ichreceived most publicity in Britain, particularly when it emerged that they had been beaten on their naked buttocks, sometimes with piano wire (which cut their flesh to shreds).40 In the same way that the schoolmaster becomes a parent of the child, the colonial authorities act as parents to the colonized. Central to masochism is the sexualization of the subaltern position, described by Deleuze and Guattari as the minoritarian becoming. This is not to say that the individual members of a colonizing race are more likely to be sadistic than the individual members of a colonized race are to be masochistic. It is impossible to read the equation in these terms. Nonetheless, these political energies enter into sexuality, or they are sexual already. In Joyce's time, there existed a metaphorical relationship of child and adult between the Irish and the English. The terms with which Matthew Arnold describes the Saxon and Celtic spirits, or geniuses, and which have become insidious stereotypes, depict the Celts as impractical and unsuited to governing themselves, and so suggest that they, like children, should be governed by the more practical and mature Saxons. Arnold considers the English to be a blend of the Germans and the Celts. The predominant characteristics of the Germans are "steadiness with honesty," "freedom from whim, flightiness, perverseness; patient fidelity to Nature-in a word, science."41 The Celt, on the other hand, is childlike and impractical, in that he is "sentimental-always ready to react against the despotism of fact."42 Furthermore, as will become apparent in the discussion of the demonization of the masturbator, in chapter three, the terms used to describe the Celt are similar to those which are deployed to describe the masturbator: "the timidity, the shyness, the delicacy of the Celtic nature, its preference for the retired life, its embarrassment at having to deal with the great world."43 In "Circe," when Private Carr wins Cissy in triumph over Stephen, we see a micro-dramatization of the relationship between England and Ireland. Cissy delights in the sense that she has given herself to a high bidder, to an
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adult. She is thrilled to see this proven, when her lover exerts power over Stephen, by physically punishing him for approaching her. His victory is her victory: she participates in his dominion over Stephen. Stephen is left alone in his becoming Irish. The soldier's bullying of Stephen mirrors Boylan's domination of Bloom, which is a central theme of the chapter, and of the novel. A powerful male takes the girl, and degrades his rival, thereby proving himself to be an adult in relation to an impotent child. For Stephen, being punched is like being pandied as a "lazy idle little loafer," or being flogged for "smugging." Again and again he sees desire stopped in its tracks by physical violence. As well as between groups, the principles of i n loco parentis enter into every group. When Alleyn commands Farrington to apologize to him (Dub., p. 60), we are reminded of Dante commanding Stephen to apologize, and we see the employee being made into a child by the boss. Farrington's rebellion is even punier than Stephen's "peaching" on D o h , although just as with Stephen's rebellion, Farrington's peers gather round him to hear of his strike against authority (Dub., p. 62). When Farrington goes home, he redirects his rage against his son, mimicking the boy's excuses, just as Alleyn mimicked his, proving that, despite his frustrations and his degradations, he is an adult to his child (Dub., p. 65). The dispute between Alleyn and Farrington reaches its greatest intensity when there is a woman present to witness their relations of father and child (Dub., p. 60). The woman is "Jewish looking," and therefore oriental and foreign, as is typical of the Joycean object of desire. She represents a world beyond bounds, a world other than the world of this stifling office. Miss Delacour is an object of desire to Alleyn, and he displays to her his power over Farrington, like plumage or a mating call. Desire is political. He wants to prove himself a potent adult, in contrast to Farrington as an impotent child. That Farrington is a well-built man merely intensifies Alleyn's desire to be seen dominating him. He tries to use his power as an aphrodisiac on Miss Delacour. It is Farrington's awareness of Alleyn's motivations, and his similar, although futile impulse, that compels him to offer his token resistance to this domination. Later, when he loses an arm wrestle to the actor, Farrington is humiliated before the female gaze a second time. Although she is not present, the shock of the yellow gloves lingers. They turn to homosocial rites of conflict and dominance with the excitement she has left them. The actor, with his access to the exotic, to the oriental, to a world of flowing identities, is to Farrington what Gallagher is to Chandler. The actor, and the girl with the yellow gloves, the sort of girl who associates with actors, highlights for Farrington his own impotence and entrapment. The arm wrestle is a libidinal struggle. Beneath the struggle is the idea that women are attracted to the man who can defeat and humiliate another man, and so force him to become a child, with no access to the female. When Farrington loses the arm wrestle, the actor
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proves to be the Shaun brother, favored by the 'rainbow sister' with the yellow gloves. Farrington is not, like Bloom, aloof enough to take sexual delight from this defeat.
While some interpreters consider the child's relations to other males to be central to the development of masochism, others consider the relations to female figures to be key. As already mentioned, the Novicks consider the mother to be the pre-oedipal determinant, and the father to be the Oedipal determinant. Here though, the father influences the child through his weakness, or distance, and his inability to assist the child's development of a superego. This reading of the role of the masochist's father relates to Freud's description of Leonardo da Vinci's sublimation as resulting from the absence of a father figure, and his failure to develop a superego. The Novicks' explanation of the role of the father in the development of masochism is too schematic, being overly reliant on temporally defined phases. In Joyce, the female figure initially acts as a voice of authority, contributing to the development of a confused superego, and continues to influence the development of Stephen's masochism in other ways into his young adulthood. The situations in which both Rousseau and Masoch grew up could be considered as affective matriarchies. The Novicks describe families that produce masochists as follows: the others seemed to play no positive role in the family, showing undue dependence on the mothers. Conversely, the mothers were all described as powerful, domineering women, who ruled their families more or less overtly. There was also a high degree of parental collusion in the gratification of inappropriate wishes. Several of the children in this group were allowed into the parental bed until ages of 11 and 12; others were helped with toileting up to 7 or 8 years.44
Rousseau's mother died giving birth to him, and he had a peculiar relationship with his father, who cuddled and petted him, saying that the child was all he had left of his wife. When still very young, Rousseau was sent to stay with relatives. It was here that being beaten by a woman determined the nature of his desire for the rest of his life: As Mademoiselle Lalnbercier had the affection of a mother for us, she also exercized the authority of one, and sometimes carried it so far as to inflict upon us the punish~nentof children when we had deserved it. For some time she was content with threats, and this threat of a punish~nentthat was quite new to me appeared very terrible; but, after it had been carried out, I found the reality less terrible than the expectation; and, what was still more
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strange, this chastisement made me still more devoted t o her w h o had inflicted it [ . . . . ] I had found in the pain, even in the disgrace, a mixture of sexuality which had left me less afraid than desirous of experiencing it again from the same hand.45
After he left this home, Rousseau continued to enter l~ousel~olds in which he might act as a courtier to a powerful woman. Masoch also tells us that his masochistic nature was determined by witnessing the actions of a powerful female relative at a very young age: At the age of ten I already had an ideal woman. I yearned for a distant relative of my father's-let us call her the Countess Zenobia-the most beautiful and also the most promiscuous woman in the country [ . . . . ] I then lznelt to put on her gold-embroidered slippers. On feeling her tiny feet in my hands I forgot myself and lzissed them passionately. At first my aunt stared at me in surprise, and then she burst out laughing and gave me a little lziclz. [When playing hide-and-seek with other children, he hid in her bedroom, and while he was hidden, she came into the room with a lover. ] [Sluddenly the door was flung open and my aunt's husband rushed into the room accompanied by two friends [ . . . . ] Without a word, she rose, strode up to her husband and gave him an energetic punch o n the nose [ . . . . ] [Slhe picked up a whip and, brandishing it, showed my uncle and his friends to the dooc [Suddenly Masoch was discovered by his aunt. ] [Slhe had seized me by the hair and thrown me on the carpet; she then placed her knee on my shoulder and began to whip me vigorously46
What follows is a description of the nanny, the nymph and the mother as inhibitors of desire, and determinants of masochism in Joyce.
The Nanny Gibson writes that: In Victorian Britain, the beating of children typically began at a very young age. It was often the case that it was first administered by a nanny, or older female relative. In Jonathan Gathorne-Hardj's The Rlse and Fall of the Brztzsh Nann)', a British nanny is described: "She spanked us with the sole of her slipper on the bare back [read 'bottom'], beat us with her brushes, tied us for long hours to chairs in uncomfortable positions with our hands holding a pole or a blaclzboard behind our backs, shut us up in darlzness." This nanny seems to take creative delight in the exercise of physical and emotional cruelty: "She made me write a letter to the butler aslzing him to make a birch for me with wl~ichI was to be punished for lying, and requesting him to read it out in the servants' hall. When he came round one day with a letter and saw me standing in my red petticoat with my face to the
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wall on a chair outside the schoolroo~nand said, 'My you look like a Cardinal.' I could have died of shame. "4'
Although Dante's disciplinary measures are not as extreme, they are essentially of the same order. There is something ferocious and unforgiving about Dante. Her presentation suggests that the socializing functions of the superego may be established through a feminine proxy, as much as by a paternal voice. Her name, which is a pet form of "aunty," also alludes to Dante, his assemblage of retributions, and the creative cruelty with which he constructed his inferno. Such creative cruelty is evident in her threat that eagles will pluck out Stephen's eyes. Not only does this belong to the oedipal myth, and suggest castration, but also blinding feminizes in terms of the politics of sexuality, whereby the male is the subjective gaze looking onto the object of desire, the blind female body. We do not get the impression that Dante abused Stephen in ways either as cruel or as arousing as those in the above examples. Still, there are similarities in the demeanor and the disciplinary tone of Dante and Bello. Stephen pays particular attention to Dante's brushes, which are the most typical instruments of domestic castigation administered by a woman. These brushes are mentioned in the paragraph before Stephen hides beneath the table, and two paragraphs after reference to the wetting of his bed. Again, this is of importance because it appears on the first page of Portrait. Reik notes that the mother, or a stand-in for the mother, will tend to be the first to punish the infant, in order to teach it to control emissions. In demanding tidiness, she is the first to command him to restrain his urges and to seal himself, and to suggest that physicality is unclean, and body is corrupt. She installs his sense of shame, and insists on his classical closure, thereby encouraging his individuation and his dread of "otherness." As Stephen observes at the Christmas dinner, Dante is a fierce upholder of public morality. She is ruthless in denouncing Parnell for his adultery. Simon suggests that this is because she was a spoiled nun (Port. 43), and Ellmanil tells us that the woman from whom Dante was drawn intended to become a nun, before she met and married a man, who subsequently ran away to South America, taking with him all her money (J.J., p. 25). Like Mrs. Mooney of "The Boarding House," who also suffered a bad marriage, Dante is a staunch defender of the institution of marriage. This might account for the ferocity of Dante's response to Stephen's claim that he and Eileen intend to marry.
The Nymph The nymph denies access to the purported or normative object of desire. She may be called the nymph because she is always partly imagined by-or occluded by the imagination of-the subject of desire. In Joyce, men (and women) rarely if ever see women for what they are; instead, they participate
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in a social fantasy based on patriarchal premises. Between the polarities of the Madonna and the whore, women are seen as mothers, nannies, nymphs, or nymphs who have lost their power through marriage. Included in the category of the nymph are Eileen, E-C-, the birdgirl, Beatrice in Exiles, Gerty, the nymph in "Circe," and perhaps Milly Bloom. The nymphs carry the weight of being objects of desire, but they also make use of this weight. In Joyce's milieu, there were few opportunities for the nymph to be economically self-subsistent, and for this reason she needed to get married. In such a society, the male has to prove that he possesses power, of which she may partake, before the nymph will satisfy him. He must prove himself to be a potent father, or a Shaun brother, so that in their union she may feel her beauty and her desirability translate into and partake of his power. All sexual intercourse is prostitution in this society, that which is not considered prostitution more extensively so than that which is. Before he may gain access to the sexual object, the male must strike a deal: he offers to support the nymph financially, and she to allow him access to her body. Both sides find, more often than not, that what they have procured through the deal they have struck does not live up to their expectations, and that the social mores stand in contradiction to the nature of desire. The man often fails to support the woman and their offspring suitably. As the woman is no longer unobtainable, or in any way exotic or foreign, her power of enticement diminishes, and she is no longer a viable object of desire. They are, however, compelled to live on together in resentment and deceit. The social system, which compels each woman to find a man on whom she may be dependent, allows no viable second chance; although both man and woman may feel cheated, they are trapped. Their union is no longer a matter of renewable choice, no longer tempered by doubt and possibility, but an enclosure, a premature conclusion to the journeys of desire, a relinquishment of the Ideal. As Joyce shows in Exiles, an equitable marriage needs to be constantly renewed by the exercise of choice. Molly and Bloom's marriage is also founded on this principle. For most of Joyce's characters, the exercise of choice runs counter to the purported stabilities of the nuptial union. In the Joycean world, the nymph's power is dependent upon her ability to make herself desirable to males, to become for them an object of desire. The clever nymph realizes that her desirability rests, at least in part, upon her ability to convey the message that she is untouchable, except to the highest bidder, and therefore a prize to be valued. She bestrews herself with fetishes, with signifiers of the feminine, to tease and entice. From the admiration she provokes, she gauges cannily her market value. The societal system also compels her to appear untouchable, as it has restricted sexuality to the confines of marriage. The nymph is perhaps more desexualized than the young man, and thus more able to hide or deny desire. "They steal the body first from the gir1."48 She, however, holds the advantage because of this, and the onus of pursuit is placed on the male. We are told
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that Emma presumes Stephen's forbearance, but secretly despises him for it (S.H., p. 73). She believes he will admire her, and understands that this gives her power over him. When she says, "I expect you to obey me" (S.H., p. 160), she proves herself a forerunner of Bello. In "Araby," the boy believes that Mangan's sister has directed him toward the exotic, the foreign and the oriental. When he discovers, instead, that the bazaar is only a market place, he is disillusioned with his longing for the nymph. Despite her retreat, which suggests that she is sacred and otherworldly, she proves to be debased by association with the activities of the bazaar. The transformative and figurative ground between Mangan's sister and the bazaar turns to clay. She, and the shopgirls at the bazaar, are not of the high world of which he has dreamed, but of the materialistic, "preposterous, pragmatical pig of a world."49 This will come into play in the practicality, and the cool, detached scorn with which the t o r t u r e s meets the masochist's romantic idealism. At the bazaar, the boy is revolted by the shopgirl's coy, insipid flirtations. He feels that his admiration of Mangan's sister has been ill founded and delusory. Araby is not oriental, not mysterious and other, but a shop with a brightly painted facade, which seeks to entice him to purchase. Banality inheres to the heart of the exotic. He is ashamed by the paltry victory to be won by the expenditure of the childish sum in his pocket; these coins have more meaning and more power here in Araby than the intensity of his passion, or the single-mindedness of his devotion. In his presentation of masochism, Joyce intensifies to the point of parodying a predisposition toward romantic love and courtly devotion, as seen in "Araby," by forcing it to its most extreme implications. In this equation, the masochist is associated with desire, and she with chastity. Courtly devotion is implicitly masochistic, in that the courtier places himself below the lady's lowliness, her body and her immanence, which she herself has risen yet further above. In contrast to this, in sadism she is desire, a slut, and he is chaste and cerebral. The courtier is a slave to desire, and therefore a slave to the object of his desire, her lowliness and her wounded body, above which she has ascended. She despises him for this slavery, because she has been taught to admire power and forcefulness in a man, rather than obedience. Her own masochism makes her want a man who has seized and negated his own desire, and who will make her become desire itself. As Yeats puts it: "Never give all the heart, for love I Will hardly seem worth thinking of / To passionate women if it seem I Certain [ . . . . I " '0 The masochist craves such neglect, such a one sided relationship, in which he is desire, and she is distance and denial. Just as genital emission, the cancellation of desire, is made to seem to be the goal of desire, so marriage, another seizure of the process of desire, is considered to be the only legitimate arena for sexuality. Marriage, however, disrupts the momentum of ongoing desire. In "A Little Cloud," Gallagher's
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experience of freedom and the foreign makes Chandler acutely aware of his own entrapment. When Chandler looks at a photograph of his wife: "The composure of the eyes irritated him. They repelled him and defied him: there was no passion in them, no rapture. He thought of what Gallagher had said about rich Jewesses. Those dark Oriental eyes, he thought, how full they are of passion, of voluptuous longing!" (Dub., p. 55) This framed photograph, which presides on a table, and Chandler's reaction to it, contrasts sharply with Bloom's "slightly soiled [and] creased" photo of Molly, and Bloom's reaction to this photo (U., pp. 758-9). There is nothing vaguely foreign or exotic about Chandler's wife; he is confined to the familial, and cannot access the non-familial, "without which the libido would not assemble its desiring machines." Their marriage is an investment, a mutual business venture. They are not co-conspirators, but involved in a business transaction. He is entrapped, and he resents and hates his wife because of this. He has given up his life for her life and their child's life. When Chandler thinks that he would like to go to England for a holiday, and then remembers that he has yet to pay for the furniture, he understands his pathetic predicament (Dub., p. 55). He will always come second to his responsibilities. His freedom is of less weight than his sofa. The coyness of the nymph is a factor contributing to desexualization. In "Circe," after he has faced up to Bella and overcome her, Bloom confronts the nymph, and accuses her of hypocrisy, of shrouding herself in illusion. It is suggested that the nymph has always been behind Bella, and that she is responsible for Bloom's masocl~ism,or tied to its source. In Gincomo Joyce the phrase "the lady goes apace apace apace" (G.J., p. 8) follows Amelia riding. In "Circe" we get a fuller rendition of this song as Bello bounces up and down on Bloom's crouched back (U., p. 647). The nymph's hypocritical chastity, as much as the father's denying authority, has desexualized him. She conspires with the father to make him see her through a Lilliputian lens. The nymph pretends she is free of desire, so that the man must pursue. Bloom suggests, however, that this purity is a lie, and that the nymph is as human as the man, who must grovel against her feigned or inauthentic indifference. She has tricked him into taking his ideals, his desires and his intensities, the parts of himself that he feels are most valuable, to her stall in Araby fair, and committing simony, in exchange for the moment of discharge. He accuses her of being coolly mercenary, suggesting that she merely lets on to have no animal desires, so that he must pay her for pleasure, instead of simply exchanging pleasure for pleasure. Just as the nymph in "Circe" claims: "We immortals [ . . . ] have not such a place and no hair there either. We are stonecold and pure. We eat electric light" (U., p. 660), so Gerty does not like to be seen eating, and wishes that we could eat "something more poetical like violets or roses" (U., p. 458). In Gincomo Joyce, Amelia Popper also enters the constellation of the untouchable, disembodied virgin: "Her body has no smell. An odorless flower" (G.J., p. 13).
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In "Circe," Bloom uncovers this hypocrisy, and deflates the nymph: her plaster cast cracks, and a "cloud of stench" escapes (U., p. 662). He sees through the illusions she has perpetuated. The nymph, not Bella, is Circe, turning men into pigs in contrast to her non-bodily nature, her transcendence. His masochism is a parody of her chastity, and of Romantic disembodiment. He parodies the nymph, by overturning the conception of the virgin as passive and the whore as active, and manufactures the active virgin.
The Mother For the Novicks, the initial determinant of masochism is the relation of the mother to pain in the first months of the infant's life. This initial association is then reiterated as it is applied in subsequent situations. This finding corresponds with Bersani's argument in T h e Freudian Body, in which he considers the tautological principle to be central to masochism, and the factor that links masochism and a certain type of art. For the Novicks, the child's association of the mother with pain is due not only to emotional distance on the part of the mother, but also to the child's acceptance of her externalizations: We could speculate that externalization of blame, failure, and devalued aspects of the self onto the child served as a major and early mode of relationship and may have become the "primary fault" (Balint 1968) leading to the evolution of ~nasochisticstructures. We suggest that the first layer of lnasochisln must be sought in early infancy, in the child's adaptation to a situation where safety resides only in a painful relatio~lshipwith the mother [ . . . . ] their beating fantasies encapsulated and perpetuated the painful relationship to the object, not only historicall!; but also in their clinging to unhappiness through all stages of t r e a t m e d l
Although they do not use the term ideal ego, which Deleuze makes such use of, their description of the child's acceptance of these externalizations, and his internalization of an idealized mother, presents a construct similar to that of the ideal ego: What was initially an acceptance of the mother's externalization (mess!; dependent, aggressive) in the service of retaining the object becomes an active internalization used by the child to maintain the image of a loving, protective, perfect mother, safe from the destructive rage of his anal sadism. From the point of view of defense, the ~nasochis~n can be seen as an attempt to defend against destructive wishes from each level of development, directed against the mother, utilizing the mechanis~nsof denial, displacement, internalization, and via the internalization, turning of aggression against the body52
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The Novicks believe that the child suffers not only from a fear that he will lose the mother, but also, and more importantly, from guilt for his "normal wishes to separate from her and function independently." Their argument that the beating fantasies later formed "may be seen as a punishment for wishes to separate from the mother,"53 is pertinent to Stephen's position, especially if we do not feel compelled to anchor this sentiment to a developmentally and temporally defined phase. The influence of Stephen's mother on him is diffused throughout Portrait and Ulysses. As in the Novicks' cases, his feelings for her are painfully ambivalent. This love 1 hate relationship has by no means run its course by the time he enters Clongowes. There are many qualities in his mother that attract Stephen, such as her loyalty, her affection, and her support. He feels a certain kinship of temperament with her, and acknowledges that she is an intelligent woman, although uneducated (S.H., p. 88). As she grows older, however, and her life becomes harder and more joyless, he sees the church capture her allegiance, with its promise of a better world if she renounces this one. As he is losing his faith, hers is growing stronger, and this alienates them from one another (Port., p. 146).Stephen accuses her of betraying him, of choosing the priests over him, and she pleads with him to come back to the church. He feels close to her when she reads and approves of Ibsen, but then he feels doubly betrayed when she continues to side with the priests against him. He considers her to be blinkered when she suggests that he has lost his faith because of the ideas that books have put into his head (S.H., pp. 138,140). He cannot tolerate a slavish view such as this, which holds that thought and ideas are dangerous, or more significantly, that they do not, in fact, constitute the self, and that someone else, a priest, a Wells or a Dillon, should do his thinking for him. She is against him in the war he is to wage against censorship and repression. Their disputes become more virulent, and their lives are sundered. It is as though she has cuckolded him with the priests. The intimacy that is present between Stephen and his mother in Stephen H e r o is all but absent from Portmit. In Ulysses, Stephen suffers because he has denied his mother her last request: that he should pray for her at her deathbed. This is the most painful of a series of calls upon him to apologize, to confess and to pray, and perhaps the most powerful consolidation of his already established masochism. When she dies, he is haunted by guilt, and he is no longer sure that his refusal of her wishes was justifiable. He reconsiders whether or not his stance of intellectual freedom is as much a life hating abstraction as the position of the church, and whether, in fighting the church over the body of his dying mother, he has missed the whole point in this abject, dying body. Cranly declares that "[w]hatever else is unsure in this stinking dunghill of a world a mother's love is not" (Port., p. 208). With his birdgirl, Stephen is as much to blame as the church for forsaking what is true. Stephen will not recognize this, and sink from his sterile pedestal, until Bloom sleeps with
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Molly. He is tormented by a mother's curse, which haunts him through 'destiny repetition.' This haunting is related to Shakespeare's darkening. He must lose woman's love again and again, in cycles of betrayal and cuckoldry.
PITYAND LOVEAS DESEXUALIZING Women may also act as inhibitors of desire because love itself is desexualizing. Love and pity become desexualizing factors because sex is violent and selfish, an enemy to tenderness. It is of utmost significance to Bloom's masochism that to have been aware of Gerty's lameness would have spoiled his masturbatory experience (U., p. 479). He makes efforts not to see her as a victim, and argues to himself that she too enjoyed the experience. There is not simply a split between sexual desire and sympathy: these impulses are in fact hostile to one anothet The masochist acts as he does because he suspects and fears that the sexual act is based upon violence. The death of Stephen's mother has much the same effect on him as have the hell sermons. It makes him feel horrified by mortality, and disgusted by the corruption of the body. From both the hell sermons and the death of May, Stephen establishes a symbolic system in which liquid represents the permeability, mutability, and susceptibility to corruption of the human form, and the loss of volition that disintegrates the self. The human body is drawn as a sordid, lowly and stinking swamp in which human life resides. This swamp imposes a claustrophobic, Brobdignagian perspective, in which the mutually immersed-struggling blindly against their dying-clasp and drag one another down. Mothers, lovers, fathers, brothers, sisters and friends are so many cocks, monkeys and serpents, with which he is cast into this sea. Despite, or perhaps because of this extreme proximity, this swamp, or this sea, impedes all human contact: "My will: his will that fronts me. Seas between" (U., p. 279). Communication is next to impossible for the panic stricken inhabitants of this liquid environment. While a certain sort of privacy is denied, a certain sort of isolation is enforced. Stephen considers each individual as alone in this swamp, because the cohabitants of this swamp are alien, and violently disposed to one another. Hell is a lonely, competitive place. He is stricken by horror when his mother's death underlines the separateness of existences. He considers love as impossible in such circumstances, as no more than a consoling illusion, and he becomes wary of the callings of love, because they threaten to drag him down into the swamp of body and abjection, in which his identity and his volition will be obliterated. When he considers whether or not he would try to save a drowning man, he sees his injured love for his mother as dragging him "with [her] together down" (U., p. 57), and when he meets Dilly, his pity for her also seems to drag him down into this sea in sympathy: "Lank coils of seaweed hair around me, my heart, my soul" (U., p. 313). The sorrow of separate existences forces him into a classical posture, makes him close himself off from all others. This fear of
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body, and of love, and of women, desexualizes him as fully as do the hell sermons. It makes him assume a stance similar to the virgin's, a stance of Romantic transcendence, of disconnected, disembodied flight. They steal the body from him, by showing him the abjection of the female body. On the morning of Ulysses, as a cloud covers the sun, Stephen's heart is riddled by an image of his mother's body as abject and corrupted (U., pp. 9-1 1 ) .We soon discover that, as this same cloud covers the sun, Bloom, elsewhere, despairs at an image of the Holy Land, his source and his end, as barren and dry (U., p. 73). For both Stephen and Bloom, the mother, the source, woman, has become an image of horror and death, a memento mori. They perceive body as lowly and life as elsewhere. Their shared exile is an exile from the feminine. When Stephen sees himself as a fox scratching the earth above his grandmother's grave, he is trying to hide away this image of horror or, perhaps, attempting to steal the mother back, attempting to regain access to the feminine, and a sense of the feminine as sacred, in Molly. In "Ithaca," this cloud is a pillar of cloud, which leads Bloom toward the Holy Land: a woman's bottom (U., p. 857). In order to escape the vision of horror and disgust that the hell sermons and his mother's death have forced upon him, Stephen makes his desired object unattainable, a transcendent image of mind. Although the birdgirl precedes the death of Stephen's mother, the death of Joyce's mother is of utmost significance to an understanding of the place of the birdgirl in Joyce's fiction. Stephen perceives the birdgirl as Lilliputian, in order to evade the horror of Brobdignanian proximity. So that to love her does not threaten to drag him down into the putrid swamp of body, he draws wings onto her. He will admire her, but will not approach or speak to her. He refuses to unite himself with her in any way, so that he will not feel responsible for her, or be drawn into her suffering. Just as the coincidence of their dreamed responses to the inatin cloud illustrates an overlap of their psyches, Stephen's dream, in which an oriental man, Bloom, presses a melon to his face as a right of entry to a brothel (U., pp. 59, 279), and Bloom's recollection of a similarly oriental dream (U., p. 4 9 7 , suggests that the key to Stephen's return to the feminine will correspond to Bloom's method of repeating his own return to the feminine. This melon, this moisture in a desert, which also represents Molly's bottom (U., p. 867), suggests a way of making the transcendent birdgirl immanent, through worship of her physicality. The third overlapping dream which Bloom and Stephen share is the dream in which Bello and May call upon them to apologize, confess, repent and pray. Bloom understands how to deal with this dragon of mind, but Stephen's world temporarily implodes. His desexualization is emphasized by the fact that he runs out of the brothel without having received the sexual consummation for which he has paid. His sexual energy has been redirected into this conflict, has been assigned another task than that of sexual gratification. Stephen's apocalypse however, might also signify his rebirth, and
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suggest, along with his meeting with Bloom, that he will soon discover a means of making the birdgirl immanent, and so establish a resexualization that will correspond to Bloom's.
This chapter concludes with an analysis the configurations of desire that are embodied by the constructs of the superego and the ideal ego. The masochist's magic works to conjure these apparitions, and to take some sort of power from his symbolic manipulation of these ideals. The superego's power resides in its ability to establish a sense of guilt within its host. The superego opposes its host's sense of ownership over his interiority, and makes everything seem to be exterior, to be open to observation, and subject to condemnation. The superego is appeased by extroversion, by the establishment of a categorizable, essential self, and by the negation of the fluid inner life. It demands of the subject that he show himself to be partaking of society, and not flowing over boundaries, and disappearing into the depravity of dream. Secrecy is contrary to the principles of the superego, and the superego exists as a constant attack upon, or undermining of, its host's sense of secrecy. Cotter is perhaps the first spokesman for the superego that we encounter in Joyce. He argues that it is unhealthy for children to be too much inside, or on their own, and calls them to come out into the light, where they may be seen: "let a young lad run about and play with young lads of his own age and not be . . . Am I right, Jack?" (Dub., p. 4 ) Here, Cotter's discourse swells around and encloses, but does not enter and speak for the alternative to healthy extroversion. Darkness, privacy, and unhealthy influence exist in ellipses. Those who stress the value of confession, and the dangers of privacy, are spokespersons for the superego, and they will be mocked in the inasocl~ist'sparody. The characters that are temperamentally associated with Joyce-the narrators of the first three stories in Dubliners, and Richard, Stephen and Bloom-are all engaged by the political and sexual energies of secrecy. When Stephen considers himself born sin by sin (Port., p. 9 7 , he suggests that he identifies himself with his secrecy, his inner world, and that he himself would dissipate if called out into the light. He has not made a paranoiac, or majoritarian identification, but has instead identified himself with that which is forced to be elusive. In the privacy of his interiority, he feels his soul, wombed in sin darkness (U., p. 46), shift its liquid, dragon scaly coils. Darkness, privacy, solitude and sin constitute for him his being. Desire, like the penis, "the subtlest beast of the field" (Port., p. 126), is spontaneous and autonomous, as is the creative imagination, the sublimative faculty. The superego forces him into identity, and tries to freeze the free-flow of his becomings, the flow that constitutes his inner world. Stephen is an introvert by nature, and he considers the outer life in which the extrovert engages to
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be merely the rind, which might easily come away from the fruit (Port., p. 81). He has renounced control of the external, so that he may elude the consistent categories which constitute an identity, and through which power is afforded a hold by which it may integrate the person. Despite his inward inclinations, and his instinctive opposition to the superego, Stephen is unable to simply dismiss or deny the superego, and so he finds himself in a constant state of internal conflict. The superego imposes a double vision, a reeling between Lilliputian and Brobdignagian perspectives. To accommodate and minimize the assaults of the superego, the sublimated object of his desire-his ideal ego-and subsequently the external object of desire, are made to seem distant and unattainable. He reduces, distances, seals and idealizes her, to suggest that physical consummation with her is not his goal, and to hide from himself her perceived qualities of abjection. She is made to become cold and cruel. When the ego draws near the sexual object, or for that matter any body, the superego imposes a Brobdignagian perspective, in which proximity seems to be magnified, and so makes the body seem liquid and corrupt, inducing claustrophobia and disgust. First, there is pure desire, pure impulse, and then the being begins to hear, beside the prompting of this desire, the learned prohibition. "I want that," is followed by "I remember. I hear inwardly the voice that told me before that was prohibited." Objection and denial become personified by the paranoiac identification, in the same manner as the ideal ego personifies the untouchable, the foreign, and the denied. He is both watching her and within her, in the same way as he is both watched by and within the superego. The conflict between the superego and the ego may also be seen in the division of the individual into component personalities, such as Philip drunk and Philip sober (U., p. 635), Henry Flower and Virag in "Circe," and Shem and Shaun in Fmnegans Wake. Stephen hears Mulligan and Simon within him, voicing the rebukes of his superego. Stephen's, and moreover Joyce's ability to hear, and to reproduce internally these external voices, makes him more vulnerable to the tyranny of the superego, just as the power of his imagemaking faculty, and his ability to animate the ideal ego, make him capable of taking great delight from her. The interior monologue technique was essential for Joyce to portray the cacophonic immediacy of the conflicted self. The assault of the superego reveals itself in the tone of disgusted selfrebuke that is so characteristic of Joyce's work. Stephen rebukes himself frequently in Portrait, and in Ulysses, such as when he thinks "Sell your soul for that, do, dyed rags pinned round a squaw" (U., p. 50), or: "you prayed to the devil that you might not have a red nose" (U., p. 49). This self-rebuke is more powerful when it is spoken in someone else's voice. Stephen often rebukes himself through the inwardly echoed memory of another's voice. Simon's voice speaks for Stephen's disillusionment with himself, when Stephen thinks: "Did you see anything of your artist brother Stephen lately? No? Sure he's not down in Strasburg terrace with his aunt Sally? Couldn't he fly a bit higher than that, ell?" (U., p. 47) In the same way, Bloom internalizes,
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and reiterates external voices, when he dreams himself on trial in "Circe." Huge portions of Finnegans Wake consist of H.C.E.'s conjuring of others' voices to revile him in his dream. This powerful tone of self-mockery entails an inward division between a facet of the self that desires, and a facet of the self that watches this desire coolly and disapprovingly. It is to emphasize this cool, disapproving distance, and its panoptic powers, that the superego often speaks in the voices of acquaintances, and wears the mask of someone known to disapprove. Disapproving external eyes merge into a cycloptic witness. This one eye, however, may become kaleidoscopic. Often, the rebuking facet of the self is empowered by its ability to become legion, and to transform itself into a rebuking mob. This rebuker might become a multiplicitous representation of community, as in the criticism of the four apostles at H.C.E.'s bedposts, and the condemnation cast by those who speak at Bloom's trial in "Circe." The superego is social; it represents the public gaze; it is not simply the singular father internalized. Finnegnns Wake is founded upon such a fracturing of the self, and such a multiplicitous superego, as the entire dream seems to be fashioned by H.C.E.'s guilty desires. In resexualization, this desexualizing tone of disgust, and this arraignment before, and submission to the socius, cause public humiliation to become a source of lust. External authority consolidates its control of the individual, internally as well as externally, by entering the mind, and paralyzing the elusive, polymorphously perverse imagination. When it enters the mind, and takes up a personality, or multiple personalities, becoming a shadow socius, the ego feels unable to hide; it is stripped of secrets. The narcissistic ego, with the object of desire which it has smuggled into secrecy-the ideal ego-is in danger of being found out, as the superego becomes internally mobile, and rummages through the prison cell of the body, paralyzing and dissipating transgressive dreams. In "Circe," we see an image of the guilty ego flushed out of hiding, when Stephen as a fox is hunted by Simon, whose monocle flashes like a spotlight (U., p. 674). Stephen as the fox is guilty of scratching at the earth over the grave of his grandmother: he is about to be kicked across the sand, like Tatters, for sniffing at corruption, and for the morbidity of his desire. The hell sermons serve to intensify the superego, and they hound the narcissistic ego out of its hiding, by convincing him that nothing is hidden, that his privacy is open to scrutiny and censure. Those desires that he has driven into obscenity, into unspeakability, just to test his own privacy, now become a source of shame for him. In "Trust Not Appearances" (c. 1897), Joyce writes: "there is a 'something' that tells us the character of a man. It is the eye. The only traitor that even the sternest will of a fiendish villian [sic] cannot overcome. It is the eye that reveals to man the guilt or the innocence, the vices or the virtues of the soul. This is the only exception to the proverb 'Trust not appearance.' " (C.W.,p. 15-6) Joyce displays here his ability to internalize and to reproduce
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and identify with the voices of authority. We will see it again and again in the voices of rebuke and insinuation that swarm throughout the works. This essay betrays a paranoiac attempt to align himself with "the master race," to declare "I am one of you, I believe as you do." The tone of cowed hypocrisy is palpable here, but his ability to mimic this voice will later support his masochistic subversion. His later rebellion is specifically perverse, because he once bowed before that which he subverts. After the hell sermons, Stephen reconsiders Dolan's claim to "see it" in his eye, and feels that his transgressions, his secrets, have been visible not only to God, but to all others. He now feels that it is possible to sin in thought as well as in deed. This diminishes him, as he had considered himself to exist not in the hard realities of the world without, but in the metamorphic spontaneity of the worlds within. Stephen, by his nature, is like Bloom and the pervert in "An Encounter"a schemer, a slippery outsider, who is more likely to try to conjure, than to go and get what he wants. Ellinann notes that Father Henry, the rector of Belvedere, was suspicious of Joyce's impenetrable manner (J.J., p. 48). The hell sermons make Stephen consider his imaginative tinkerings with transgression as lowly, bestial and sordid. His imagination has made him an abomination, a degenerate. This self-disgust, this visceralized and visceralizing shame, forces his desexualization. In response to the intensification of the superego brought about by the hell sermons, Stephen attempts to repent for his dreamed and real transgressions, by bowing to all authority, and becoming a thoroughly "good little boy" (Port., p. 129). Authority will always make its subject step back into childhood. He regresses to a compliant second childhood. He sets himself against both bodily desire and sublimative desire, and attempts to repress his creative flows. He becomes life loathing, and self-destructive. He mortifies the body, frustrating and denying each sense in turn. He binds his desire, and seals himself against the world. Occasionally this is difficult, as for instance in the case of smells, some of which, though repulsive, he recognizes as at the same time intriguing and compelling (Port., p. 135). These smells are fascinating just because they are repulsive. This is the start of his moral masochism, his paradoxical perversity-the first seed of what will become his experience of denial, frustration, disgust, shame and pain as pleasurable. Reik, Gibson and Deleuze all point out that it was necessary to forbid priests to flog themselves as acts of devotion, mortification or repentance, as they often eroticized the pain.74 More than the mortification of his senses, Stephen finds the mortification of his creative imagination to be essential to the appeasement of the superego. He is guilty to the extent that his imagination has proven itself to be labile. After the hell sermons, he repeats his devotions compulsively, to drown out and stifle his own spontaneous internal monologue. By its nature, the imagination sins against law and deadening authority, and struggles to free itself from mind-forged manacles.
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The imagination is considered intrinsically sinful, because of its essential links to privacy, and because of what it has in common with the penis as serpent. Stephen asks himself how sin enters thought, and then concludes that the penis may be aroused spontaneously, without him willing it to be so. The penis, unlike the hand, for instance, is not wholly in the service of the conscious mind, the will, any more so than is the imagination. The imagination is spontaneous, like desire, and unlike speculation. As the spasms of the "deafinute idiot [ . . . ] shaken in Saint Vitus' dance," and the theme of locomotor ataxy-an alleged consequence of masturbation-in "Circe" suggest, desire entails a loss of self control (U., p. 562). The desiring subject feels his conception of order begin to ooze, his classical closure opens and flows down over itself. When Stephen attempts to live a life of order and restraint, he finds that he cannot, because the "flood gates he built for himself" are flown over against his will (Port., p. 94). The superego compels the subject to hold and to r e t a i n 3 Desire drives him to let flow, to bubble at the solar anus, to spew, to emit, and to waste. This apparent symmetry, however, is undercut by the paradox in which emission, whether anal or genital, is in itself a cancellation of flow. The penis and the imagination are unruly co-conspirators: like the penis, the image-making faculty is spontaneous and autonomous, and it redirects energy from the pragmatical purposes of the work-world. The solar anus, situated at the peak of the skull like a volcano, allows psychic emission. This psychic spew, or perhaps, rather, the withholding of this psychic spew, the reluctance to let go, or conclude, constitutes the process of ongoing desire. Perhaps in the type of art, or thought, of which Joyce is evidence, thought is not so much the excrement of being, as a compulsion driven by a visceral rush analogous to that experienced by the anally fixated child who sits grimly refusing to let go of his feces. Most commentators, however, perceive the useless dream as emotional, imaginative expenditure, or wastage, which in its free flow may be considered to possess the fluid, goo-like consistency of other bodily emissions. The superego strives to enforce repression of this free-flow and, before the whole structure doubles back on itself, opposes the instinctive and spontaneous flow of the image-making faculty. After the hell sermons, the king and priest are more solidly ensconced "in here." Stephen later worries, rightly, that this self-mortifying impulse is still a part of him, though in ways that he cannot detect. In "Circe," when his hand hurts, we see the lasting impression that early assaults against his freedom and privacy have made (U., pp. 668, 687). Dolan's appearance as a jack-in-the-box (U., p. 667), however, heralds the establishment of Stephen's masochism. The prohibitions, the repressions, can never be forgotten, nor be wholly expelled from the mind: his country has made him. The prohibitions, however, may be projected, made ridiculous, and turned into toys. When Bello calls Bloom to pray and to confess, and when May's ghost calls Stephen to pray and to confess, we see the lasting mark that the imposition of the superego has made on these men. We see, moreover, that both
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Stephen and Bloom, as in Deleuze's formal masochism, project the father, or superego, onto the mother in their fantasies, and identify themselves with the guilty ego.
Playing beside, or against the superego, is the ideal ego. A predominance of the ideal ego manifests itself as sublimation, and a predominance of superego manifests itself as repression. These do not work like light switches, however, and the sublimation and the repression may be intermingled. The ideal ego offers desexualized energy an alternate channel to the cessation of flow prescribed by the superego. This is always, however, a conciliatory channel, that flows tightly beneath the belly of repression. An archetypal image of the ideal ego is the rose image used by Dante Alighieri who, exiled from Beatrice, recreated her within the confines of his mind. In the formation of the ideal ego, the individual recreates the desired object within, through identification with the desired object, under cover of the privacy of the imagination. He creates her in the same way that he creates and perpetuates the superego through his imaginative ability to "method-act" external oppression. The recharging of the superego may obliterate the ideal ego if powerful enough, but it may also merely make the ideal ego wear more elaborate masks, appear more transcendent, and integrate itself more fully with the traits of desexualization. This intricate subterfuge fools even the self: in his longing for a distant object of desire, Stephen creates Mercedes, and then the birdgirl, and convinces himself, through elaborate arguments, that his admiration of these girls is in no way sexual. That this is not the case is revealed when, subsequent to his vision of the birdgirl, he seems to have a wet dream while experiencing a vision of a rose, that is a "thinly disguised" vision of a vagina.76 The conjuring of the Ideal is masturbatory, and only the orgasm cancels the apparition. This vagina is thinly disguised, but it is a relevant disguise, given Stephen's fetishism. In The Cold and the Cruel, Deleuze argues that fetishism, which is founded on disavowal, is the essential determinant of masochism.j7 Stephen's rose is a good example of the fetish. It disguises the horror of the vagina, and so disavows the wound that the superego has compelled him to see. What is more, his vision of the rose glorifies this wound. That the ideal ego serves as an alternative to the superego may be seen in Portrait, when Stephen finds submission to the Virgin Mary, a transcendent, untouchable object of desire, to be more palatable than submission to God the father (Port., p. 99). Stephen enjoys the thought of submitting to, and being forgiven by Mary. He thrills in the tension of praying to her with the taste of lewd kisses still on his lips (Port., p. 99). She is an audience before whom he enjoys revealing his lowliness. Unlike the sadist, he does not make the female represent body, and he
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transcendent power, but he is body, and she is transcendent power. He flips over the hierarchy in which God is highest, man is next, and woman, as representative of body, is lowest. Instead, he makes woman highest, untouchable but bodily, and he next, pliable, pitiable and whorish, desire itself, and finally, beneath all else, he situates the father as coarseness, brutality and tyranny. He prefers a pleasure-toned nakedness, and openness, while waiting on the whim of the perfumed object of desire, over waiting naked in the cold, white damp of God's sterile, all-male panopticon. In making sacred the desired object, he is uncovering primitive eroticism from beneath what Bataille describes as the Christian doctrine of degradation, in which the object of desire, the tabooed object, is profane and lowly. He is also unlocking the doors to the masochistic fantasy, accessing the masochistic means of escape. Eroticism depends upon tensions between extremes, and because he has made the desired object virginal, transcendent aild untouchable, rather than a representation or personification of his desire, as does the sadist, he must supply the lowliness, the bodiliness, to their erotic union. He is the passive whore, and she the active virgin. As a fetishist, he hides the wound of the female vagina from himself, and glorifies the object beneath which he has it hidden. As the ideal ego is primarily a means of evading the superego, and the hard truth, and as it is at first not readily recognizable as such, the desired object is drawn in such a way that she possesses none of the traits which the superego considers as lowly and profane. The nymph in "Circe" is the epitome of such a creature, with "no hair there" (U., p. 660). She is what the Dublin virgins wish they were, and expect young men to believe they are. The birdgirl mirrors the Apollonian untouchability of Daedalus, just as the nymph in "Circe" reflects a classical closure enforced by the dictates of the superego. In the ideal ego, the traits of the desexualization are retained and extended. The ideal ego, however, offers a compensatory object for repressed desire, it offers a means of desiring, despite a horror of bodies. The solar anus spews and boils stubbornly, secretly. We may recall here Patrick Morkan's old horse, Johnny, in "The Dead," half heeding the reins, and half heeding a compulsion to approach the statue of a horse, so that he walks around aild around this statue (Dub., p. 145). Initially, the ideal ego, like the superego, constitutes a desexualization: it is a second order disembodiment of desire. In the strict form of his villanelle, we see that Stephen's ideal ego appears amidst desire, under conditions of strict self-bondage. He creates his own restrictions through which to flow, and so diverts his energy from the superego aild the social. He extends his desexualization through sublimation, and so reverses repression. In his image of the birdgirl, and in the aesthetic theory that supports this image, in which he argues that art should not awaken desire, we see Stephen snared, Stephen acquiescing to the fathers, and participating in his own subjugation. In Ulysses, he will move beyond this theory, to his Shakespeare theory, which, while similar to his Portrait theory, differs in its recognition of the impor-
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tance of the artist's ties to the external world, even though these ties are only of value to the artistic project when they are broken. Until parodied in resexualization, the ideal ego entails self-imprisonment, and self-renunciation. The ideal ego is a concession to the external dominance of the superego. Although it is founded upon, and formed by this concession, and so a desexualization in itself, it is through this avenue that the masochist will retain internal freedom, and achieve resexualization. The courtly adorations of the boy in "Araby" already entail something of a resexualization, retaining the traits of its desexualization, in that the boy is excited and tantalized by the distance that necessitates his quest: his longing serves as an end in itself. He values the production of desire over the attainment, and so commodification, of the object of desire. When he reaches Araby he is caught, genitalized. In his pocket there was once the fetishistic power of Eileen's hand; now there is money and his genital drive. He is ashamed because this original power has been replaced by the ability to cancel the quest by reaching in for money, or to do what Bloom does. He has learned what it means to spend. Bloom's potato is a mystery, but perhaps it serves to replace the power that the boy loses in "Araby." Desire does not hunger for a commodity, or satiation, but for the perpetuation of itself. It is cancelled in discharge, not because this is what it has sought, but because it reaches an intensity that the subject does not wish to bear. It is the nature of the Odyssean figure to wander, to process and produce desire, and the return, the homecoming, is only a momentary pause, or drawing of reins, before the horseman, the seaman, passes by. When the boy in "Araby" reaches his goal, he is disillusioned, and feels the tawdry reality to be of much less value than his dreams. In this we see the genesis of the Lilliputian perspective: the boy learns to look at things through the wrong end of the telescope; he sees that he prefers to distance himself, to prolong longing, and put off approach. Similarly, Gabriel is aroused when he observes Gretta through the wrong end of the telescope, while she listens to Bartell D'Arcy, and forgets for a moment their Brobdignanian proximity, the claustrophobic, desanctifying sanction of their marriage. For a moment, he perceives hers as a separate life, not belonging to him in any way (Dub., p. 146).The feeling that she is not his property recharges his lust for her. He is aroused to realize that another man may desire her, just as he does in his distanced, detached frame of mind, in his emotional exile from his profane life. In creating for themselves a transcendent, and therefore mystical object of desire, these lovers impose continence upon themselves.58 Continence forces sexual energy to release itself in the mystical experience, through the eruption, or rather the pre-eruptive spewing of the solar anus. Like distance, this continence, this self-denial, becomes an end in itself for the masochistic neophyte, and later for the masochist. Reik stresses the centrality of the delay of end pleasure to the masochistic rite.59 Continence and distance heighten the intensity of desire, and force a state of tension and suspense essential to
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masochistic longing. Again, this toying with tension may be seen in Stephen's visualization of a tide receding and approaching (Port., p. 136). In this image, Stephen is playing with preparatory masturbation, building tension, but delaying end pleasure, in order to intensify and prolong the sexual experience. He is like Beckett's Murphy, tied to a chair, so that he may move inwardly.60 The masochist, more than all others, denies the tyranny of the body as an organism. This is his magical omnipotence. His methods are those of the visionary and the alchemist. The next chapter discusses the way in which the ideal ego becomes a focus for masturbation. As the resexualization of the desexualization must possess traits of its desexualization, the masturbatory fantasy will direct the masochistic neophyte toward the defilement of the ideal ego's purity, not in her but in himself. In the narcissistic ego / ideal ego system, the distinction between the lover and the beloved is blurred. He drags the transcendent ideal down into immanence, finding a body for her in his own body. He will drag her down into life by degrading his own body as hers; he will languish beneath her chill gaze. He is touched: she is untouchable.
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CHAPTER THREE
Icarus Resexualized The Consolidation of Masochism
Black Beast Burned zn Omaha, Ga. A lot of Deadwood Diclzs in slouch hats and they firing on a sambo strung up on a tree with his tongue out and a bonfire under him. Gob, they ought to drown him in the sea after and eloctrocute and crucify him to lnalze sure of their job. (U., p. 4 2 6 ) THE NYMPH: Mortal! You found me in evil cornpan!; highlziclzers, coster picnic makers, pugilists, popular generals, immoral panto boys in flesh tights and the nifty shimmy dancers, La Aurora and Karini, musical act, the hit of the century. I was hidden in cheap pink paper that smelt of rock oil. I was surrounded by the stale smut of clubmen, stories to disturb callow youths, ads for transparencies, truedup dice and bustpads, proprietary articles and why wear a truss with testimonial from ruptured gentleman. Useful hints to the married. BLOOM: (Lifts turtle head towards her lap) We have met before. O n another stac (U., p. 655-6)
In Joyce there are, as well as prohibiting fathers, a number of alternative fathers who offer oppressed youths a perverse precedent, an anomalous choice. These fathers may be considered "Shem fathers." Father Flynn, the pervert in "An Encounter" and Bloom are such fathers. They are silent and furtive. Their loneliness seems essential to their access to an unsanctioned and mysterious object of desire. They are seen to be introverted, finding the focus of their desire within, rather than without. There are a number of clear connections between Father Flynn in "The Sisters" and the pervert in "An Encounter." Flynn was born in Irishtown, which is where the pervert prowls. Mahony calls the pervert a "queer old josser" (Dub., p. 15). Cotter says of Flynn: "I wouldn't say that he was exactly . . . but there was something queetX(Dub.,p. 3) Although queer in Joyce does not denote homosexuality, it does connote a sense of the outre' which embraces the sexual, particularly in its latent or anoetic form. The word "josser" is also problematic, leaving ground for interpretation. One meaning of "josser" is "an old roue." A roue is a debauched or lecherous
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man, a rake. The word comes from nineteenth-century French, in which it means "one broken on the wheel, from "rouer," from the Latin "rotare," to revolve, from "rota," a wheel, with reference to the fate deserved by a debauchee" (Collins). The pervert's speech is described as "moving around and around in the same orbit" (Dub., p. 15), as though he were strapped to the wheel of his perversity. According to Wyse Jackson and McGinley, "josser" also suggests "a Chinese figure of a deity, from the Portuguese 'deos' [ . . . . ] 'joss-pidgin-man' is a minister of religion. In FW (611) there is 'Lord Joss.' "1 The sacerdotal connection between the pervert and Flynn is further developed by the fact that both are described as wearing green-black suits.2 Both men serve the role of confessor for the respective youths, and the youths enter into the role of acolyte. The boy says of Flynn: "[hlis questions showed me how complex and mysterious were certain institutions of the Church" (Dub., p. 5 ) . The narrator of "An Encounter" says of the pervert: "he led me monotonously through the mystery, grew almost affectionate and seemed to plead with me that I should understand him" (Dub., p. 16). There are also similarities in the physical appearance of these two men. The narrators focus upon, and are repelled by, the men's mouths, which utter enticing words. Flynn is described as having trembling hands, while the pervert is described as shivering. In both of these stories, the narrators identify with these older men. In "An Encounter," when the pervert says of Mahony-"he goes in for gamesm-he relates him to Cotter's ideal sporty boy. Furthermore, when he says of the narrator, "you're a bookworm like myself," he alienates the narrator from Cotter's normative ideal, and connects him also with Flynn and the narrator of "The Sisters." The youth is usually an unheeded witness, watching in fascination as the pervert's solar anus spews and bubbles imaginative excrement. The examples of these fathers direct the youth toward "a new passion, a darker shadow of the first" (U., p. 252). These fathers are to the narrators of the first three stories of Dubliners, and to Stephen, what the druid in Yeats's "Fergus and the Druid" is to Fergus. The narrators, and Stephen, learn from these fathers about becomings, about the inward populations that are discovered when the body as an organism is renounced, the seasons that are discovered with the dissipation of identity. These fathers do not divulge this information willingly, knowing what sorrow resides in the "small grey bag.": Their reluctance, or indifference, is of no importance, however, as it is not a matter of educating, or in any way fathering these youths, so much as of infecting them: H o w can we conceive of a peopling, a propagation, a becoming that is without filiation or hereditary production? X multiplicity without the unity of an ancestor? It is quite simple; everybody ltnows it, but it is discussed only in secret. We oppose epidemic to filiation, contagion to heredit!; peopling by contagion to sexual reproduction, sexual production [ . . . . ] The vampire does not filiate, it infects.4
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This type of non-generative reproduction also describes the insidious nature of masocl~ism.This method of reproduction is suspect because rather than producing others, it appropriates others. The fact that this defection from the normative productive ethos proves to be contagious accounts for the fact that these outsiders must remain furtive. These fathers compel because they are anomalies: "it is by means of this anomalous choice that each enters into his or her own becoming-animal."5 Deleuze and Guattari's conception of a pact with an outsider as crucial to becomings casts an interesting light upon the influences of Flynn, the pervert and Bloom upon the young narrators and Stephen: Captain Xhab has an irresistible becoming-whale, but one that bypasses the pack or the school, operating directly through a monstrous alliance with the Unique, the Leviathan, Moby-Dick. There is always a pact with a demon; the demon sometimes appears as the head of the band, sometimes as the Loner on the sidelines of the pack [ . . . . ] Lovecraft applies the term 'Outsider' to this thing or entit!; the Thing, which arrives and passes a t the edge, wl~ichis linear yet multiple, 'teeming, seething, swelling, foaming, spreading like an infectious disease, this nameless horroc'h The respective narrators of "The Sisters" and "An Encounter" are repelled by the physical traits of Flynn and the pervert, and yet find their words to be strangely compelling. Similarly, Stephen seems to be repelled by the touch of Bloom's limp arm (U., p. 769). Stephen does not seem to be particularly intrigued by Bloom's anodyne musings, however the vitiating effect of Bloom occurs on a subtextual level. Althougl~Bloom seems to have no real effect upon Stephen, the Shakespeare theory and the intermingling of their psyches in "Circe" suggest that Stephen will one day find a means of dealing with his conflicts that is similar to Bloom's. Bloom's secretive and anomalous position is noticed by Molly, who refers to him as "slyboots" (U., p. 882). At the end of "Lestrygonians," Nosey Flynn recognizes, but misinterprets Bloom's inwardness, his reservation and his secrecy, when he claims that Bloom is a Freemason (U., p. 226). Bloom, according to Flynn, is elusive in that he will never give his signature (U., p. 227). His silence, exile and cunning make him a borderline phenomenon. When Kelleher tells the police that Stephen won on Throwaway (U., p. 698), he links Bloom and Stephen, because Bloom too is considered to have won money by betting on Throwaway (U., p. 435). The racehorse's name, "Throwaway," suggests indifference (due to masturbation?),7 and an exile like that of Fergus, who renounced his status as a king. It may also suggest Stephen's Shakespeare, who writes because, once sexually overborne in a cornfield, and cuckolded, "he will never be a victor in his own eyes after nor play victoriously the game of laugh and lie down" (U., p. 251). The father and son theme in Ulysses is about Bloom infecting Stephen. We do not see this so much in terms of character, or character interaction, as through what,
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set as it is in the brutally mimetic day of Ulysses, might only be described as magic. The strongest signs of the effect of Bloom on Stephen are in the intertwining of their hidden selves in "Circe," and their coincident responses to the matin cloud. Bloom, and the oriental motif, are introduced to Ulysses together, when Stephen recounts a dream of the night before Ulysses, in which an oriental man initiates him to a brothel, by pressing a melon to his face. The whole scheme of Portrait is inverted, and Daedalus, Stephen's "old father," is replaced by an avatar of Proteus, leading him down from his fall into the waves. This subversive father teaches him now not how to fly, but how to fall, how to return. Each of these wanderers, these exiles, suggests a way to transgress boundaries, and enter the forbidden, and therefore subversive and exotic. Oriental imagery, which in Joyce is normally reserved for the desired object, is somehow involved in the presentation of each of these perverse precedents. When he withdraws beneath his bed covers, and scans the horizons of the freedom afforded by privacy, the narrator of "The Sisters" thinks of Flynn, and then falls into dreams of Persia. Similarly, when the narrator of "An Encounter" evades the responsibilities of school, and seeks adventure and the exotic, he crosses the Liffey in the company of "a little Jew with a bag."8 He searches the eyes of foreign sailors, expecting them to have green eyes.9 (Dub., p. 13) These sailors, however, are productive mercantile seamen, rather than infectious Odyssean wanderers. Like the comparably productive stallholders of Araby, they threaten a banal end to his adventure, and disillusion him. It is not until he meets the pervert that the boy discovers the green eyes he has sought. His wanderings will not be riverine or maritime: the navigable channels that open up to him are of the mind. He wades into the psychological riptides of the pervert's world. When the boys tire of the sailors, and also decide not to go to the Pigeon House, they move from Irishtown toward the train station at Lansdowne. They enter a field and lounge on the bank of the River Dodder. As this river is renowned for flooding, this field is a floodplain. The ridge on which they lounge is a levCe, a manmade construct to prevent flooding. In symbolic terms, it may be seen as an impediment to psychological flow. As a floodplain, this field is unworked land, used mainly for pleasure, idling, wandering and encountering. In this way, it is like the beaches on which partly sexual Joycean epiphanies so often occur. These interstitial zones lie between the freedom, chaos and potential of the feminine sea or river ("our great sweet mother," Anna Livia), and the restrictive, ordered and limiting scope of the patriplegic city. "Sorcerers have always held the anomalous position, at the edge of the fields or woods. They haunt the fringes."l0 The anomalous is "a phenomenon of bordering [ . . . . ] there is a borderline for each multiplicity; it is in no way a centre but rather the enveloping line of the farthest dimension."ll
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Joyce described his writings as a series of: "extravagant excursions into forbidden territory" (J.J., p. 265). The word "extravagance" "condenses deviation, perversion, and vagrancy. For 'extravagance' the OED gives as its first entry, 'A going out of the usual path; an excursion, digression. Also, the position or fact of erring from (a prescribed path)' [ . . . . ] The first OED entry for 'extravagant' [ . . . ] defines it as that which 'wanders out of bounds; straying, roaming, vagrant.' " I 2 Equally of interest is the etymology of the word "encounter" (Latin: in contm, meaning "into the opposite"). An encounter is a casual, unexpected meeting, which is not to say that it is not somehow wished for or anticipated. When Mahony rushes across the field as if to bring the narrator aid, the latter feels penitent "for in my heart I had always despised him a little." The narrator recognizes that Mahony is on a vain mission because he does not need to be rescued-he has been found, he has found himself. The narrator still feels uncertain, and dallies on the threshold of the world opened up to him by the pervert. This world, of course, is not the pervert's world, but rather a protean, malleable one, capable of offering becomings. To journey while stationary is to become, and people the self with populations. By escaping the paranoiac molar politics of self-identity, the nonfamilial other, the oriental, may be discovered. The perverse precedents, through contagion, inadvertently instruct their pupils how to become "all in all in all of us" (U., p. 2 7 4 ) , androgynous angels, nothing and many things: "becoming animal is an affair of sorcery because (1)it implies an initial relation of alliance with a demon [ . . . I." We see this when the boy in "An Encounter" feels himself to be alienated from Mahony, and drawn toward the pervert. (2) the demon functions as the borderline of an animal pack, into which the human being passes or in \vl~ichhis or her becoming takes place, by contagion [ . . . . ] There is an entire politics of becomings-animal, as well as a politics of sorcery, which is elaborated in assemblages that are neither those of the family nor of religion nor of the State. Instead, they express minoritarian groups, or groups that are oppressed, prohibited, in revolt, or always on the fringe of recognized institutions, groups all the more secret for being extrinsic, in other words, anomic. If becoming-animal takes the form of Temptation, and of monsters aroused in the imagination by the demon, it is because it is accompanied, a t its origin as in its undertaking, by a rupture with the central institutions that have established themselves or seek to become established.1j
The pervert causes "[m]onsters [to be] aroused in the imagination" of the narrator of "An Encounter"; the narrator's alienation from Mahony represents "a rupture with the central institutions," which he embodies, being something like Cotter's ideal sporty boy.
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In Victorian Britain, the masturbator was more demonized than the homosexual. They were both considered to waste the essential fluid of life, but the compulsive nature of the masturbator was believed to further drain these spirits, so that he was more deadened than the homosexual. Krafft-Ebing might have united these categories within the category of hyperaesthesia, the excessive sensitivity to stimulus, but he did not do so overtly. Although the l~omosexualman might be considered artistic and intense, the masturbator was simply dissipated. The denunciation of masturbation was unanimous and complete. Homosexual people meet, and even if only in the confines of the covert couple, there is a sense of society. Masturbation entails a greater alienation. William Acton, who will also be referred to in relation to the way in which the flogging of children encourages masturbation, was the most renowned of the campaigners against masturbation in Victorian Britain It is easy to underestimate the intensity, and the ferocity, with which educators, medicos, the clergy and the general public denounced masturbation in Victorian Britain. Considering the word "masturbate" to be derived from the Latin manus (hand) and stupmre (to defile), they believed themselves to have a classical precedent for this vilification. For instance, Dr. Kellogg, best known as the inventor of Cornflakes, carried out clitoridectomies on a number of girls whom he suspected of masturbating. Before resorting to such extreme methods, he tried other ways of preventing them from indulging in these furtive pleasures. H e burned their genitals, and rubbed them with abrasive substances. Cornflakes, the cereal, was conceived as a douche that would also act as an irritant.14 In A Talk on the Wilde Side, Ed Cohen remarks: "The proliferation of texts written about masturbation in nineteenth-century Britain is truly remarkable, even for a culture dedicated-as Michel Foucault has suggested-to putting sexuality into discourse."l5 Cohen follows Foucault's suggestion that perversion is neither a regression to primal, pre-social impulses, nor a distortion of sexual urges due to repression. Instead, society inscribes perversion onto and into the individual, in order to situate the individual in its hierarchies, and channel his energies. The masturbator is inscribed as the demonized other, in contrast to which a conception of normative masculinity is defined. It is the breadth of the term "masturbation" that makes it a particularly effective and insidious handle for power, offering it a grasp that is both far reaching and deeply penetrating. The anti-masturbation campaigns would drastically divide the majoritarian term within itself, sanctioning and glorifying those members of the majoritarian group who most implicitly and most actively complied with the productive ethos of society. Through the focus upon, and the demonization of masturbation, a radically discluding nature was defined, that would make those possessing these unnatural traits even
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more alien or other than members of the most minoritarian terms of the hierarchy. The anti-masturbation campaigners wanted not only to feminize the masturbator, and make him seem childlike; they wanted also to make him seem even weaker than women and children were considered to be. In the same sense that the Celt (another popular configuration of the other) was seen to be "timid in the face of the great world,"l6 the masturbator "becomes shy and timid, particularly in the presence of women."l7 Masturbation, as drawn by the anti-masturbation campaigns, offers a clear example of what Dollimore considers the "paradoxical perverse," because it is invisibly inherent in that from which it is excluded. The conception of masturbation as perversion sanctions vigilance over youths, and discourages privacy. Introversion, distraction, or the possession of an inner life, become symptoms of perversion. There was an emphasis on the need to draw youths out of themselves and to compel them to partake. Privacy and physical inactivity were considered to encourage the tendency to deviance, and so both of these were proscribed. It is the impossibility of absolute compliance with such a dictate that gives it its power and, at the same time, makes it susceptible to the disrupting paradoxes and parodies of the perverse. Although power might circumscribe masturbation in discourse, it cannot enter into it. Masturbation is like the pervert's wasteland in "An Encounter," encompassed but omitted. Cohen writes that the "totalizing interpretative schema, which largely characterized the clerical writings on 'schoolboy immorality,' encumbered the pedagogical discussions of male masturbation with a self-censorship that severely limited its utterances to indirections and euphemisms."l8 Masturbation, "the secret vice," is described in the subtitle of one tract as "the Vice of Boyhood, the Blight of Youth, the Curse of Men, the Wreck of Manl~ood,and the Bane of Posterity."19 When Joyce asked J. Lidwell, his solicitor, for a letter confirming that Dubliners was not blasphemous, Lidwell, in reference to "An Encounter," quoted Gibbon's Decline and Fall: "I touch with reluctance and dispatch with impatience this most odious vice of which modesty rejects the name and natures abominates the idea" (J.J., p. 330). Such discourse never enters and speaks in the first person of masturbation, but circumscribes it, or binds it in a profusion of tangents. Any first hand experience of masturbation is, in typically sadistic fashion, negated or repressed by these speakers, and projected onto another. Although discourse saturates the topic of masturbation, the unanimous consensus of the discourse is against masturbation, and by contrast the offender is absent, or silent. If the threat that masturbation poses to society is so great, where are all these masturbators, and what do they say? The answer was that the masturbator was too excessively introverted and selfish to express himself, but that he was all around us, a poison, "a hidden destructive potential living beneath the apparently serene surface of Victorian middleclass domesticity. Parents, pastors, doctors and teachers were admonished to be increasingly vigilant in observing their adolescent male
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charges, in order that they might detect any deviation from the norm that would suggest the development of greater future departures."20 Discourse swells up around mute absences, to locate or situate and account for them. In inscribing masturbation, and drawing it into discourse, power draws it as an essential secrecy, an "enactment of solitude," and an absence from society. It is in this way similar to Augustine's conception of evil as a nothingness, possessing no ontological grounding. In the ellipses in which masturbation exists, however, as in the black dot where Bloom falls asleep in "Ithaca," an emptiness, a nothingness, accounts for an inexpressible flow, a zone of transformation. In the perverse reinscription, the masturbator, forced into hiding, identifies secrecy as one of his joys, or his mode of being. The demonization of secrecy makes it foreign and exotic, and the masochistic masturbator takes delight in glorifying the terms that have demonized him. The campaign against masturbation operated at predictive and prescriptive levels. Masturbation was defined as unnatural: "[tlhat the consequences of natural (i.e., biological) maturation are deemed 'not natural' for the adolescent male demonstrates the degree to which 'nature' itself is an ideological construct that grounds the proscriptive definitions of 'normal function.' "21 By telling the youth what he should not be, power directs and channels the youth toward a category that serves its purpose. The antimasturbation campaign "normalizes a set of ideological assumptions about the productive 'nature' of male behavior. Concomitantly, they exclude masturbation from the normative by portraying these assumptions as natural 'human' functions."22 The boy who is seen is natural: the elusive boy is unnatural. Privacy is seen as inhibiting, rather than enabling; it conditions deviancy. Throughout Joyce, there are pairs of characters who are opposed to, and contrasted with, one another ("Shaun brothers" and "Shem brothers"). An understanding of the norm fostered by the discourse against masturbation is significant to the distinction between these Sheins and Shauns. Through perverse reinscription, Joyce inverts the priority of the prescribed norm, and valorizes the minoritarian term, while mocking, or choosing to elude, the majoritarian term, the sanctioned norm. He speaks from within the ellipses, and draws S h u n from Shem's perspective. Cohen considers the anti-masturbation campaign and the introduction of compulsory, organized athletics into the educational system of Victorian Britain to be interdependent tactics of surveillance and control. "Compulsory athletics were initially instituted in order to increase control over public school boys who, heretofore largely unsupervised outside the classroom, were given to engaging in a variety of disruptive activities in communities surrounding the schools."2~Power does not rest with controlling its object, it also strives to form its object. The intense systems of surveillance utilized in Victorian public schools, such as dormitory accommodation, prefects, housemasters and supervised study, compelled boys to be extroverted, open
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and forthright, involved and productive, so that they might better serve "the bureaucratic, industrial and imperialist institutions of Victorian Britain." "The norm was defined (in opposition to effeminacy) as embodying 'robust energy, spirited courage, and physical vitality.' "24 The masturbator, the negative of the norm, by contrast, is perceived as self engrossed, obsessive, weak and wasteful: "[tlhe loss of an ounce of it [seminal fluid] enfeebles more than the [loss of] forty ounces of blood."2' The syinptoinatology developed "to characterize the consequences of masturbation (e.g., 'an air of distraction, embarrassment, and stupidity,' 'a disagreeable feeling of laziness') implicitly constructs masturbation as antithetical to the qualities upon which bourgeois social productivity is predicated."26 The campaign against masturbation becomes a campaign against privacy and solitude. As it is natural for boys to do what is unnatural, they must be kept under surveillance. More importantly, the boys themselves must internalize this vigilance, and learn to dread privacy. The susceptibility of sexuality to transcription makes this possible. The lists of physical ailments that might befall the masturbator are long and shocking. The masturbator is drawn as a negative version of the Hamlet type: "[hlis intellectual powers are diminished, he becomes pale, emaciated, and depressed in spirits; exercise he n o longer has a taste for, and he seeks solitude."27 William Acton describes the masturbator as follows: It is scarcely to be marvelled at that anyone so direly afflicted should fall, as we are told he does, "into a state of extreme wasting;" that his sltin "acquires a yellowisl~,leaden hue;" that his eyes "become encircled with a blue ring;" and that he winds up falling into a state of "brutish stupidity," insanity, and locomotor ataxy.28 The peculiar imbecility and shy habits of the youthful offender, the suspicion, and fear, and dread, and suicidal impulses, and palpitations, and scared look, and feeble body of the older offenders, passing gradually into dementia, or fatuity [ . . . ] all combine to stamp and define this as a natural order or family.29 This more "poetical" descriptive technique utilized by the anti-masturbation campaigners, creates a masturbator w h o is similar t o the Romantic hero, "alone and palely loitering." The Celt, the Romantic hero and the masturbator are all embodiments of anti-establishmentarianism. Masturbation is the first, most readily accessible, and inevitable transgression, and so, in a desexualizing environment, it is a primary route toward resexualization. It may, in fact, be non-volitional, as in the case of a wet dream. Masturbation is linked to the ideal ego, because it is dependent upon the image-making faculty. Masturbation is, in fact, focused on the ideal ego, as is the artistic project, as the ideal ego is the embodiment of the absent or denied object of desire. The ideal ego is the fundamental conciliation, or
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consolation for the absence of the desired object, and the masturbator focuses upon, and so conjures her. The ten years that Stephen will take to write a novel (U., p. 321) is related to the ten years in which Bloom has not engaged in penetrative genital intercourse with Molly. Masturbation draws the desexualized ideal ego into resexualization, because it declares itself as specifically sexual, and takes a first tentative step into the world possessed by the fathers: namely, the body. Although the mind free of superego has afforded privacy, the masturbator extends his silence and furtive cunning to his character, to establish some privacy in the real world of the fathers, the world from which the superego draws its power. For the masochist, the danger of being found out is always aphrodisiac, due to the sense in which the resexualization retains the traits of its desexualization. Masturbation, even more than homosexuality, is the love that "dare not speak its name." Even libertarians as resolute as Deleuze and Guattari frown on masturbation. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari attack masturbation and pleasure, uniting these with lack and castration, and with fantasy and the ideal, as inhibitors of desire.30 This attack, however, is aimed at masturbation that is a quick, sentimental, non engaged means to an end, that is, to emission, or the cancellation and repression of desire. It does not address masochistic masturbation, which stokes and prolongs desire, through repeated interruptions of the ascent toward emission. The masochistic masturbator forestalls emission, allowing fluids to bubble and boil unabated, as the anally fixated child withholds his feces, and the visionary holds shut the solar anus, forestalling the conclusion of the dream: "[tlhe masochist's suffering is the price he must pay, not to achieve pleasure, but to untie the pseudobond between desire and pleasure as an extrinsic measure. Pleasure [ . . . ] is something that must be delayed as long as possible because it interrupts the continuous process of positive desire."31 End pleasure, genital discharge, represses desire as an ongoing process. It is in part the shame of indulging in an act so universally condemned that compels the masochist to be seen masturbating. Before Joyce, masturbation, something that may be an ubiquitous daily occurrence, is shunned and unspoken in literature. Masturbation has never played a big part in the contents of pornography, although its centrality to the perusal of pornography is indisputable. Joyce would not have had such troubles with censors had he simply written some straightforward pornography. Joyce first addresses masturbation in "An Encounter." Here, it is constrained and defined by a discourse that draws bounding lines around it. Joyce often draws masturbation in instances that are not easily recognizable as such, in order to evade censorship and, perhaps, to emphasize the essential secrecy of masturbation, its internality, and its expulsion from discourse. In "The Sisters," and "An Encounter," Joyce suggests masturbation in the image of a mind moving compulsively around a circle, magnetized by an imag-
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inary object upon which it is focused. The pervert "gave me the impression that he was repeating something that he had learned by heart or that, magnetized by some words of his own speech, his mind was slowly circling round and round in its own orbit" (Dub., pp. 14-15). It is significant that in "The Sisters," which parallels "An Encounter" so closely, Flynn has made the boy learn the incantatory responses to the Mass by heart (Dub., p. 6 ) . This comments on the high degree of fixation which accompanies masturbation, and particularly that with a perverse object. In these images of the magnetized and repetitive mind, we see masturbation as conjuring, as the stirring of a magical cauldron. The masturbator, denied the sexual other, tries to imagine her powerfully enough that she may step into reality, like Selene in "Circe." The language of sexual arousal is like the language of religious adoration, in that it snowballs, expands upon itself repetitively, building upon a reiterating description born of need, drawing an image toward an immanence that it never quite attains. In this way, it is typical of rituals of sympathetic magic. In "An Encounter," the nautical theme supports the image of the masturbatory mind as seeking its desire, and as magnetized by the zone in which the image of desire is conjured or produced. In "The Dead," we see this image again in the old horse Johnny walking a circle around a statue of a horse. Like the masturbator, this horse is magnetized by an inhuman-or in this case in-equine-and so imaginary image. Johnny is asking the same question that Bloom asks of the statues at the library. This horse's image of desire is predominantly transcendent, like Stephen's image of the birdgirl. In "Nausicaa," after masturbating, Bloom thinks: "Circus horse walking in a ring" (U., p. 492). It is not until the masturbatory advances of Bloom that the birdgirl becomes Gerty, and the masturbatory fantasy tempts and intrudes upon the space of the fathers, challenging the powers of the panopticon, by projecting the ideal onto the real. The masochistic masturbator is, in secrecy, digging up, or conjuring, a glimmering dragon of desire. There are a number of covert and overt instances of masturbation in Joyce's fiction. In "The Sisters," Father Flynn laughing in the confessional, and to a lesser extent Father Flynn holding the chalice in his coffin, may be considered images suggestive of masturbation.;2 (Dub., pp. 6 , 9 ) In a story in which so much is unmentionable, Flynn laughing in the confessional may be considered as a euphemism. Between these two stories, there is a strange juxtaposition of the confessional and the obsessional. In typically Joycean fashion, the sacred and the profane, that which purifies and that which sullies, are not so much in dialogue as univocal. They speak the common language of purgation. Furthermore, both offer only temporary respite: the next "fall" awaits the temporarily sated onanist, and the absolved penitent.:; The masochistic masturbator toys with the tension between the hidden and the revealed, and assimilates and subverts the force at the source of his desexualization. For this reason, it is easy to see why the confessional, which is on the one hand essentially private, and on the other hand a demolisher of
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the premises of privacy, a private space in the public house of God, may serve as an enticing venue for the masturbatory fantasy. Molly recognizes the erotic elements of the confessional: "he touched me [ . . . ] but whereabouts on your person my dear child on the leg behind high up was it yes rather high up was it where you sit down yes [ . . . I " (U., p. 875) Gerty associates the confessional with masturbation. After pondering what the gentleman lodger did in his bed with pictures of skirt dancers, Gerty thinks: Besides there was absolution as long as you didn't d o the other thing before being married and there ought to be women priests that would understand without your telling out and Cissy Caffrey too sometimes had that dreamy kind of dreamy look in her eyes so that she too, my dear, and Winny Rippingham so mad about actors' photographs and besides it was o n account of that other thing coming on the way it did. (U., p. 476)
As the masochist thrills in danger, and in traversing tensions between extremes, the flouting of the panopticon, and the profanation of the sacred, may afford the tension, and the paradox upon which his perversity feeds. In a place of such "grave responsibility," Flynn's laughter is suggestive of play and flow. The confessional is an enticing scene for masturbation from the perspectives of both the confessor and the penitent. When, in the letters, Joyce asks Nora to confess to him, he reveals that accessing the secrecy of others excites him. Similarly, Stephen tells Emma that he would like to be her confessor (S.H., p. 159).When she says that he would grow tired, he acknowledges her understanding, because she seems to partly recognize the unappeasable nature of masochistic desire, and its essentially masturbatory and imaginative nature. What she does not understand, is that he would only grow bored if he considered her as one nymph, and not as many. As a masturbatory icon, she would serve as an imaginary locus on which he might conjure the Ideal. She would always be subsidiary to his fantasy. He would be drawing from her an access to the nymph above all other nymphs: a Mercedes, a secret rose, the ideal ego. He would grind her up and reform her in his desiring machine. The masochist is a teacher, but also a forger, a maker of models. The women who would confess to him would offer their sins in the same way that women offer Bloom their underpants, as representations of their immanence, their reality. He would then utilize these fetishes to anchor his transcendent ideal to reality. Certainly, this is a vision of woman as fetish. Joyce is not, however, working in the prescriptive, but in the confessional mode. Masochism serves his liberation, before it serves the liberation of women. Masturbatory voyeurism is an always-futile effort to give body to the ideal ego. There are many acts of such voyeurism in Joyce, perpetrated by the boy in "Araby," the pervert in "An Encounter," Stephen watching the birdgirl, Bloom watching Gerty, and Gerty watching Bloom. These voyeurs
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study an immanent object of desire, and draw images from the external object onto the ideal ego, to anchor her in immanence. When Stephen draws E-C-into the role of a harlot, he does not simply draw a harlot, he makes this harlot more real by feeding her anti-matter drawn from immanent matter, by using E-C-as a life model. In Stephen Hero, Emma's eyes shine "like gems" (S.H., p. 202), and in Portrait, E-C-, the figure who seems "demure and innocent" by day (Port., p. 94), is transformed by his masturbatory imagination into a "jeweleyed harlot" (Port., p. 107). Stephen is enticed by the paradoxical juxtaposition, the tension that he is able to infuse into his ideal ego, by making E-C-, who is not a harlot, behave as a harlot. He does not degrade, but empowers her in giving her hard and jeweled eyes. If to be blinded is to be castrated, to be given jeweled eyes is to be given a glorified phallus as substitute for an initial wound. These flashing, well-disguised eyes, this precious, glorified wound, amplifies her gaze. Her jeweled eyes recall Simon's monocle, and the bottle-green eyes of the pervert. He dreams her released from repression, and from the societal dictate that holds that women should not be aggressive in their desires. Like masochistic exhibitionism, masochistic voyeurism is intent upon extraction more than on invasion. This voyeurism reveals a source of the masochist's coldness, which is mirrored and inverted in the ideal ego, and shone in turn upon him, as a taste of his own medicine. Stephen sees the birdgirl, and she sees him. In the masochistic scene, hers is the gaze beneath which he is humiliated. The theatrics of sexual power gauge who is looking, against who is being looked at. Certain images in "Araby" are suggestive of masturbation. The boy spies on Mangan's sister, just as the pervert spies on the boys, and Bloom spies on Gerty. The language and the intensity of the boy's adorations are suggestive of the increasing tension of the masturbator working toward while forestalling climax (Dub., pp. 18,19). Althougl~the clasped hands and the shaking would, like Flynn's laughter, suggest masturbation, particularly in light of the way Mangan's sister earlier holds the railing (Dub., p. 19), it is more likely that any emissions produced pour out of the solar anus, as they can not yet come from the penis. In Portrait, when Stephen awakens from a "dewy wet dream," and when he envisions a rose representative of female genitalia, it seems that genital emission has occurred. This becomes even more likely when we compare this event with Bloom's masturbation while watching Gerty. In Stephen looking at pornography "for hours" (Port., p. 107), marathon bouts of masturbation are implied.
Whipping Causes a Sexual Reaction Ironically, the instruments of deterrence used by educators to chastise the masturbator act as instruments of sexual incitement; instead of deadening the impulse, they give succor to it. The ways in which whipping causes a
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sexual reaction have been widely recognized for centuries, if not from time immemorial. This sexual reaction applies to both the active and the passive parties. Even the non-participant-the voyeur-may gain gratification. Havelock Ellis considers "the earliest definitely described case of sadistic pleasure" to occur in a letter dated 1672: I have lznown intimately a very learned man, whose name I shall omit for honour's sake, who, whenever in schools or elsewhere he sees a boy punished, unbreached and beaten, and hears his cries, at once ejaculates semen copiously without any tension or erection of the penis but with such mental co~lfusio~l that he could almost swoon, and the same thing happens to him frequently in sleep when he dreams of this subject."^
The easiest explanation of the sexual effects of beating has always been Meibom's mechanical description of beating as a means of heating the semen so that it might descend into the testicles. Examples of sadism, however, should have made it clear that the sexual effects of beating were more insidious than this. Theories addressing the sexual effects of beating have continued to utilize Meibom's model, but this always needs to be supplemented by an attempt to describe the more ineffable combination of shame, nakedness and submission as labile incentives to arousal. That there was more to the syndrome than what Meiboin posited was often hinted at obliquely, although rarely formulated before Freud. In 1839, Michael Ryan, a British sexologist, wrote: "Flagellation and denudation are inseparable, and often excite erection in children."35 This may help to explain Stephen's curiosity regarding whether the boy or the master takes down the trousers, but it is very far from being a compelling argument. It continues to be the symbolic and paradoxical natures of sexual masochism that elude interpretation. Many thinkers have considered the soundest reason for the discontinuation of beating to be the fact that beating was known to cause the start of masturbation in children. In "Pollution" (1829),Jean Baptiste Serrurier argues that gluteal flagellation, applied to children, may awaken premature sexual feelings, and thus encourage masturbation and the loss of that "most vital fluid for the maintenance of life."36 William Acton, whose crusade was specifically against masturbation, also warned against flogging for the part it might play in the start of masturbation: Before quitting the subject, I cannot help but alluding to the ill consequences of whipping children o n the nates. Of late years, this form of p~inish~nent has gone out of vogue; but, in some recent newspaper correspondence, it is urged that flogging cannot be dispensed with. The objections on medical grounds have not, probabl!; been stated; and, I think, its
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ill effects are not sufficiently known. That it has a great influence in exciting ejaculation, no one can doubt. Jean Jacques Rousseau, in his 'Confessions,' admits that this was his first incitement to masturbation, as the floggings administered by his guardian first gave him sensual feelings. I a m almost ashamed to say that there are vile wretches who, to excite emission, have recourse to this means of stimulating their flagging powers: and I sincerely hope that, if flogging is still t o be practised, it may be employed on the shoulders, and not on the nates, of youths.j7
Although he mentions medical reasons, Acton here fails to offer any explanation of the sexual reactions of beating. His acceptance of beating on the shoulders suggests, however, that he subscribes to Meibom's model of mechanical stimulation or a derivative thereof. Although this model can explain why flogging might cause children to start masturbating, it cannot wholly account for the way in which some people are only able to conceive of sexuality in relation to whipping. In order to describe this obsessive sexual preoccupation, conceptions of fixation and obsession were developed.
That people call become sexually fixated by whipping has long been recognized. In such cases, fantasies of sexual beating accompany the first emission. After this the subject can never achieve arousal without recourse to a fantasy of whipping. This was the case with both Masoch and Rousseau, and with all of the masochistic patients analysed by the Novicks. As mentioned, Pico della Miradona refers to an acquaintance who could only achieve ejaculation after having been whipped. He does not believe that there is an astrological explanation for this, but he cannot understand it in any other way, and so he asks the acquaintance for his own explanation: When I seriously enquir'd of him the Cause of this uncommon Plague, his Reply was, I have used myself to it from a Boy. And upon repeating the Question to him, he added, That he was educated with a Number of wicked Boys, who set up this Trade of Whipping among themselves, and purchased of each other these infamous stripes at the expense of their M o d e s t y 3
Rousseau also underlines the addictive qualities of the flagellant fantasy. He tells us that his sexuality was first awakened when he was beaten by his aunt, Mlle Lamberciet He tells us that he became addicted to masturbation during his adolescence. It is clear that fantasies of beating invariably accompanied this act. As he grew older, flagellation continued to be the focus of his erotic imagination. Rousseau describes the obsessive and masturbatory nature of his masochism in terms that are very clear:
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Not onl!; therefore, did I, though ardent, lascivious, and precocious by nature, pass the age of puberty without desiring or lznowing any other sensual pleasures than those ~11ic11Mlle Lalnbercier had, in all innocence, acquainted me with; but when finally, in the course of years, I became a man I was preserved by the very perversity \vllich might have been my undoing. My old childish tastes did not vanish, but became so intimately associated with those of maturity that I could never, when sensually aroused, keep the two apart . . . I never dared to reveal my strange taste, but a t least I got some satisfaction from situations which pandered to the thought of it. To fall on my lznees before a masterful mistress, to obey her commands, to have to beg for her forgiveness, have been to me the most delicate of pleasures; and the more my vivid imagination heated my blood the more like a spellbound lover I loolzed.~9 Gibson comments: "Since, overwhelmed by shame and timidity, he was never able to tell any woman of his secret craving, never able to 'act it out' with a partner, we must assume that before and during intercourse he achieved and maintained erection by imagining flagellant scenes."40 One hundred years later, ICrafft-Ebing case studies show that such acts of imaginative compensation are regularly found in perversity. Although ICrafft-Ebing does not elaborate on the concept of fixation, but continues to work with Meibom's thesis, many of his case studies describe men unable to engage in sexual intercourse without recourse to the fantasy of sexual beating. Krafft-Ebing also provides evidence that obsession with the flagellatory is pre-pubescent in origin.41 In "A Child Is Being Beaten" (1919), Freud claims that it begins "certainly before school age and not later than in the fifth or sixth year" (XVII, p.179). Other researchers have substantiated this claim. "The adult flagellant fantasy, in short, always derives from the infantile one. As with all the sexual perversions, we are dealing with a variety of arrested development, with a 'prephallic' fixation that puberty and subsequent experience have been unable t o dislodge." Gibson quotes The Autobiogmphy of a n Englishman, by "Y": "I feel certain that an obsession with flagellation, practical or theoretical, never leaves anyone once he has acquired it at
THEUBIQUITY OF THE FLAGELLANT MESSAGE: BOYS'MAGAZINES, AND ADVERTISEMENTS PORNOGRAPHY, NEWSPAPERS Another limitation of Meibom's thesis is that it does not does not account for those who are fixated by the beating fantasy, despite having never actually experienced beating. The fixation may arise vicariously, from reading or hearing about beating. We see this happening in "An Encounter," and in Portrait, when, after talking about punishment with the other boys, Stephen fantasizes about being caned on the bare bottom. Many of ICrafft-Ebing's case studies became obsessed by flagellation in early childhood, after having
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only read or heard about flogging. The Novicks also found "no constant relationship between actual experiences of being beaten and the presence of beating fantasies" in children.43 According to Deleuze, and Barthes, sadism and masochism are literary perversities, but this contention is often used as an excuse for avoiding a direct engagement with these perversities. The argument that sadism and masochism are predominantly literary perversities is based upon a number of assumptions. O n the most superficial level, we might say that literary people are sometimes compelled by these perversities. It should be obvious, though, that all sadists and masochists are not literary people. Perhaps the clearest sense in which these might be considered literary perversities, is that reading about these perversities can act as a determinant in the irreversible adoption of perversity as the manner in which sexuality is exclusively conceived. Furthermore, these perversities are more likely to exist in textual fantasies than in life, because of their deeply paradoxical natures, and the difficulties involved in actualizing them. Reference to flagellation was ubiquitous in Victorian Britain. It was in boys' magazines, and in the newspapers, in references to flagellant excesses and techniques in military, scholastic and domestic realms. In the papers, there were also occasional scandals in which flagellant brothels were revealed. In these revelations, the pornographic intentions of the writings are barely hidden beneath the vituperation. Gibson comments that "the thousands of boys' yarns published in the Victorian period and later in books, twopenny weeklies (such as the G e m and Magnet) and annuals (the most famous being the Boy's O w n Annual and Chums)" were full of descriptions of public school-style canings. In all of these stories, the caning of the buttocks is taken for granted, and, in some, "the account of the ceremony itself is explicit."44 T h e Halfpenny Marvel, old numbers of which help to make up Joe Dillon's library in "An Encounter," typically contained very overt sadistic and masochistic messages. R. B. I<ershner writes: Ironically for a magazine generally regarded as cheaply sensational, it claimed the intent of counteracting the influence of unhealthy sensationalism aimed at children [ . . . . ] Soon The M a w e l began printing testimonials such as that of the Reverend C. N. Barham expressing pleasure that the magazine was so 'pure and wholesome in tone.' O n the front cover of that issue was a man being tortured.45
It is clear that, in "An Encounter," a story about education and educators, the boys bring to their encounter with the pervert some background knowledge. The Marvel at the opening of this story balances the pervert at its closing. As mentioned, most recent interpreters of sadism and masochism conclude that exposure to such literature might predispose children toward
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perversity as readily as the actual experience of beating. Gibson notes that: "[blot11 Krafft-Ebing and Freud had patients who claimed that their libido had first been aroused at an early age by reading about the whipping of Negro slaves in Uncle Tom's Cabin." He believes that they were most likely to have been affected by the passage in which Beecher Stowe describes the arrangements made to send Rosa to a whipping house for the infliction of 15 lashes: Miss Ophelia well knew tllat it was the universal custom to send women and young girls to whipping l~ouses,to the hands of the lowest of menmen vile enough to make this their profession-there to be subjected to brutal exposure and shameful correction. She had lznown it before; but hitherto she had never realized it, till she saw the slender form of Rosa almost convulsed with distress. A11 the honest blood of womanhood, the strong New England blood of libert!; flushed to her cheeks, and throbbed bitterly in her indignant heart.46
As we see in "Cyclops," descriptions of the oppression of blacks in America are available in the titillating magazine through which Terry the barman searches for "spicy bits.""' (U., p. 426) "Cyclops" is preoccupied with sanctioned and ritualized cruelty and violence. There is the letter from the hangman, descriptions of a boxing match and an execution, and the discussion of naval flagellation. Barney I
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not technically abolished."49 As a consequence, the birching of the buttocks, a punishment more directly related to both shame and sexuality, was increased. In 1900, 315 birchings were inflicted on naval cadets, all of which were administered in public.50 In 1904, Vice-Admiral Penrose entered into debate with George Bernard Shaw in the columns of T h e Times on the subject of birching in the Royal N a ~ y . 5Shaw ~ had often spoken out against corporal punishment before this. In 1 8 9 7 , he wrote that corporal punishment: is capable of being used as a sport, a debauch, masquerading as a deterrent or as 'justice.' There is a flagellation neurosis, well known to psychiatrists and some less reputable persons. A public flogging will always draw a crowd; and there will be in that crowd plenty of manifestations of a horrible passional ecstasy in the spectacle of laceration and suffering from ~11ic11 even the most self-restrained and secretive person who can prevail on himself to be present will not be wholly free.52
In 1906, the summary inflictions of corporal punishment were abolished in the Navy and the cane was substituted for the birch. Furthermore, public beatings were no longer allowed. Bernard Shaw goaded Vice Admiral C.C. Penrose Fitzgerald in T h e Times, and the latter's responses, Gibson comments, make particularly sickly reading: M r Bernard Shaw then treats your readers to some blood-curdling details about a 'flagellant epidemic,' and 'official executioner,' 'physical torture,' 'the flaying of the unfortunate wretch's bare breech,' and a heap more nauseous cant of a similar description. As if British youths had not been birched and caned from time immemorial, not only at public schools, but elsewhere; and yet the race has not turned out badly on the w11ole.sj
After the abolition of the birch from the navy, however, it became clear "that an excessive number of canings were now being meted out to cadets."54 Joyce would have been familiar with many first-hand descriptions of the cruel ceremony of naval flagellation such as the following from T h e H u m a n itarian of January 1905: Another (I forget his offense) would utter no sound. Towards the completion of the number of strokes the corporal began to be anxious for his reputation, so he resorted to the unfair and terrible upward stroke, but his aim was not true. The poor fellow gave a yell which I shall never forget, and fainted at once. Your readers must co~ljectured a t had happened. Until he had been surgically examined, there was some anxiety, but d e n it was ltnown that no permanent injury had been inflicted the matter became one for jest among those sufficiently lost to all sense of decency and humanity. "5'
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11 6 And this, from the March issue of 1905:
The most degrading and truly demoralizing chastise~nentis, however, the birch. The offender is strapped hand and foot, in this case, over the bitts of the breech of a small gun, his trousers are allowed to fall below the knees. A broad canvas is passed around the middle of his bod!; and his clothing is strapped up by this means, leaving thighs and buttocks perfectly nude. The same preliminaries are gone through as in caning, and the stroltes are deliberately delivered on the bare flesh, not in rapid succession, but with a slight pause between each strolte, malting the torture and agony of as lengthy a duration as possible. With each strolte the flesh is seen to turn red, blue, and black, with bruising; after six or eight stroltes the sltin usually breaks, and copious streams of blood trickle down the unhappy victim's legs; at the twelfth strolte, a halt is called, and a fresh corporal with a fresh birch supersedes the first, and the boy is allowed to drink water, which is always provided. The officer orders, 'Carry on the punish~nent,'and the second instalment is laid 011; splinters of broken birch wet with blood wl~izzand fly in all directions, and not infrequently the exuding excrement of the sufferer goes to make up one of the most revolting and inhuman spectacles that can be imagined-it can hardly be described. Often he swoons, and has to be supplied with restoratives before he can be half led, half carried, to the sick berth below.56
In "Cyclops," we have the following description of Naval discipline: So he starts telling us about corporal punishment and about the crew of tars and officers and rearadmirals drawn up in cocked hats and the parson with his protestant bible to witness punishment and a young lad brought out, howling for his ma, and they tie him down to the buttend of a gun [ . . . . ] Then he was telling us the master at arms comes along with a long cane and he draws out and he flogs the bloody backside off of the poor lad till he yells meila murder. (U., pp. 426-7)
As mentioned, Bloom's contribution to this discussion is somewhat uncharacteristic. The only explanation seems to be that Bloom is attempting to impel the argument, or add blood to it, so that he may indulge in that "passional ecstasy" of which Shaw considers nobody to be free. Here, Bloom is engaged in more fieldwork, gathering items with which to feed his perversity, and give life to his dream. Victorian and Edwardian newspapers also filled their columns with salacious details of brothel scandals. Gibson recounts that although some brothels catered specifically for flagellants, all brothels would have been able to satisfy this special interest if required. Bloom's vision of Bello may be drawn in part from newspaper descriptions of flagellant brothel madams. Mrs Theresa Berkley, described below, would seem an appropriate model:
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Her supply of birch was extensive, and kept in water, so that it was always green and pliant: she had shafts with a dozen whip thongs on each of them; a dozen different sizes of cat-o'nine tails, some with needle points worked into them; various lzinds of thin bending canes; leather straps like coach traces; battledoors, made of thick sole-leather, with inch nails run through to docket, and currycomb tough hides rendered callous by many years flagellation. Holly brushes, furze brushes; a prickly evergreen, called butchers bush; and during the summer, glass and China vases, filled with a constant supply of green nettles, with which she often restored the dead to life. Thus, a t her shop, whoever went there with plenty of money, could be birched, d i p p e d , fustigated, scoured, needle-pricked, half-hung, hollybrushed, furze-brushed, butcher-brushed, stinging-nettled, curry-combed, phleboto~nised,and tortured till he had a belly full.X7 In 1904, Sophia Mable Pearse was charged with running a flagellant brothel. Newspaper reports reveal that police found: "a large arm-chair, with brass rings fixed to the top of the frame. In a wardrobe he found two birches and several wrist and ankle straps, which could be fixed to the chair. . ." ("Raid on A Mansion," Daily Telegraph, 28 July 1904).58 In "Circe," Bella protests: "This isn't a brothel. A ten shilling house" (U., p. 684). Similar nominative obfuscation was apparent in the euphemistic appellations ascribed to flagellant brothels. For example, "The Balneopathic Institution for the treatment of rheumatism, gout, sciatica, and neuralgia, by dry hot-air baths, massage and discipline, etc." featured in a famous 1898 case at Marlebone Police court.59 Letters to the Editor pages of Victorian and Edwardian newspapers were filled with the flagellant message. One type of these letters sought to disabuse people of the notion that girls were not whipped at school. O n the surface, these may be read as part of the legitimate anti-corporal punishment campaign, but in fact they were often barely veiled pornography. Bloom himself keeps "a press cutting from an English weekly periodical Modern Society, subject corporal punishment in girls' schools," as part of the secret cache in his top drawer (U., p. 849). These letters also discussed methods and the need for corporal punishment. Again, they are imbued with pornographic intent, as were many of the letters purportedly written against indelicate whipping. The advertisements carried by newspapers as "classifieds" also added to the ubiquity of the flagellant message. Gibson notes that a Mrs Clapp advertised birch rods in the Church Times in 1889 (p.58).60 In the 1880s, Town Talk ran the following: THE ROD-Ladies resident in London interested in the above subject are invited to co~nmunicatewith L.J., 2 Vigo Street, Regent Street, when we will be happy to arrange an interview. (14 April 1883)
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118 TO LADIES-Lad!
wanted to teach French. Birching necessarj. Address Z.Z., care of Mr W. Polden, 18 Yorlz Road, S.E." (21 April 1883)G1
These "classifieds" are more explicit than most. Typically they were couched in more euphemistic terms. They either directly or indirectly referred to pedagogy or moral instruction. In "Lestrygonians," we see that Bloom has recognized and utilized the coded language of the personal ad: "He passed the Irish Times. There might be other answers lying there. Like to answer them all. Good system for criminals. Code [ . . . . ] Wanted smart lady typist to aid gentleman in literary work" (U., p. 202). Bloom's reference to criminality and code, followed by the wording of his ad, suggests that he attempted to convey a veiled message. After recalling the wording of his ad, Bloom thinks "I called you naughty darling because I do not like that other world," recalling Martha's most recent correspondence. The wording of Martha's correspondence, with its reference to punishment, suggests that she too understands the coded meaning of "literary gentleman." Again, sadism and masochism are at home within the realm of the literary. Bloom is in the tradition of Masoch, who sought to satisfy his perverse desires partly through the medium of correspondence columns. Bloom sees the titillatory potential of advertising. His idea for an ad in which two smartly dressed girls sit in an illuminated showcart writing has clear voyeuristic implications (U., p. 800). Furthermore, it provides him with a conflation of the feminine and the literary, and through this, the pedagogical. This may seem like Bloom's desire to publicly demonstrate his own infidelity, as a response to Molly's infidelity. In envisioning these girls, Bloom may be seeing women responding to his correspondence. It is not, however, a part of Bloom's sexual disposition to be vindictive. In each of his real or imagined infidelities he emphasizes that he is a cuckold, and his desire, in fact, is focussed upon this. It is more likely that, like Richard in Exiles, the erotic charge that Bloom gets from the image of these women writing is predicated on the secret. He may wonder who they are writing to, and muse upon the inner lives of these girls that are distinct from his.
COWBOYS AND INDIANS It is easy, however, to overemphasize the literary natures of sadism and masochism, and so dismiss as mere fantasy what truths these perversities might reveal. Even if children are not exposed to flagellation, or to literary representations of flagellation, they will tend to equate violence and sexuality of their own accords. "An Encounter," for instance, is about the awakening of sexuality, not only in the witnessing of the pervert, and in the reading books and magazines, but also in the games of cowboys and Indians. The Novicks note that at a certain stage children "form their concepts of relationships in terms of power and control." Chasing, catching, hitting and
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controlling are means of discharging aggressive and hostile impulses during the anal phase. They note that: "It is via the sadistic theory of intercourse that the beating becomes sexualized. At the phallic stage both boys and girls were seen playing hitting games or chasing and catching games, all accompanied by intense sexual excitement."62 It may be the case, however, that the sadistic theory of intercourse held by children-and by the sadists and masochists who become fixated at the stage of phallic beating-is not a inisperception, but a clearer vision of sexuality. Altl~ougl~ children initially alternate between passive and active roles in these beating games, eventually girls begin to withdraw from these games, and boys begin to resist assuming the passive role: With the awareness of the differences between the sexes, being beaten acquires a further meaning. Form the anal phase it carries the meaning of punishment and loss of love, from the early phallic phase it comes to represent parental intercourse, and, at this point, with the differentiation between the sexes, it represents castration and the passive feminine position in intercourse. Here we regularly find a divergence between boys and girls. Boys begin to struggle against passive wishes and the wish to be beaten.63
After the aggressive beating wish becomes sexualized, and thus more subject to social approbation, children tend to replace beating games with wish fulfilling masturbatory fantasies involving beating or derivatives of beating. Rousseau tells us that soon after becoming fixated by the sexual element of beating, he began to indulge in beating games with a little girl: I had several meetings, brief but lively, with a certain little Mademoiselle Goton, in which she deigned to play the schoolmistress, and that was all; but this all, wl~ichwas really all for me, seemed to me the height of happiness [ . . . . ] to my great regret, my secret was discovered, or not so well kept 011the part of my little schoolmistress as on my own: we were soon separated: and, some time afterwards, on my return to Geneva, while passing through Coutance, I heard some little girls cry, in an undertone, 'Goton tictac Rousseau!' [ . . . . ] She took the greatest liberties with me, but never allowed me to take any with l1er.64
Stanislaus recalled (for William Henry, the rector of Belvedere) that when Joyce was fourteen he had for a period of time indulged in beating games with a twenty year old girl who worked as a servant for his family. They sometimes chased one another around, and took turns at catching and spanking one another. Although we do not have much to go on in determining what happened between Eileen and Stephen, it is possible that they engaged in chasing games, or games of sexual experimentation. What happens after Eileen puts
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her hand in Stephen's pocket, and then runs away laughing? Does he chase after her? Does he catch her, and if so, what does he do? Does Dante witness this? Eileen's hand looks back to the money in the boy's pocket in "Araby," and forward to Bloom's hand in his own pocket in "Nausicaa." OBSESSION AND
REPETITION: CONJURING
By all accounts, the first emissions of masochists are accompanied by masochistic fantasies. From this point on, masochism becomes a fixation of such power that the subject can never again be sexually aroused unless this arousal is accompanied by the masochistic fantasy, whether acted out or not. All masochists detest this situation, but are unable to change it. Interpreters seem to agree that once this fixation is established usurpation of the sexual drive is total. (This is not to say, however, that people who are not fixated upon masochism cannot occasionally indulge in masochistic fantasy.) Almost all analysts have thrown up their hands in despair of trying to interpret or to cure this mania. True masochism is not a hobby, or a wandering interest, but a total and irreversible reworking of the sexual urges: once a masochist always a masochist. For this reason, Bloom's masochism is much more than a literary embellishment: it is an intrinsic part of his psyche. Obsession and repetition are central to Reik's account of masochism, and to Deleuze's accounts of both masochism and sadism. Although he does not stress the point, in Reik's argument obsession and repetition must be the means through which the masochist postpones end pleasure, and prolongs a specific rhythm of arousal. The masochist is not seeking release, or pleasure, but rather the perpetuation and intensification of this rhythm. Obsession and repetition must also account for the means by which the Reikean and the Deleuzian masochists suspend the real in order to give space to the fantasy. For Deleuze, the desexualization itself becomes the object for resexualization. In Stephen's desexualization, he is obsessed with escaping from body, through flight. The obsessive quality of his religious self-mortification is obvious. In each of his self-mortifications, he is attempting to deny the body. To elude sensations of dread, and falling-abjection-the source of which is as perpetual as gravity, he must perpetually and obsessively reinstate his distance and distinction from body, his flight. To do this, he makes a paranoiac identification with the institution that has installed his dread, and uses its tools to elude abjection. These tools-(incantatory) recitations, prayers, and prolongations of discomfort-are innately obsessive and repetitive, because they act against the undiminishing gravitational pull of the body. Even when Stephen believes he has eluded the church, his static theory in Portrait is merely another means by which he may justify the perpetuation of his resistance to the kinetic, bodily forces of loathing and desire. The desexualization, the suspension between the desire to approach and the prohibition on approach, will by its nature reveal itself as repetition.
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This repetition is the object of resexualization. In sadism and masochism, "repetition runs wild and becomes independent of all previous pleasure. It has itself become an idea [in sadism] or an ideal [in masochism]." Pleasure is now secondary to repetition, as a result of the resexualization of the desexualization. "Eros is desexualized and humiliated for the sake of a resexualized Thanatos." Desexualization "consolidates repetition at the opposite pole to pleasure."6' The masturbator is obsessed with masturbatory icons, and with engineering tensions between them. Fetishes are pulled into orbit around a zone of conjuring, and drawn down into this zone, to imaginatively embody the ideal ego. The zone of conjuring is charged by obsession. Obsession describes being drawn by the quality of magnetism possessed by this zone of conjuring, and repetition describes the means by which one remains in orbit around this zone. The sadist wants to reiterate the negation of desire, as it is reified, in the return of the repressed, on the body of the desired. The persistent return of the repressed means that this negation will need to be continually and obsessively repeated. This is the sadist's means of flying, of postponing the death of an intense emotional trend in the purity of one pole or the other. Although he wants to kill the desired object, the predominant urge is the urge to repetition that the death instinct has invested in his sadism through the desexualization. This wins out over pleasure, and compels him to struggle obsessively to resist the pleasure that killing would entail, by keeping the woundings short of being mortal, cutting into only symbols of abjection, of flesh, so that he may prolong this flight, this escape from the abjection of Eros. For the masochist, obsession entails an imaginative disavowal of the external, a suspension of the real, which opens space in which the ideal may be summoned. In Joyce, an instance of such obsessive suspension, that may or may not be considered masturbatory, is in the maudlin adorations of the boy in "Araby": "I pressed the palms of my hands together until they trembled, murmuring: '0love! 0 love!' many times" (Dub., p. 18). To prolong his vision of the ideal, he must prolong the suspension of the real: "At night in my bedroom and by day in the classroom her image came between me and the page I strove to read" (Dub., p. 19). He is trying to replace the real with the ideal, to make real the ideal. The sense in which the final impossibility of this endeavor must be supplemented by a perpetual renewal of effort, also accounts for the repetitive nature of masochistic arousal. In the tortured obsessiveness of Stephen gazing at pornography "for hours" (Port, p.107), it is clear that he is, paradoxically, trying to prolong or freeze desire, despite the obvious pain that this entails. In "Ithaca," in the list of the contents of Bloom's drawer, immediately before mention of pornographic photographs, there is reference to a magnifying glass (U., p. 850). Clearly Bloom studies these photographs obsessively with this magnifying glass. It is this obsessiveness that precludes the Joycean hero from access to
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spontaneous caress. Molly notes that Bloom "never knew how to embrace well" (U., p. 884). The duration of Stephen's periods of engrossment in pornography, and more so Bloom's magnifying glass, suggest a Brobdignagian focus of obsession, an obsession with returning to body. This obsession frantically redeploys abjection, by drawing it into his own body, and glorifying the body of the desired, that is thereby healed of the wound. Original sexuality may be imagined to be spontaneous, bodily, and free from abjection. Once socialized, however, the polymorphously perverse becomes the paradoxically perverse. Desexualization forces the being to flee the body and pleasure, from fear of abjection and, through a continual repetition of the suspension of the real, substitutes obsession for spontaneity. Resexualization entails a return to the body, a fall, but the return must be obsessive, and must retrace the path of its desexualization, as it is marked by its exile. Bloom cannot hug well, cannot engage in spontaneous caress, because in his return, the traits of desexualization are retained, as an obsessiveness that might be defined as worship. He is never simply free to take. When the inasturbator begins to actively suspend the real, and impose the fantasy on the real in the manipulation of the scene, the repetitive nature of his desexualization manifests itself as a compulsion to manipulate. It is when the masochist begins to manipulate the scene that the question of the pervasiveness of sexual energy seems most important, and also most undeterminable. It is here that the sexual begins to leak or radiate into what is normally not considered sexual, and permeates all investments with sexuality. This obsessive manipulation is still masturbatory, but there is a much greater emphasis placed on prolongation. This is a part of the paradox by which sublimated energy both is and is not desexualized. Sexual desire is barely hidden in the voyeuristic manipulations of the boy in "Araby": "Every morning I lay on the floor in the parlour watching her door. The blind was pulled down within an inch of the sash so that I could not be seen. [As he follows her] I kept her brown figure always in my eye" (Dub., p. 18). Richard, in Exiles, betrays the obsessive and sexual nature of his project to be cuckolded when, like the boy in "Araby" thinking ''0 love! 0 love!" (Dub., p. 19), he rubs his hands together while interrogating Bertha about what passed between Robert and her. Molly recognizes the obsessive and sexual nature of Bloom's manipulation of his own cuckolding: "only hed do a thing like that all the same on account of me and Boylan thats why he did it Im certain the way he plots and plans everything out" (U., p. 910). The boy's devotion in "Araby," Stephen's obsession with Mercedes, his vision of the rose, the connection between the birdgirl and Gerty, and-as Buck points out-Stephen's Shakespeare theory, all suggest that masturbatory obsession is closely related to the creative impulse. The obsessive nature of Stephen's creativity is obvious. His friends complain of his persistence in engaging them in streams of dialectics. They resent in him what the boy in "The Sisters" appreciates in Flynn. When Stephen walks to college, he initiates a specific train of thought at specific points on his journey (Port., pp.
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154-5). In Stephen Hero, he meanders endlessly and aimlessly around the city, composing his paper in his head. His means of composition are as concentrated, and rigid, as are his religious self-mortifications in Portmit. Where once he accumulated hours and minutes of grace, now he obsessively gathers a "word-horde." Pound noted that Joyce had "a power of concentration and absorption passing Yeats' " (J.J., p. 479). In "Oxen of the Sun," Stephen works through the same ideas, with the same words that he has been working them all day. His obsessiveness betrays a predominance of the inner world over the outer. Ellmanil notes that: "The sculptor August Suter was rather irritated to see how Joyce seemed to stage-manage conversations as if to use his friends as subjects for experiments" (J.J., p. 438). The repetitiveness of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake-their patterns of convection-reveals an obsessive "fascination for what's difficult."66 In his letters, Joyce made it clear that for him composition was a painful process. His obsessiveness does not serve pleasure, but repetition itself, through an accumulated complexity that demands prolonged engrossment. Although he complained that the composition of Finnegans Wake was agonizing, he persisted in its composition, in full realization that its obsessive disintegration of differentiation and signification would appear repetitive, and induce boredom. As Pound said, "nothing short of divine inspiration or a cure for the clap could justify this circumambient peripherization." Nora commented that while he wrote Finnegans Wake Joyce would laugh loudly to himself in the other room.67 He had become like Flynn, laughing alone in the confessional. There is a clear linkage in Joyce between the obsessive, the masturbatory and the artistic. In one of Freud's attempts to account for the death instinct, for that which is "beyond the pleasure principle," he refers to destiny repetition, or the compulsion to repeat: we have come across people all of whose human relationships have the same outcome [ . . . ] the man whose friendships all end in betrayal by his friend [ . . . ] the lover each of whose love affairs with a woman passes through the same phases and reaches the same conclusion. This 'perpetual recurrence of the same thing' [suggests] that there really does exist in the mind a compulsion to repeat wl~ichoverrides the pleasure principle.68
In Stephen's Shakespeare theory, he draws a cluster in which destiny repetition and the sexual account for Shakespeare's creativity. Shakespeare writes because, once sexually overborne by a woman, and once cuckolded, "he will never be a victor in his own eyes after nor play victoriously the game of laugh and lie down" (U., p. 251). Writing is a symptom of love lost, and the reiteration, or tautology of this loss. It is hard to understand Stephen's inordinate interest in Shakespeare's cuckolding, without some reference to Bloom. Again, there is a link between Bloom's ten years of abstinence, and the ten years that Stephen intends to take to write a novel.
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In developing the notion of repetition toward the conception of the death instinct in "Beyond the Pleasure Principle," Freud proposes that organisms defend themselves by means of a bound and differentiated exterior layer, through which stimuli are filtered.@ That this armor is formed by the seizure of a portion of the living organism in static form, leads Freud to conclude that the organism is defended by a layer of its own death. When a wound breaches this layer of death, a portion of the unbound, still flowing, and so still living organism floods the breach and seals it by dying itself, by repeating the original erection of the wall. If an external threat appears to be too great for the protective layer, the organism defends itself by identifying with this threat. Freud refers to the acknowledgement of such a danger as fear, and the means by which the organism prepares for this threat, by giving over a portion of itself to identification with this threat, as anxiety. This description of the paranoiac identification through the metaphor of the coagulation of blood helps explain the sense in which the structure and ceremony of masochistic and sadistic ritual secures space in which labile fantasy may flow. The organism has no defense against internal threat-that is, against the pressure of its own impulses resisting repression by the paranoiac identification-and so it binds this internal threat in a static image. It then projects this image onto an external object, in order that he may utilize his protective outer layer as defense against this threat. This is the return of the repressed. It is this double movement, this identification with an oppressive threat, necessitating a projection of a portion of the self, which accounts for sadism. Fright differs from fear, in that the threat is sudden and unexpected, and the organism has no time to build a defense through anxiety, through paranoiac identification with the peril. Early in Portrait, Stephen seems unprepared for the threats and the violence that he meets. He considers the logic of punishment to be "queer"; he does not understand why he is being compelled to apologize, or why boys should be flogged. He is perhaps unprepared for the violence he meets, because he identifies more with the mother than with prohibition. The paradox by which the sadist rather than the masochist suffers from a particularly strong conscience, is related to the tempting suggestion that the masochist is not subjected to physical punishment in the home as much as is the sadist. Before Clongowes, Stephen seems to lead a relatively lackadaisical and guilt free life. Although Dante threatens him, we are unsure whether this is accompanied by a physical attack. As already mentioned, Reik suggests that threats which are not followed by actual punishment direct the youth toward masochism.70 The threat itself implants as an obsessive and masturbatory fascination for the subject of punishment, which is stronger than that experienced by those who have been beaten, and for whom there is no mystery. The distinction between the fear of an identifiable threat and sudden fright, between building a defense either before or after the threat, may be at the source of the distinction between masochism and sadism. Freud uses traumatic neurosis as an example of the defense against fright. In traumatic
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neurosis, for example shell shock, the defense must be built after the wounding. Rather than making a paranoiac identification with the threat, the victim binds the wound by re-living it, by repeating it obsessively. He glorifies the wound, and identifies with the wounded body. Leo Bersani describes both of these means of defense as the "shattering" of the self, and as desexualization. He considers art to be a method of reiterating the original shattering of the self; a masochistic tautology. After Dante threatens Stephen, he converts the admonition into: Pzlll out hzs eyes, Apologzse, Apologzse, Pzlll out hzs ej3es. Apologzse, Pzlll out hzs ej3es, Pzlll out hzs ej3es, Apologzse." (Port., p. 20)
Drawing upon Freud's attempts at explaining the death instinct through repetition, Bersani proposes that art, or a certain type of art, portrays the repetition of thought being developed simply so that it may be cancelled out and rebuilt. In this sense, art reiterates the way in which the being defends itself by giving a portion of itself over to death. At the outset of his argument in The Freudian Body, Bersani refers to Moran, the hero in the second part of Beckett's Molloy: "during his long crawl home [ . . . ] he was bizarrely preoccupied with such theological questions as: 'Did Mary conceive through the ear, as Augustine and Adobard assert?' 'Is one to approve of the Italian cobbler Lovat who, having cut off his testicles, crucified himself?' "72 Bersani considers the mind in Beckett to expel from the body-like the anus-anonymous and limitless substances that the body both produces and treats like waste. "Thought, far from providing a guarantee of being in this radically non-Cartesian world, is the excrement of being."73 A similarly obsessive impulse to repetitively set up thought only so that it may be cancelled out, might be seen in Father Flynn: Sometimes he had amused himself by putting difficult questions to me, aslting me what one should do in certain circumstances or whether such and such sins were mortal or venial or only imperfections. His questions showed me how complex and mysterious were certain institutions of the Church which I had always regarded as the simplest acts. (Dub., p. 5)
It is significant that Flynn is here amusing himself, rather than teaching the boy. The links between the two primary meanings of the perverse in Joyce-
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the religious heretic and the sexual pervert-are made clear in the parallels between Flynn and the pervert in "An Encounter." The most important of the many parallels between them is their obsessiveness. Flynn heralds Joyce's project of deconstructing the thought that "supersaturates" his mind, from within its own terms, through an artistic and obsessive application of the paradoxically perverse. When the birdgirl is the only viable sexual object, sexual desire must move into the world she inhabits: the imagination. Once masturbation has established a toehold for imaginative lust in the external world, however, there follows an effort to make the fantasy real, to drag the ideal into immanence. Stephen, walking the streets with the repetitive persistence of a masturbator magnetized by the focus of his desire, longs to see Mercedes manifest herself in the real world (Port., pp. 66-7). Rousseau, jutting his buttocks toward a pack of shocked girls, is very busy in his mind. It is such frantic traversing of the tension between the real and the ideal that will eventually force the birdgirl to manifest herself as Gerty. The masturbator, however, is spoiled by the sovereignty of the imagination, and therefore unlikely to encounter in the real world an object of desire that will approximate his perverse ideal, until he has discovered how to apply his imagination to cunning, to manipulating the scene. His early efforts to make the ideal real are therefore exclusively imaginative: he strives merely to make the ideal seem real. To do this, he causes details to converge upon the magnetic focal point of his desire. A vampire, he extracts details from the world without as actual, to inhabit his world within as possible. The Novicks note that the fixed beating fantasy differs from the typical temporary beating fantasy, because in the fixed beating fantasy the subject draws the imagined beaters from people with whom he is acquainted.74 He craftily implicates others in his fantasy. The masochist dwells on realistic details, screening them for their power to excite and to convince, addressing in turn each of his senses, until the fantasy begins to seem real. He sifts through his stolen images, producing a flow of desire, of useless dreams. The masochist's self sufficiency is paradoxical, however, because it is founded upon an initial denial, or shattering. It is also questionable, because the exact relation between his desire and objects from beyond the self is never clear. If an external object is required, then masturbation is an ascetic starvation, a disembodying fast, an effort to slip from immanence. Reik stresses that, for the masochist, in the beginning there is no action, only phnntasy.7.j The fantasy is also crucial to Deleuze's interpretation of masochism. The inasocl~isticmasturbator does need an awareness of others beyond himself, but he intensifies and emphasizes the sense of distance between himself and these others, by contrasting the sodality of these others to his own isolation and self-sufficiency, and by translating his self-sufficiency as the untouchability of the other. Ultimately, he should feel that he is faced by
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a community that is united in scorning him. He cannot desire in a void, and he needs to set himself in some real or imagined relation to others, but their distance from him, and their union with each other, defines the relation that he craves with these others. His lust becomes a complex equation of opposition, an alchemy of inversion. He devises rituals that represent the opposition of his desires to the prohibitions set against them. His exploration of these dualities, and his sense that what is beyond bounds is mysterious and sacred, lead him to expound a new religion, a religion of eroticism: "the 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."76 (Emphasis added)
In Fearful Symmetry, the Novicks conclude that masochism is the result of a premature disruption of the condition of infantile omnipotence, followed by a failure of the child to embrace the reality principle, or a failure of reality itself. They argue that the children in their study who developed masochistic traits turned to pathological solutions as a means of adapting to a situation in which they felt overly dependant on their mothers, and an inability to exert any control over their social realms.77 They deduced that both physical and mental factors on the part of both the mother and the child had a bearing on the latter's inability to maintain a condition of infantile omnipotence. When our patients were infants, their inborn capacities to elicit needed responses were often ineffectual. All the ~nasochisticcases were intermittently loved and cared for, but in a way wl~ichundermined confidence in their ability to evoke response. Their wide-eyed gaze was not met by a mother's adoring, joyful look but by a blank, depressed deadness. Their mothers smiled only when they emerged from their depressed or anxious state and felt like smiling, not in response to the child's smile. The only constant in their unpredictable lives was the experience of the range of dysphoric feelings, and so, as Glenn (1984) and Valenstein (1973) have noted, these patients came to associate their mothers with pain. As olle patient said, "Unhappiness is the smell of home."'8
When the condition of infantile omnipotence is disrupted too early, the child may initially supplement this loss by short-term measures, such as pulling its hair and throwing tantrums in efforts to draw attention. Eventually, these palliative measures are superseded by a more entrenched and enduring system of magical thinking, or magical omnipotence. There are significant differences between infantile omnipotence and magical omnipotence.
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The happ!; contented infant, safe in mother's arms and surrounded by adoring adults, is said to be in a state of infantile omnipotence, a happy delusion that he is the center of the universe with the power to make everyone meet all his needs. But when we refer to fantasies of omnipotence in our patients we d o not mean such blissful daydreams; rather, these are hostile fantasies of total control over others (Kernberg 1988, Panel 1990, Panel 1991b), relentless denial of and refusal to accept reality constraints."'9
The end of infantile omnipotence is predicated upon the child's successful adoption of the reality principle. Should reality be seen to fail in the child's eyes, infantile omnipotence will mutate into the condition of magical omnipotence. This substitution is perpetuated by the child's perception that each successful engagement with reality is a result of his adoption of magical thinking. By school going age, it is all but impossible for the child to relinquish this means of thinking. According to the dynamics of this magical mode of thinking, escalating self-destructive behavior pays for success in reality. The price of maintaining a fantasized self is paid for by a punishment of the real self. Throughout all of this, one of the most important agents of the reality principle, namely, the father, is absent or disinterested. The failure of the child to accept the reality principle is closely related to his failure to establish a superego, and to identify with the father in particular. "This ego defect is an important factor in the characteristically high level of anxiety in masochistic patients."80 As an alternative to the superego and the reality principle, the child turns to the ideal ego and magical thinking. The Novicks summarize magical thinking as follows: [The child begins] to use the experience of helpless rage and pain magically to predict and control their chaotic experiences. The failure of realityoriented competence to effect empathic attunemem forced the child into an imaginary world where safet!; attachment, and omnipotent control were magically associated with pain.8'
The Novicks balance the negative aspects of magical thinking and sadomasochism against its apparent benefits. It prevents a complete withdrawal from objects to a state Krystal (1988) terms alexithymia, which the patients often describe as "being dead."82 Through sadomasochism, the subject at least retains some sort of a sense that he may influence events, and so does not sink into absolute apathy and helplessness. This in turn serves as a link to the social world, albeit on its own intransigent terms. In what ways is this type of thinking magical? Magic entails a Platonic, rather than an Aristotelian worldview: truth is perceived to reside not in the
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weight and measure of things, but in the ideas behind them. Magic is a means of influencing things remotely, through the substrata of idea, by manipulating metaphors for these things. The Kwakiutl cannibal ritual of Canada's west coast is typical of magical thinking. This ritual is held in midwinter, and in it the son of the chief becomes the cannibal monster, the old woman of the woods. He does not simply dress as her, and act as her, but prepares himself for weeks to embody her: through fasting and ritualistic deprivations, he prepares himself for vision. At the highpoint of the ceremony, the chief's son rushes into the dancing, singing members of his tribe, and attempts to eat them. They beat and kick him away, but he persists, until they throw toward him the body of his most recently deceased next of kin. He eats this until he vomits into a bowl provided for the purpose. This bowl and its contents are kept as a holy relic throughout the coming year, as maggots and flies devour its contents, eventually leaving it all but empty, and needing to be filled again, to end another winter. The masochist also pushes winter to its deepest point, perhaps also in hopes of ending it. This ritual acts as a small tuning fork tapped to produce a sympathetic resonance in the greater tuning fork of the universe. In winter, the world is seen to be devouring itself, and the Kwakiutl reproduce this state of affairs, but write into it a way out of the paradox, by demonstrating how small lives might begin in the waste of death. Voodoo dolls and holistic medicine also work through the principles of metaphor. Throughout history, change has come about through the interaction of scientific, religious and magical thinking. It might be easy to think that magical thinking has ceased to be of relevance to us, but this may be because it has become meek in its concessions to the pre-eminence of science. N o matter how much psycl~oanalystsmight wish to think that they are scientists, magical thinking is inherent in the psychoanalytic project. Furthermore, magical thinking has taken the low ground, in advertising and propaganda. In this, however, it still retains an insidious power. We cannot say that magic has no power, for although it creates nothing that we can touch, it creates our vision of the world. Magic may not influence things remotely through metaphor, but it does influence minds remotely through metaphor. Whether he recognizes it or not, it is through magic that Stephen intends to forge the conscience of his race. Cotter, with dogmas and clichks, and the unthinking obedience that upholds authority, speaks for the reality principle, while Flynn, with his mysteries, and his probing interrogations of the depths of tradition, intimates an alternative to that solution. Cotter advises the boy to get out more, and suggests that privacy is unhealthy. (Dub., p. 4). When the uncle, who conspires with Cotter in warding the boy away from Flynn, refers to the boy as "that Rosicrucian" (Dub., p. 4), it is suggested that-in the forbidden state of
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privacy-quest, ritual, and the magic of the imagination may uncover a "Secret Rose,"83 a compensatory and self conjured femininity: the perverse ideal. For the father, this is a very thorny rose, which emblematizes a delusory state.
The fetish and transvestism play important roles in the magic of the masochist. The fetish is incorporated into the masturbatory act in an attempt to externalize, or reify the perverse ideal, to give it an apparent palpability. The fetish serves as a preliminary appeasement of such need as that expressed by Stephen in "Proteus": "I am lonely here [ . . . . ] Touch, touch me" (U., p. 61). It is intended to staunch the wound that is splitting body and soul, and to quiet the soul crying out for communion. It leads him toward return, facilitating his fall into body and sea. The transcendence of the birdgirl, and the incorporeal nature of the fantasy, make him long to substantiate his object of desire. He needs to anchor his lust in reality, and the fetish is the most accessible external object. Through the fetish, he may continue to fool the forces of prohibition, and adopt a seemingly innocuous object of desire. He may then approach this object of desire, aild the forces of his repression are no wiser to his transgression. With the fetish, he furtively traverses the gap between reality and fantasy. In "An Encounter," and in "Araby," the desirability of the female is signified by soft, white hands, and by long, shining hair (Dub., pp. 14,19). This focus upon the hands and the hair of women and girls will appear again and again in Joyce. In Portrait, Stephen does not understand his attraction to Eileen, and so he attributes this attraction to the whiteness of her hands, and to the golden shine of her hair. This focus of his desire, as it is not overtly sexual, initially evades the prohibition of his elders. It is not difficult, then, for him to link the object of his confused adoration to the mysterious, intangible ideas that his elders encourage him to adore. Eileen's hands and her hair serve to anchor the intangible objects of his parents' religious adoration in reality for Stephen. Stephen understands the phrase "Tower of Ivory" in relation to Eileen's hands, and " H o u s e of Gold" in relation to her hair (Port., p. 49). In order to conceive of the sacred, the transcendent, he must draw from life, and work between extremes. To make the ideal seem real, he associates it with the real. He discovers that the ideal must be supplemented by the real, just as, because of prohibition and denial, the real must be supplemented by the ideal. Neither pole can stand alone in purity. By interpreting the sacred through the medium of his profane adoration, he endows the object of his profane adoration with a sense of the sacred. Freud argues that the fetish is established when the child becomes aware of sexual difference, that is, when he first observes that the woman has no penis.84 This observation is too much for the child to bear, as it proves that his fears of castration are well founded. If the mother, or the sister, has been
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castrated, he may be castrated also for his Oedipal designs, or for his failure to control emission. O n noticing that the woman possesses no penis, the child's mind recoils in horror, returning to the object upon which he had focused before his glance strayed to this frightening absence. For this reason, the fetish is often a foot or a boot: May's slipper becomes Bella's hoof. The child has looked at the woman's foot, his eyes have strayed upward, and then recoiled in shock to their starting point at the feet. The foot, or the boot, supplements this absence, glorifies this wound. The fetish is charged with a double meaning. On the one hand, it is a substitute phallus, proclaiming that "it is all right, the woman has a penis, and we are all safe." At the same time, however, it declares the absence of the female penis, saying "look no further, for you will see something that will terrify you." The fetish stands as a wall between the fetishist and the female genitalia. It is the cloud that covers the morning sun for Stephen and Bloom. It is a disavowal of reality, and a retreat into fantasy. Freud notes that the fetishist will invariably be repelled by the female genitalia, and seek to disguise it with the bottom or the breasts. Bloom admires breasts, bottoms and legs, and only ponders the vagina with a sense of sacred awe, not with lust. Although it must be supplemented by an account of the fetish as voodoo talisman, or sacred relic, as a token of metaphorical power, the Freudian account of the fetish as a substitutive phallus, as a glorification of the wounded body, shines an interesting light upon Joycean masochism. When Eileen pushes her hand into Stephen's pocket, and then runs away laughing (Port., p. 49), she is clearly experimenting with sexual difference. It is possible that, given the ferocity of Dante's threats, Stephen too has been making such inquiries, though most likely in a much more passive fashion. By this time, he has established the girl's hands and hair as fetishes. Eileen's hand acts not only as a compensatory phallus, but also as an aggressive phallus, penetrating Stephen's pocket, forcing him into a passive female role; a role that he will maintain. This incident is retranscribed in Bello plunging her arm elbow-deep into Bloom's vagina, and saying: "Here, wet the deck and wipe it round!" (U., p. 651) The Roman law of m a n u s (hand) sanctioned the husband's control over the wife.85 Eileen and Bello use their hands to effect a reversal of power. The woman's hand is a particularly apt fetish for the masochist, as through this fetish, the female may become the active party, and reduce the male to a passive posture. As well, the woman may maintain the distance and indifference of the birdgirl, the Apollonian closure of the virgin, while the male is open to her direction, made a slave to his lust, and forced to whorish emission. He is open desire: she is closed power, driving on his desire. The fetish is active and urging, and it is through the fetish that the masochist may overturn the perception of the virgin as passive and the whore as active. She is the active virgin: he is the passive whore. Both Brenda Maddox and Brown consider the reference to the "Soft soft soft hand" in "Proteus" to be a personal allusion to Nora's presumed
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masturbation of Joyce on their first walk out together to Ringsend, presumably on June 16.86 They base their assumptions upon a letter Joyce wrote to Nora, in which he claimed: "It was not I who first touched you long ago at Ringsend. It was you who slid your hand down down inside my trousers and pulled my shirt softly aside and touched my prick with your long tickling fingers [ . . . ] all the time bending over me and gazing at me out of your quiet saintlike eyes" (S.Ltrs.,p.l82). In Joyce, the woman tends to be on top: there is the nude senorita over the nude torero (U., p. 850), Molly over Mulvy, Molly over Bloom at Howth, Anne stooping to conquer Shakespeare, and the prostitute over Stephen. Boylan, however, bears down on Molly. The paradoxical tensions that are central to Joyce's sexuality may be seen in the contrast between Nora's sexual initiative and her saintlike eyes, and in Joyce's reference to this event as "a sacrament" (Ltrs.I.,p.49). Molly understands and utilizes the fetish. She recalls that, while she sat between Boylan and Bloom, and talked about the shape of women's feet, she "waggled [her] foot." When she walked to the lavatory, she noticed Bloom's, or Boylan's, or more likely both sets of eyes on her feet. She boasts to herself of having "made him spend once with my foot" (U., p. 881). Gerty too makes Bloom "spend" by waggling her foot. The fetish, however, may be viewed not only as a substitutive phallus, but also as a voodoo talisman, containing the essence of the desired object. It is a talismanic piece of the holy body, a sacred relic, his to worship or destroy. Through the use of the fetish, the fetishist attempts to draw his transcendent ideal down into immanence, and also to make a first furtive extension of his lust from his dreams into reality. The pornographic photographs which Stephen hides in his chimney (Port., p. 107), his "fluefoul smut" (F.W., p.183.15), are an example of the fetish as voodoo talisman. It is through the chimney that H.C.E. hears an enticing mingling of the high and low: Issy calling him up to annihilation, and the clatter of pots and pans in the kitchen below. These photographs make Stephen feel less alone with his lust. They demonstrate that desire exists in the world without as well as the world within. The photographed women are representations of women, which he imagines into life, and makes accomplices to his desire. His mind moves around these images as though magnetized, conjuring them into illusory substance. A strange vampire, a night panther preying on anti-matter, he extracts partial objects from these representations, and feeds them through his desiring-machine. He focuses upon points, and inserts probe heads, through which to draw partial objects that will charge and give body to his inner world. He must press this vein deeper and deeper as he becomes addicted to this process. Bloom too possesses such accomplices to his lust, which serve to anchor his desire. He has a photo of Molly in his pocket and, in his drawer, "2 erotic photocards showing: a ) buccal coition between nude senorita (rere presentation, superior position) and nude torero (fore presentation, inferior position): b) anal violation by male religious (fully clothed, eyes abject) of female
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religious (partly clothed, eyes direct)" (U., p. 850). That the torero and the male religious are in these photos as well as the nude seiiorita and the female religious, suggests that Bloom has brought all the players into his fantasy. Bloom also uses women's underpants as fetishes. When advising Budgen about how to approach his explication of Ulysses, Joyce recommended that he treat the topic of women's undergarments with "IMMENSE seriousness, respect, circumspection, historical sense, critical acumen, documentary accuracy, citational erudition and sweet reasonableness" (Ltrs., 111, p. 280). Joyce kept a pair of doll's underpants in his pocket. O n one occasion, he disconcerted a homosexual acquaintance, and demonstrated the power of such a talisman, by putting these underpants over his fingers, and walking them toward this man (J.J., p. 438). When Molly recalls placating Bloom by offering him her doll's underpants, we see that the fetish is charged with a tension between extremes (U., p. 883). That this fetish is underpants, suggests that it represents the immanence and physicality of women. That it is a doll's underpants stresses the fetish as an imaginative token of woman as generic object of desire, the ideal ego resexualized. That Bloom particularly desires for women to give him soiled underpants, further emphasizes the role of the fetish as voodoo talisman. In making a voodoo doll, the shaman incorporates items that have been close to the object of his magic, such as feces, pubic hair, and sweaty bits of clothing. By utilizing such objects, he hopes to imbrue the talisman with the essence of its object. Bloom values soiled underpants as fetishes, because with such underpants he may possess more fully the essence of the desired object in the fetish. The stains of emission, left by the woman who cast off these undergarments, possess the most unadulterated secretion of her being, and represent her physicality, her immanence, and her presence as body. He treats the fetish as a holy thing, and so degrades himself before her lowest point. As when he sleeps with his head at Molly's feet, Bloom's devotion to the fetish is a means of worshipping the lowest point of the desired object. Admiring the fetish is like kissing a saint's toe, his lowest part, his physicality, but this saint is the female patron of desire. This holy item is both the sacred object and the taboo object. It is holy not despite the fact that it is lowly, but because it is lowly, bodily and immanent. The fetish is like the handkerchief given by a lady to her knight. As the fetish serves to anchor the transcendent fantasy, or birdgirl, in reality, the soil on these undergarments serves to further drag the transcendent down into immanence, to embody the ideal ego. The woman who cast off these undergarments is not present, but remembered, and therefore transcendent, an image of mind. These underpants, however, continue to prove that she is more than an image of mind, that she is a reality, and somehow, because of this cast off soil, present and participating in his fantasy. He is here playing with the tension between extremes. The untouchable nymph of whom he dreams, the perverse ideal, is proven immanent and alive by the soil on these underpants, and so the transcendent is made immanent. She,
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like him, is proven to consume more substantial fare than electricity: "We immortals, as you saw today, have not such a place and no hair there either. We are stonecold and pure. We eat electric light" (U., p. 660). The fetish as voodoo talisman serves as an aid in conjuring. Through the possession of the externals, or signifiers of woman, the fetishist hopes that, by moving around the item as though magnetized, and by focusing obsessively upon it, he will conjure or make real the absent woman. The fetish is a detail, a realistic prop, to make the fantasy seem real, to convince, and to prod imagination. The fetishist may continually recharge and embody the imaginary image by interrogating the fetish. He visualizes a transcendent ideal onto a zone of immanence, giving birth to his dream. In possessing the signifiers of femininity, he also questions, however, the rigidity and the depth of sexual difference. He wonders whether he might not make the absent woman real by becoming her.
In Coldness and Cruelty, Deleuze says very little about the aspects of transvestism that are often a part of masochism, perhaps because Sacher-Masoch's eponymous predilection, the topic of his essay, contains little if any transvestism. In James Joyce and Sexuality, Brown refers to the masochistic transvestism in Jacques Desroix's La Gyne'ocratie, as being similar to Joyce's depiction of masochism.87 Although masochistic transvestism is relatively rare in Victorian pornography, today the forced feminization of the "sissy boy" or the male maid is without a doubt the most common genre in masochistic pornography. Masochistic transvestism is at first a further effort to make the absent woman real; it is creative empathy as conjuring. In Masochism and Modern Man, Reik recounts, of a boy who was later to become a masochist, that he: especially enjoyed pronouncing four words and accompanying them with particular gestures and movements of the body. It was the romantic sentence, "The dear, wild man!" He recognized the origin of this exclamation later on. It came from one of the books of his teenage sister. In this book the words were spoken by a young girl who thinks tenderly of an absent man. While exclaiming them she turns away shyly with a blush [ . . . . ] later he pantomimed the scene in front of the mirror, reiterating the sentence aloud and accompanying it with expressive corresponding gestures. He imagined the girl's skirt swinging when she turned.88
Reik recognizes the parodic element of this pantomime, and stresses that this action does not simply betray an innate femininity in the boy. The original motive of this play, Reik suggests, was that the boy "wished that an attractive young girl would have behaved like that while thinking of him." Reik refers to this as the "primary mirror scene," which will be superseded by the
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"advanced mirror scene" of the masochist, who has the woman punish him, to say to her: "this is what I would like to do to you." Reik's mirror scene, like the fetish, works upon the principles of sympathetic magic. In creating the woman in himself, he hopes to convince the universe to imitate his metaphor, and provide the missing woman. In "Scylla and Charbydis," Stephen proposes that the artist, like God, must be "a wife unto himself," an "androgynous angel" (U., p. 274). Stephen's assertion seems to be grounded on three assumptions. According to the first of these assumptions, if the artist is not whole unto himself, if the focus of his desire is external to himself, he will neglect his inner world. Joyce commented to Stanislaus: "how would I write the most perfect love songs of our time if I were in love?" (J.J., p. 62) He must suffer the agony and isolation of his work (in dedication to the ideal ego); this is in order to convince her to move from transcendence (from her absence), and to return (to be embodied). In his writing he tries to convince her to do this, as he tries to win her favor by acts of devotion in which he lowers himself before her. The choice here is between "perfection of the life or of the work."s9 He may choose to court the foul witch in the dry ditch of Araby, or to worship an absence, calling it to return, sacrificing his outer life and devoting himself to painting flattering pictures of her. In flattering her as an elaborate peacock, illuminated by his continence, he beseeches her to appear. The production of creative writing is the production of a love letter addressed to an absence, compensating for the absence of the loved object on all but the page, the zone of conjuring. In the union of the artist and the page, we might see lover and loved one combined, but for the fact that the page is a vortex into which all desire will sink unanswered. According to the second explanation of the artist's androgyny, the creation of the work of art is analogous to a virgin birth. The divine word, or the profane epiphany, inspires, and so impregnates the artist's mind, in a single instant of excitement. The artist carries within himself his internal response to this external stimulus. This is fed by his nurturing intelligence, developing as he thinks it through, until it is ready to be born as a work of art. According to this conception, the artist is androgynous because each artist requires "a womb of one's own": the work of art is the offspring of the "hysterical" self.90 Although the artist's mind is considered to be impregnated in both Stephen's aesthetic theory in Portrait, and his Shakespeare theory in Ulysses, the two theories differ in respect to who or what impregnates the mind. In Portrait, when "Gabriel the seraphim" comes to the virgin womb of the imagination (Port, p.188), Stephen seems to conceive of inspiration in a manner similar to Yeats's conception of the artist drawing images from the Spiritus Mundi. The images enter the mind from an alternate, hidden and transcendent world. Such a conception supports Stephen's perception of the artist as isolated and indifferent. In this conception, however, he does not look beyond the immediately transcendent nature of the ideal ego, to the
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reason for her transcendence; that is, her desexualization. In the Shakespeare theory, the loss or denial of access to an object of desire is at the root of the artist's inspiration and his impulse to create. Although this is a watering down of the Platonic principle, it is not a total defection to Aristotle, because the hopes of the heart are still turned toward what is missing. In his Shakespeare theory, Stephen recognizes the initially immanent nature of that which impregnates the artist's mind. Though Russell objects to Stephen's prying into the private life of a great man (U., p. 241), Anne Hathaway's overbearing and cuckolding of Shakespeare is central to Stephen's Shakespeare theory. The overbearing of Shakespeare recalls Eileen putting her hand in Stephen's pocket, and the cuckolding, of course, relates to Bloom. As when Stephen is inspired by a "dewy wet dream" of the denied E-C-, so Shakespeare is turned inward, made introspective and imaginative, by a severing of affections directed to the external world, and by a withdrawal of a libidinal object-cathexis. He must recreate what he has lost. He enters exile and, becoming nothing, becomes many things. The denial and subsequent withdrawal of externally directed desires, and his sense of marginalization, inspire and impregnate the artist's mind. Nora complained to Budgen: "Jim wants me to me to go with other men so that he will have something to write about" (J.J., p. 445). When Richard walks along the strand after Bertha has been with Robert, he hears demons speaking (P+E., pp. 244,260-1). In both cases, the idea of cuckolding produces creative energy. A third explanation of Stephen's assertion that the artist must be man and wife unto himself, is that to present a complete picture of reality, the artist must understand the female mind as well as the male mind. If he does not possess the creative empathy necessary to understanding women, to putting himself into their position, his work will be one dimensional and lopsided, and his female characters unconvincing. This aspect of Stephen's theory links the characters of Stephen and Bloom, and suggests that there is "a touch of the artist about old Bloom" (U., p. 302). Such ideas were current at Joyce's time, in the conception and elaboration of the "invert" personality type, or the "womanly man." Tim dean quotes the following from Edward Carpenter's Intermediate f i p e s A m o n g Primitive Folk (1914): The double life and nature certainl!; in many cases of inverts observed today, seems t o give them an extraordinary humanity and sympathy, together with a remarltable power of dealing with human beings. It may possibly also point to a further degree of evolution than usually attained, and a higher order of consciousness, very imperfectly realised, of course, but indicated. This interaction in fact, between the masculine and the feminine, this mutual illumination of logic and intuition, this combination of action and meditation, may not only raise and increase the power of each of these faculties, but it may give the mind a new qualit!; a new power of perception corresponding to the blending of subject and object in conscious-
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ness. It may possibly lead to the development of that third order of perception which has been called the cosmic consciousness, and which may also be termed divination."
There is much evidence of Bloom's ability to empathize with women. In Holles Street, he alone of the partying group considers, again and again, how painful Mina's extended labor must be. Molly recognizes and admires Bloom's ability to understand women, and it is suggested that it was this quality in Bloom that convinced her to induce and consent to his proposal of marriage (U., p. 932). Bloom's empathy for women, however, is related to his interest in enacting woman, in becoming woman. Furthermore, the woman he enacts is typically woman as victim. Bello derides Bloom for an occasion when he "clipped off [his] backgate hairs" and lay swooning across the bed, dressed in a "secondhand black operatop shift and short trunk leg naughties all split up the stitches," imagining himself as waiting to be violated by a number of men, women, and a dog (U., p. 648). She also reminds him of an occasion on which he urinated from a seated posture: "you took your seat with womanis11 care, lifting your billowy flounces, on the smoothworn throne" (U., p. 649). Bloom denies Bello's accusations of perversion, by suggesting that these were merely experiments, in the interest of science, to "compare the various joys we each enjoy." N o doubt Bloom's excuses are valid, as are Bello's accusations of perversion, as his experiments are clearly motivated by sexual desire, or efforts to enjoy the sexual joys we each enjoy. In his enquiries, he focuses primarily on alchemical woman, rather than on political or biological woman, although of course these women overlap. Bloom enacts the mirror scene for a number of reasons. According to the weakest of these, he is motivated by simple curiosity, and wants to feel what it is like to be a woman. Beyond, or within this, however, it is fuel for his erotic fantasies. In his transvestism, he is moving in a circle, magnetized by the focus of his desire. He dresses in women's clothes in order to summon the female in his own body. He strives to understand what it is like to be a woman, so that he may bring the woman to life more fully in the sexual fantasy. In this way, he is using the imagination to traverse the gap between the real and the ideal. At the same time, however, Bloom never fully becomes a woman, but is always a man dressed as a woman. He is transgressing bounds, and inviting shame, with this extension and intensification of the masochist's provocative exhibitionism. He is doing what he considers to be most shameful, just for the sake of this shame. The woman that he draws in himself is the least emancipated of women, a weakling woman cowering before a masterful male. To support this aspect of his mirror scene, he makes parodic use of the most sexist elements of popular culture; the more silly, frilly and cliched his sources, the more he finds them enticing. The more Bloom embodies these cliches, the more he is
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submitting to degradation and enslavement, and so (in terms of the fantasy, anyway) atoning to the cold ideal for these irreverences to women and to her. Joyce commented that Gerty is all in Bloom's imagination. By this, Joyce is not suggesting that Gerty is physically absent. She is physically present on the stand, but she may be mentally absent from the page: her thoughts may be Bloom's creation. What is supposed to be Gerty's mind might be conjured by Bloom-she may be a projection of his imagination. At the same time, on another level, Bloom wants to be exposed as a man dressed as a woman. In this mode of the transvestite fantasy, it is the contrast between him and the "Shaun brothers," such as the Citizen and the clamoring mockers in Barney I
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Furthermore, Stephen considers his admiration of the birdgirl to be nonsexual, just as Gerty considers Bloom's admiration to be non-sexual: "the gentleman lodger [ . . . ] had pictures cut out of papers of those skirt-dancers [ . . . ] and he used to do something not very nice that you could imagine sometimes in the bed. But this was altogether different from a thing like that because there was all the difference in the world because she could almost feel him draw her face to his" (U., p. 476). Both Gerty and Stephen, however, are deceiving themselves, and both experience a sexual rush on the beach. Smith also notes similarities in the thoughts of Gerty and Bloom. Gerty in the first half, and Bloom in the second, share topics of consideration: nuns, menstrual periods, letters, pornographic pictures, the fetishistic appeal of lingerie and general feminine apparel, the sacrifice of women in a sexual connection, whores, a woman's first kiss and orgasm, the value of woman's hair, cross dressing, the death of Dignam, and dogs." 9 3 That "Nausicaa" is set at twilight, Smith argues, suggests that this "brings emphasis to the moment of transition." "It is a time not of half light but of twin lights," the sun and the moon. "Accordingly, Joyce establishes a series of dualities," and pairs the characters of the chapter. "Edy helping Tommy to urinate, is replicated by Gerty helping Bloom."94 Smith concludes that Bloom and Gerty "share the same world."95 It is perhaps closer to the point, however, to suggest not that they share the same world, but that they are the same world. In the narcissistic ego 1 ideal ego system, the subject and the object of desire are inextricably intertwined. In Gerty, as in Molly, Joyce is enacting the mirror scene. Gerty should be read as a transvestite fantasy in the sense that her thoughts about "four dinky sets, with awful pretty stitchery," may be Bloom's thoughts. In "Nausicaa," we do not see a juggernaut wheeling over a sparrow, but a juggernaut becoming a sparrow. The inversion of Bloom's becoming woman is here accompanied by what are for him the fireworks of carnival (U., p. 477). Bloom draws aspects of Gerty into the cyclone of his becoming, running her through the clanging wheels of his desiring machine. In clothing himself in the signifiers of femininity, Bloom, on one level, hopes to maintain his masculinity, in order to intensify his sense of shame, and see himself as negated. There is also a sense, however, in which these signifiers of the feminine are intended to draw out and reveal an innate, although necessarily disguised, feminine predisposition. This inner femininity, however, is culturally defined. This point is emphasized by the difference in the styles of dress of the torturess and the masochist. The masochist will dress in soft colors, such as white, to suggest passivity and chastity, while the torturess will tend to dress in black, to emphasize her power and her menace. The clothes of the masochist will suggest inhibition and accessibility, while those of the torturess will focus upon the fetish. The clothes that
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Bello forces on Bloom constrain him: "You will be laced with cruel force into vicelike corsets [ . . . ] your figure, plumper than when at large, will be restrained in nettight frocks" (U., p. 647). At the same time that they constrain and inhibit him, these clothes make him vulnerable and accessible: "Martha and Mary will be a little chilly at first in such delicate thigh-casing but the frilly flimsiness of lace round your bare knees will remind you.. ." (U., p. 648). When Bello warns Bloom, "If I catch a trace on your swaddles" (U., p. 649), she further emphasizes the extent to which his privacy has been demolished: he is thoroughly open and accessible to vigilance. Molly stresses that the masochist's style of dress is more typical of woman's dress than is that of the tortures, in its emphasis on inhibition and accessibility. When she recalls Bloom and herself being tossed in a rowboat, she resents Bloom for not having recognized the discrepancy of their dress: "theres no danger whatsoever keep yourself calm in his flannel trousers." She complains, "my new white shoes all ruined with the salt water and the hat I had with the feather all blowy" (U., p. 908). More to the point in emphasizing the inhibition and accessibility imposed by female fashion, is an earlier expression of Molly's grievance: "clothes we have to wear whoever invented them expecting you to walk up Killiney hill then for example at that picnic all staysed up you cant do a blessed thing in them in the crowd run or jump out of the way thats why I was afraid when that other ferocious old Bull began to charge" (U., p. 895). That this fear of the bull conveys accessibility is suggested by the fact that this bull, which, two lines later she recalls "ripping all the whole insides out of those poor horses," is representative of the phallus. It is passivity and accessibility that are identified as Bloom and Stephen's femininity. Bloom, like Stephen, is sexually passive. Molly asks Bloom to propose with her eyes, and then penetrates his mouth with her tongue, filling his mouth with seed cake, suggesting that she is the male and he the female (U., p. 931). This penetration of Bloom's mouth with seedcake recalls Stephen's passivity when Eileen pushes her hand into his pocket, and in his encounter with the prostitute. The prostitute approaches Stephen, leads him, penetrates his mouth with a kiss, and he "close[s] his eyes, surrendering himself to her" (Port., p. 96). In his masturbatory fantasy, Stephen makes E-C-a "jeweleyed" harlot: a sexually aggressive predator. Joyce's letters to Nora reveal that he too was aroused by the idea of assuming a passive sexual posture. He tells Nora: "The fucking must all be done by you, darling, as I am so small and soft," and then proceeds to describe the ways in which he would like her to fuck him: "dressed in full outdoor clothes [ . . . ] with boots muddy [ . . . . ] rid[e] me like a man with your thighs between mine" (S.Ltrs.,p.l90). It is essential to him that women are free to desire, and that sex is not forced upon them. He considers chastity to be a weakness in women, and he has no interest in this, unless it is a coy, twinklingly invertive deception.
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For the Novicks, the masochist's passivity is determined during the latency phase, when the child develops a perception of parental intercourse as sadistic. "[Tlo submit, to suffer, to be beaten, to be humiliated now come to represent the feminine receptive position in parental intercourse. The wish to be in this position becomes the instinctual motive for the masochism, the spur and the accompaniment to phallic masturbation."96 Stephen's passivity is involved in more than his sexual preference. After Stephen is bullied by Heron, he is divested of his anger, as fruit is stripped of its "soft ripe peel" (Port., p. 81). As an introvert, he will take in, or absorb. He is, as Brendan Kennelly says of Bloom, "a consciousness on which all things impinge, and even enter."97 The introvert, in this way, like the masochist, may be identified with alchemical woman. In contrast to the introvert, the extrovert imposes; he thrusts into the world, or impinges upon the external. He is a body as an organism. The extrovert is paranoiac, imposing territories, gathering everything into macromolecules, molar codes and categories. He is a colonizer, a member of the master race, opposed to the "black beast," the schizo, who will always draw a line of flight, and escape through gaps in the majority. The Novicks draw a distinction between receptivity and passivity:
X further effect of the intrusive pattern of interaction is the hypercathexis in the child of the receptive mode. This touches upon a major conceptual puzzle-the relation of masochism and passivity. Maelson (1984)notes that many analysts continue to equate the two, as Freud did originally. We see passivity as an ego quality linked in its pathological extreme manifestations to the experience of an inattentive caretalzec Xn adolescent boy who had suffered from infancy from parental inability to sustain attention to his needs and feelings showed no signs of masochistic patholog!; yet demonstrated extreme passivity in all areas of his life. Masochists are highly receptive and are ready to take in any stimuli from the outside world, ranging from subtle shifts in mother's moods to what one ho~nosexualpatient described as a wish for a "fist-fuclz." Masochists are very active in their pursuit of pain and failure, in part to maintain the receptive relationship with an intrusive object.98
For Joyce, pain and failure are negative catalysts: they are perverse means to an artistic end. Personal slights, whether intended or not, become part of his creative armory. He set up situations in which it was easy for friends and associates to betray him, seemingly enacting a destiny repetition. Bloom and Richard are very active in their pursuit of pain and failure in their manipulation of their own cuckolding. According to the perception of male as active and female as passive, any given male may be more alchemically female than any given female, while any female may be more alchemically male than any given male. These qual-
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ities may also interplay within the individual. Here, inversion describes the relation of components in a movement of becoming, rather than an ontological condition of inversion. Whether these categories represent masculinity and femininity in any sense other than as metaphors of the mechanical interaction of the sexual organs is unclear. Certainly society plays a part in directing women toward introversion and passivity, and men toward extroversion and activity.
Masochism reveals its magical mode of thinking most clearly in its visionary efforts to call the perverse ideal into being. The quest for vision has always entailed the renunciation of the self, and mechanisms for breaking down the body. In many North American Indian tribes, a child was only given an adult name after he had experienced a waking dream, and seen something from which his name might be taken. The more difficult the vision was to achieve, the more powerful it was considered to be. To induce vision, they fasted, chanted in sweat lodges, took hallucinogenic drugs, and indulged in selfflagellation and self-mutilation: anything to break the mind's grip on reality. The plains Indians did the sun dance, in which they bounced and hung from a pole by deep piercings through their pectoral muscles. If vision was hard to come by for a Kwakiutl youth, he would go into the woods, and sit without eating, drinking, or even moving. To hurry the vision, he might cut off segments of his fingers. This is not unlike in Yeats's At Hawk's Well, in which the old man advises the young man to pierce his foot, so that he does not fall asleep while waiting for the well to fl0w.~9For Yeats, the death of the body frees the soul, and the death of the soul frees the body. There are also the examples of Jesus in the desert and Mohammed on the mountain. The Novicks recognize that pain is essential to the magic of the masochist: Analysis of masochistic adolescents reveals that the greatest threat to the omnipotent system is the experience of competence and pleasure, especially in separate, gender-differentiated adult activities such as genital sexuality. Pleasure has no place in the omnipotent system, except as secret moments of sadistic triumph, and leaves the masochist feeling, as one patient said, "like a row boat pushed out to sea." Pleasure leaves them feeling ordinary and not specia1.100 Pain is the affect which triggers the defense of omnipotence, pain is the magical means by which all wishes are gratified, and pain justifies the omnipotent hostility and revenge contained in the masochistic fantasy. '01
There is, in all of these cases, a conscious renunciation of Reality, or World as Will, and an effort to engage what is absent. Stephen says that a man of genius makes no mistakes. Among other things, this refers to Bloom's
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masochism, and to Joyce's: we are being told that it serves a purpose. (Although there are no overt expressions of Bloom's genius, his correspondence to Joyce and, more importantly, to Shakespeare, suggests that he possesses the configuration of genius). The purpose of this masochism may be only to enable him to escape from the hard truth, the World as Will, by becoming a Body without Organs. He adopts an aesthetic position that affords a radical, quietist power. Renunciation and escape may be the only truly revolutionary gestures. There is always a discrepancy between the static and ritualistic external manifestations of masochism, and the labile movement of becoming which it affords. Deleuze and Guattari describe this as the Body without Organs; a sealed space through which fantastic populations migrate. The masturbatory imagination is riotous, a flow. In the deep-mind, the sublimated and repressed images and drives have proliferated in darkness. In the ritual, they emerge again, fleshed by the contemporary-like the dead who may speak when they feed on the blood of the living-to repeat the shattering, the wounding negation that damned them to proliferation. The image-making faculty thrills in a chaos of multiplicity, letting images run amok over the now ghostly bounds of prohibition. The masochistic masturbator summons a mob, but remains at its margins, defined in opposition to it. He can examine all the nooks and crannies of polymorphous perversity, so long as he feels himself forced to do so. He plays with tension, letting it progress and recede, knowing that with orgasm the carnival will end, and the day will break on a solemn, tedious world. To prolong the carnival of his desire, he interrupts the ascension of his desire before orgasm, forcing the advancing waves to recede. To do so, he makes use of the scattered scepters and miters of the toppled tyrants "in here." In doing so, he overcomes the body as an organism. Deleuze argues that this interruption signifies both castration and giving birtl1.102 If so, the masochist gives birth to the dreamed personae that join him in this riot: a metamorphic flow of personae, binary figures of power and submission. He identifies with all persons who are subjugated, and so symbolically brings all power to bear on himself. The sadist's becomings are in the mutilated body of the beloved.
There is an obvious connection between masochism, magical thinking, and a certain type of writing, but this connection is at the top of so many tiers of paradox that it is perhaps impossible to proceed beyond this recognition.103 Certainly there is a tendency to overdetermine masochism, and it has been argued that this fact makes the term all but useless. Inherent in the nature of the syndrome, is the multiplicity of its symptoms. We may be justified in overdetermining masochism, however, in light of the evidence of its total
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usurpation of the sexual urges. That the perversity is so contrary to the wishes of the masochist, so overwhelming, and so incurable, should suggest that we would be mistaken to seek simple explanations. Despite the errors that overdetermination of the syndrome might lead us into, a few suggestions about the relation between masochism and this certain type of writing might be made. Firstly, it is erroneous to define this type of writing as L' bcriture feminine. Lacan is probably closer with his description of a type of writing that does not represent, but embodies jouissnnce (although we would have to supplement this with a conception of a jouissnnce of cruelty). Of course, the problem with this is the vagueness of the conception of jouissnnce. Deleuze and Guattari are perhaps closer with their conception of the Body without Organs, and their ethics of escape. There is a relation between confession and the masochist's exhibitionism. Rousseau is compelled to show himself as ridiculous to girls, and then he shows this again to his readers. As with Joyce, there is a sense in which he is casting the blame for his obsession away from himself. In his writings also, Joyce displays the masochist's provocative exhibitionism. The reader is implicated in, and infected by Joyce's dissidence. Joyce felt that if he dropped a bucket into his "soul's well, sexual department," he would draw up waters which we all have in common (J.J., p. 238). Despite the scandal that his work provoked, Joyce persisted in drawing that which his society considered to be shameful and lowly, and to belong beyond the bounds of discourse, into the scope of discourse.104 In doing so, he himself was united in their eyes with the sordid and the shameful topics that he revealed. Although we may object to his inability to recognize the value of Portmit, Edward Garnett was not wrong to notice "ugly things, ugly words [ . . . ] shoved in one's face, on purpose" (J.J., p. 404). In Gincowzo Joyce, Amelia Popper has the same misgivings about Portmit: when she returns the book to Joyce, who had lent it to her, she comments that "had it been frank only for frankness' sake she would have asked why I had given it to her to read" (G.J.,p.l2). A masochistic investment is clear to be seen in Joyce's persistence in associating himself with the shameful, and so standing naked and degraded before the scorn of the socius. Even when those who were favorably disposed toward his work attempted to dissuade him, and suggested that he was being difficult for difficulty's sake, and gratuitously shocking, as though he wanted to alienate his readers, he persisted in his efforts to subvert (J.J., pp. 321-4, 347, 442, 459). He was fascinated by what was difficult, by what was painful in writing. Joyce's game of self-exposure is an extension of the candor that is central to his fiction. His elders had urged him not to hide away in secrecy, and to confess.10j He used confession as vengeance, dragging all the distorted and obscene creatures of night out into day, parading his wounds. He turned the blame for this obscenity upon the socius, upon tyranny: "This race and this country and this life produced me [ . . . . ] I shall express myself as I am" (Port., p. 177). Stanislaus noted in his diary that:
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Rousseau, indeed, might be accused of cherishing the secret hope of turning away the anger of disapproving readers by confessing unto them, but Jim cannot be suspected of this [ . . . . ] H e has a distressing habit of saying quietly to those with whom he is familiar the most shoclzing things about himself and others, and, moreover, of selecting the most shoclzing times, saying them, not because they are shoclzing merely, but because they are true. They are such things that, even lznowing him as well as I do, I d o not believe it is beyond his power to shock me or Gogarty with all his obscene rhymes. '06
In the fantasy, Bloom will feign shame, but will not be ashamed. He plays with shame, purposely displaying what is considered shameful, just because it is considered shameful. He hopes to liberate his desire from the deadening abstraction of mechanical authority, from the tyranny of mind-forged manacles. He confronts shame and annihilates it, showing it to be illusory. Like Stephen and Bloom, Joyce toys with the tensions between candor and secrecy. In linking the masochistic masturbator and the artist, in Shakespeare and Bloom (U., p. 274), Joyce implies an identification between the non sexual and the sexual ideal ego or perverse ideal. In masturbation he engages her sexually, and in the poem he addresses her verbally. It is implied that all creative writing may be considered as a love letter, addressed to an absence, covered over, or compensated for by an ideal other. In both creative writing and masturbation, the lover is a product of the creative imagination, before which the ego displays itself. The page is the zone on which he conjures her. It is like the fetish, in that it hides and glorifies the wound that has isolated him, with one and the same gesture. By turning to the page, he renounces the world, and resigns himself to fantasy. The individual chooses to create the object of his desire in the imagination, because external prohibitions restrict his focus on an external object, but also because he is disillusioned by the external world, in which possibility is so limited. This internal focus closes him off from the world, and locks him in the sort of endless confrontation with the self (or disintegration of the self) that is seen in Finnegans W a k e . Even more so than the mere masturbator, the masochist has fractured the self, and made his desire dependent on his ability to animate the creatures of phantasmagoria through creative empathy. The masochist clearly identifies with the victim, "the black beast," but he must also be able to conjure, or act the part of the torturer, the member of the master race. When Freud claims that there are four people present in any sexual act, he is placing too great a limitation on the masochist's cast of cl1aracters.l0~To conjure the personae with whom he plays, the masochist must identify with, or colonize creatively, the character of the torturer, and of the loved object before whom he is shamed, at the same time as he identifies with the victim, as himself and as the loved object. He must also construct and embody a chorus, a crowd,
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into which this structure is stamped. Each of these personae, however, may be legion, straddling one another so that many genetic crosses, or borderline phenomena emerge. The frenetic and fluid flow between roles is essential to the masochist, and makes him justified, above all others, in claiming to be "all in all in all of us," a world unto himself. In Coldness a n d Cruelty, Deleuze considers disavowal to be the primary characteristic of the masochist. Perhaps renunciation is closer. In "Paring His Fingernails: Homosexuality and Joyce's Impersonalist Aesthetic," Tim Dean defends Ulysses against Bersani's charge that it is the epitome of modernism's redemptive aesthetic. Dean makes this defense while continuing to accept Bersani's critique of the modernist aesthetic, that "[tlhe culture of redemption itself depends on even more fundamental assumptions about authoritative identities, about identity as authority."108 Dean argues that our interpretation of Joyce's impersonalist aesthetic, and the extent to which his writing may be considered to belong to modernism's redemptive aesthetic, are dependent upon "how we read the image of "the artist paring his fingernails." "109 He draws together Stephen's explanation of his impersonalist aesthetic to Lynch-that the artist "like the God of the creation, remains within or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernailsm-and Tusker Boyle, "one of the schoolboys who is caught smugging in the novel's opening chapter and who is nicknamed Lady Boyle "because he was always at his nails, paring them."ll0 Through Tusker Boyle's involvement in the smugging incident, Dean relates Tusker Boyle's femininity, and the image of the artist paring his nails, to homosexuality. This femininity, however, does not necessarily connote homosexuality. We might also relate Tusker Boyle's femininity to Bloom's (forced) feminization, which is not best described as homosexual or even bisexual. Dean continues to suggest: "[ilt is not so much the fictional character of Stephen Dedalus or the historical figure of Joyce who is to be considered homosexual (or closeted), as it is the impersonalist aesthetic as such."lll This argument perhaps presents an overly schematic picture of Joyce's personal and emotional investment in his writing. This is not to say that all of Joyce's writing is autobiographical, but to suggest that many of the more compelling meanings that we draw from his work were not as consciously contrived as they may appear in our interpretations. In another context, albeit, Dean states: "it would be hubristic to suppose that he could completely control their reverberations-such, indeed, is perhaps the most unfortunate myth even in Wake criticism. I refer to this embarrassing aspect of sophisticated critical writing on Joyce in order to emphasize that our enjoying Joyce in the sense I have outlined does not by any means entail our attributing to him absolute mastery of his words."ll2 Dean describes Joyce's impersonalist aesthetic as based on "the double association of homosexuality with art and jouissance."ll; He links homo-
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sexuality with jouissance through recourse to the term "hyperesthesia," which ICrafft-Ebing used to describe aesthetic sensitivity, before linking it to sexual sensitivity. "Hyperesthesia sexualis" does not, however, refer only to homosexuality. Dean quotes ICrafft-Ebing elaboration of paresthesia: "[tlhe perverse sexual impulse may be directed (1)toward the opposite sex or (2) toward the same sex"; and pnresthesia sexunlis is introduced with the reminder, "This anomaly is of the greatest clinical and forensic importance, especially as it is frequently associated with sexual hyperesthesia."ll4 Lacan's term jouissnnce, Dean argues, might be permitted to gloss hyperesthesia sexualis.ll" In developing his argument, Dean connects homosexuality, sublimation and jouissnnce. Homosexuality and sublimation are connected because in Freud's first major work on sublimation, his study of Leonardo da Vinci, he explicitly connects artistic production with sublimation. It is more difficult to link sublimation and jouissnnce, however, because "Lacan describes the constitutive loss of jouissnnce" or primordial enjoyment, as being "brought about by the symbolic order as a sublimation."ll6 In order to link sublimation and jouissnnce, Dean refers to the reformulation of the conception that Lacan made in his interpretations of Joyce, and a second order, or perverse sublimation: "the symbolic order's evisceration of jouissance gives us the model for normative sublimation. In Lacan's view, Joyce's sublimation is fundamentally perverse."ll7 The "paradox of sublimation," Dean argues, "leads us to what Bersani calls "this peculiar idea of sexuality independent of sexm-or what Lacan names jouissnnce." After succeeding in establishing these connections, Dean elaborates upon this conception of perverse sublimation. He states that because sublimation evades repression, it "avoids the parental prohibition essential to the normalization of desire."lls Although he does not refer to Deleuze and Guattari, his perverse sublimation is like the minoritarian becoming, because it dismantles and undermines socially constructed identities, and in so doing renounces the fascism that is situated in the body: the authority of identity. In concluding his defense of Ulysses, Dean writes: As with Lacanian jouissance and Bersanian self-shattering, the value of Joycean "joy" resides in its inherent solipsism, its resolute recoil from use: this art "does not urge us to seek anything beyond itself." As a recommendation of "art for art's sake," Joyce's aestheticism could easily be read, in accordance with postmodern clichis about high modernism, as apolitical, or worse, politically conservative. By discouraging the reader from seelzing anything beyond itself, Joyce's art seems to advocate a quietism that necessarily prohibits the lzind of action required to effect social change-for example, to intervene in the colonial exploitation of Ireland. Yet I would argue that the opposite is true. Inhibiting us from seelzing anything beyond itself (by satiating us with "joy"), the Joycean text actually implies a mode of being that is profoundly resistant to exploitation. The
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joyceance that compels a recoil from use is exactly homologo~isto-in
fact, it derives from-sexuality's constitutive recoil from its object. Following Laplanche's account in Llfe and Death uz Ps)'choanaljsls, of sexuality's reflexive origin in autoeroticism, Bersani develops Freud's radical insight that "the sexual instinct is in the first instance independent of its object." In so doing, Bersani makes available a new politics of solipsism that both he and Joyce connect with ho~nosexualaesthetics.1~9
The reference here to "sexuality's reflexive origin in autoeroticism" is one hint that, in terms of Joyce at least, we would be closer to the point in seeking a masocl~istic,rather than a homosexual aesthetic. Masochists, after all, are masturbators par excellence. Again, we should relate Bloom's ten years of refusal to engage in penetrative sexuality with the ten years Stephen intends to take to write a novel. The masochist masturbates instead of engaging in genital penetration with the ideal woman whom he worships, because to penetrate her would be to lower her, and destroy the powerful illusion of her untouchability, her unattainability. Another reference to the paring of the fingernails, that Dean overlooks, occurs in the "Hades" chapter, when the passengers in the carriage see Boylan. "Mr Bloom reviewed the nails of his left hand, then those of his right hand [ . . . . ] My nails: I am just looking at them: well pared" (U., p. 115). Here, Bloom is attempting to feign indifference, but more than this to force indifference on himself, as his painful decision to renounce his right and his role as a husband is recalled to him. Masochism is more resolutely renunciatory and solipsistic than is homosexuality, and much queerer than homosexuality. The argument that Dean develops would be closer to the point were it to focus on masochism, rather than on homosexuality. All evidence of homosexuality in Joyce can be understood by reading the works with an awareness of the presence of an overriding masochistic sexuality, that embraces the play of (forced) feminization, willing cuckoldry and, at its deepest, (forced) bisexual debasement. It is too easy to dismiss masochistic or magical thinking, just as it is too easy to dismiss the position that art should exist for the sake of art. Even the most subtle and determined of thinkers tend to dismiss the masochist's mode of thinking. The Novicks claim that: "The accomplishment of the adolescent tasks of taking ownership of the mature body requires relinquishment of the fantasy that one can be both a man and a woman."l20 In this claim, they are confused by the differences between alchemical and physiological being, and so fail to distinguish between the process and the condition of inversion. Bloom never feels that he is a woman trapped in a man's body: rather, he is a man who sometimes likes to escape into the realm of woman. When the Novicks write: "In our adult masochistic patients we have found variously a reluctance to work, or the apparent expenditure of enormous effort with little result,"l21 one hears a position similar to those who attempted to
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discourage Joyce from his work on Finnegnns Wake. It is this insistence on locating a normal or "saleable" personality that makes psychoanalysis incapable of comprehending the function of masochism: that is, escape from such socially constructed identities. The topics of idleness and the dissipation of the self through work were often discussed by Joyce and Stanislaus. In his diary, Stanislaus writes: "Jim turned a number of the Irish literary clique against him by announcing his dislike for work and his intention to do it only when he must [ . . . . ] Jim is never idle except when studying for an exam, but always spiritually very much alive." 122
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CHAPTER FOUR
A Darker Passion The Rituals of Masochism
The tusk of the boar has wounded him there where love lies ableeding [ . . . . ] There is, I feel in the words, some goad of the flesh driving him into a new passion, a darker shadow of the first, darkening even his own understanding of himself. (U., p. 251-2) VOICES: (Sighing)So he's gone. Ah, yes. Yes, indeed. Bloom? Never heard of him. N o ? Queer lzind of chap. There's the widow. That so? Ah, yes. (From the suttee p)'re the flame of g u m camphire ascends. The pall of incense smoke screens and disperses. O u t of her oak fiame a q w p h with hair unbound, lightl)' clad in teabrown art colozlrs, descends from her grotto and passing under interlacing y w s , stands over Bloom.) [ . . . . ] T H E NYMPH: (Softl)')Mortal! (Kindl)')Na!; dost not weepest! BLOOM: (Crawls iellil)' forward under the boughs, streaked bjl szlnlight, with dignit)')This position. I felt it was expected of me. Force of habit. (U., p. 6 5 5 )
CONFLICT AND FLUCTUATION IN THE DIVIDED SELF There is always an opposition between the masochistic impulse and the selfpreservative drives of the subject outside arousal. The goals of the perversity constitute a mirror image of the values of the non-aroused subject. Most evidence suggests that those suffering from a masochistic fixation would prefer to be able to become sexually excited in a more normal way, but that, despite themselves, they can only achieve erection by having recourse to their fantasies. Although the masochist revels in pain and shame when aroused, these feelings continue to be shameful and painful throughout, and afterwards. He will tend to be tortured and shocked by recollections of his indulgence. He may rebuke and revile himself with such force that he initiates another masochistic process. Full-blown masochism, or masochistic fixation, is based upon a number of seemingly paradoxical inversions, the meanings or sources of which must be sought far beneath the surface. The masochist disguises his true intentions, and the true meaning of his rites. These rites may be considered para-
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doxical, in that the masochist uses what originally turned him off, or desexualized him, to turn him on. Punishment, disgust, loss of love, shame and rebuke become sexually arousing. In Fanny Hill, John Cleland recognizes this conflict. In his description of Barville's shifting facial expression, he anticipates Theodore Reik's description of the Janus face of masochism, "one half of which is distorted by anxiety, the other entranced with pleasure." As soon as Mrs. Cole was gone, he seated me near him, when now his face turned upon me into an expression of the most pleasing sweetness and good humour, the more remarkable for its sudden shift from the other extreme, which, I found afterwards, when I lmew more of his character, was owing to a habitual state of conflict with and dislike of himself for being enslaved to so peculiar a taste, by the fatality of a constitutional ascendant, that rendr'd him incapable of receiving any pleasure till he submitted to these extraordinary means of procuring it at the hands of pain, whilst the constancy of this repining consciousness stamp'd at length that cast of sourness and severity in his features: which was, in fact, very foreign to the natural sweetness of his temper. 1
The masochist's daily, non-aroused self tends to be Apollonian, in so far as it is closed, withdrawn and aloof. Whether this is a result of the masochism, and of the secrets that must be carried, or the masochism is a relaxation of this posture cannot be determined. The day-to-day self of the masochist may be described as Daedalian flight. It is possible that the Apollonian man may only maintain his exile through a powerful effort of will, so that when he relaxes from this effort, he falls toward his opposite. The sexual self of the masochist is grotesque, open and receptive. Stephen's satanic pride relaxes to become the humbling of Bloom. It is a bathetic strategy that affords an escape from excessive consciousness. The distinction between flight and falling in this sexual context is adumbrated in Robert's image of two statues in Exiles: "The statue which says: H o w shall I get down? And [ . . . ] The statue which says: In my time the dunghill was so high" (P.+E., p. 157). Richard has "fallen from a higher world," while Robert has "come up from a lower world" (P.+E., pp. 158-9). The statue representative of Robert, who is described as a sadist, ascends, while the statue representative of Richard, who is described as a masochist, descends. Here, the middle ground is the sexual. In sex, the sadist is engrandized, and the masochist is degraded. It may be suggested that masochists are typically people for whom pride and dignity are of particular importance. The most important reason for linking Bloom and Stephen on the template of Joyce, is so that this point might be made. Bloom's sexual servitude is an inversion of Stephen's refusal to serve. The inasocl~ist'slife consists of a reeling between the subaltern and the
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satanic positions. The Novicks describe one patient whose "feelings about himself fluctuated between grandiose delusions of omnipotence and a sense of abject worthlessness."2 The conflict between the sexual and the non-sexual selves of the masochist resonates with other fractures in his character. Early in "Circe," Bloom reels between fantasies of engrandizeinent and degradation that are not yet sexual. This teetering self-perception, and the internal monologue that embodies it, are perhaps the most characteristic features of Joyce's work. Stephen passes again and again between images of himself as sordid and weak, and proud and pure. Finnegans Wake traces this almost disembodied movement between extremes in perpetuity. Practically every page presents either the praise or the rebuke of one character or another.
Until recently, corporal punishment was typically first used by parents to toilet train young children. It was then used to train children to hide their sexual urges, including the polyinorphously perverse urges of the oral phase and the sadistic anal phase, and the beating games of the latency phase. In broader terms, beating served to control unruly impulses in children, and to socialize them. In all cases, corporal punishment imposes a sort of classical closure upon its victim; all apertures are sealed, to prevent leakage. If corporal punishment is not sexual in its inception, as a desexualizing force it plays a part in the resexualization of the desexualized. The narrator of "An Encounter" sees that the idea of corporal punisl~mentis sexually arousing for the pervert, and he is intrigued and compelled by this apparent contradiction. In Portrait, when Stephen broods upon the idea of Simon Moonan being flogged, he takes a step toward viewing corporal punishment as sexually arousing, as it is dragged with a series of associated mysteries into the open vortex of his desexualization. Stephen finds it sexually exciting to think about being flogged, but it should be noted that such pleasurable excitement is only afforded when the punisl~mentoccurs within the framework of the fantasy. He takes no delight in being pandied by Dolan. Although it is obvious that, within the framework of the fantasy, Bloom is sexually aroused by the notion of being subjected to corporal punishment, it may not be said that all of the punishments with which Bello threatens him in "Circe"-"the nosering, the pliers, the bastinado, the hanging hook" (U., p. 645)-are representative of his sexual fantasies. Much of the interaction between Bloom and Bello in "Circe" should be considered as a parody of a parody. The original parody is tlle masochist's parody of authority. The second order parody is a parody of masochism. As Reik explains, the masochistic fantasy rarely goes to the dangerous extremes of the sadistic fantasy (in its most extreme manifestation the "snuff" movie), for the obviA distincous reason that it is the victim who engineers these punisl~ments.~ tion must be made between tlle masochism of self-mutilation and, for
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instance, the masochism that falls under the umbrella of the term pngeism, in which the masochist desires to act as a woman's pageboy. In many ways, mutilations such as piercings seem to support the Freudian view of masochism as sadism turned around upon the self. Again, it is a specific genre of masochism that is under consideration here. When Bloom claims that he only had in mind "the spanking idea. A warm tingling glow without effusion. Refined birching to stimulate the circulation" (U., pp. 593-4), he is restating the Meibomian explanation of sexual beating. We may believe him in part, although, as is evident in "Circe" despite the second order parody, his masochistic fantasy is cyclonic, metamorphic and polymorphous. It is hard to believe that Bloom would be satisfied with such a simple and straightforward ritual, and still feel no need to alter or intensify the fantasy. His Meibomian excuse constitutes an effort to disseminate his perversity, and it says nothing about his urges to be cuckolded, humiliated or feminized. The masochist is compelled by the politically charged gestures of spanking-by the currencies of power that it brings into play-more than by the physical effects of being spanked. The masochist does not submit to corporal punishment primarily for a benefit to circulation, or even for the pain, but for the symbolism of the gesture; for the sake of being forced into a servile position, and becoming a naughty boy, or girl. During arousal, he wishes to be reduced and negated in the eyes of others. The earlier threats that the high society ladies make to Bloom are more typical of the masochist's flagellant fantasy: "Make him smart, Hanna dear. Give him ginger. Thrash the mongrel within and inch of his life [ . . . . ] I'll flog him black and blue in the public streets" (U., p. 594). An analysis of masochism will be tripped up by paradox at every step. The foregoing discussed the paradox of wanting that which is not wanted. There is a further paradox in the masochist ordering someone to order him, in his being in control of someone who he compels to compel him. The masochist will only submit to a ritual that he has devised. These ceremonial or ritualistic qualities of the perversity have been noted by all of its interpreters.
THESTAGINGOF THE RITUAL The dramatic form of "Circe" is appropriate for a depiction of masochism. Although the masochist submits, he gives the tortures a script, detailing precisely the ways in which she should compel him to submit. The masochist is typically the dominant person in this sense. Although in the contract Masoch signs with Wanda he tells her that his will belongs to her totally, he first teaches her what he wants her to do to him. For Deleuze, the sense in which the masochist is a teacher is crucial. Both the fictional and the real life Wanda are afraid that they will not be able to live up to the ideal, and satisfy the masochist's need to be dominated.
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This paradox is apparent in Fanny Hill. When Fanny beats Barville, it is clear that she is reading his cues, and obeying him in seeming to force him to obey her: I led him to the bench, and according to my cue, play'd at forcing him to lie
down; which, after some little show of reluctance, for form's sake, he submitted to; he was straightaway extended flat upon his belly, on the bench, with a pillow under his face; and as he thus tamely la!; I tied him tightly, hand and foot, to the legs of it; which done, his shirt remaining truss'd up over the small of his back, I drew his breeches quite down to his 1znees.l Gibson finds that the beatings described in pornography are, invariably, ritualistic in character: "the ceremony, carried out with great solemnity, proceeds according to a set plan, any variation in which would result in a loss of meaning, power and effectiveness: the spell would be broken, the magic dispersed."j His argument here is similar to Reik's insistence that the submission must take place within the framework of the fantasy, and that humiliations that are not engineered will fail to produce arousal. Masoch wrote into his contract with Wanda that her only obligation should be to wear furs when behaving cruelly toward him. These furs served as cues, to distinguish the fantasy from reality. Again, masochism is not an ontological condition, a permanent state of being, but rather a movement away from a normative state: a becoming is always a defection from a inajoritarian position. It is Gibson's position that spontaneity is totally absent from masochistic performances.6 H e supports this contention with reference to Reik's idea that the masochist diminishes the pain of anticipating punishment administered by others, by engineering punishment for himself. Gibson, however, overemphasizes the absence of spontaneity from the ritual. In Masoch's contract the paradox by which he wants to control his own loss of control cannot be negated. What drives him is the uncertainty that his submission entails, and the thrill of not knowing for certain what will happen. A part of him really does want to awaken the dormant tigress in her, so that the ritual will take on its own life, and he will lose his grip on the reigns of his fantasy. A part of him wants this, in the way that his aroused self always wants his submission to overtake his life. After orgasm, he will renounce this desire with the same conviction with which he held it while aroused. Although the ritual is predetermined, or learned by rote, there is a second movement in which the ritual is enacted, or submitted to the vagaries and spontaneities of its actualization. Contrary to what Reik has to say, there is always a thrill of anticipation, a rush of danger, when the fantasy moves from fantasized structure to the enactment of the fantasy. When the inhuman ritual is submitted to the whims of other people, the masochist is watching
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to learn from what he did not expect. The buttocks, for example, are stilled and situated as the fantasy is erected, and then they are caused to writhe and jolt chaotically within this context of confinement. The compulsion feeds on this small margin of chance, and derives from this the energy required for the compulsion to continue to compel. In the ritual, physical stasis opens space for imaginative flow. Althougl~ what Gibson says may be true of the surface, or structure of tlle ritual, it overlooks tlle sense in which tlle structured ritual opens space through which a labile charge might issue. For tlle Novicks, tlle ritualistic qualities of the masocllistic fantasy, its dependence upon a stable structure, serves as a defense against anxiety, and as a means of imposing order upon a disordered world. In this sense, tlle informing impulse of masochism is identical to a certain explanation of tlle artistic project: We would suggest that formation of the fixed fantasy not only required a modicum of stability of representations, but also seemed of itself t o contribute to maintaining stability in the usual chaos of the representational world of these children.'
The Novicks also consider the masochistic ritual to serve as a means of abating self-destructive urges. The masochists whom they studied seemed to sexualize self-loathing, in order to dampen this drive. This does not quite constitute a conception of masochism as a turning of sadism upon itself, thoug11 it is close. Masochism serves to seduce tlle aggressor that he is to himself, but the self-destructive urges are not sexual, or sadistic, until sexuality blunts the edge of this attack. Instead of cutting his wrists with a razor, he is spanked, spat upon and laughed at. The fixed beating fantasy [ . . . ] represented the most i~mocuousform of the wish, variations on the theme often involved more ominous fantasies of suicide, self-mutilation and death [ . . . . ] In the cases of Xbel and the other boys with a fixed beating fantas!; we could see a diminution of anxiety when the beating fantasy was employed, whereas fantasies of death or mutilation soon became anxious preoccupations and led to feelings of overwhelming terror. One might say that in place of a fear of being destroyed or damaged, they created a pleasurable fantasy of being beaten, that is, anxiety had become libidinized.8
As a means of managing a very high proof upsurge of Thanatos, the masochistic rites constitute the machines and apparatuses that Deleuze and Guattari consider to be essential to engineering a Body without Organs. This is the visionary explanation of the masochistic ritual. It is unclear whether this explanation is in total contradiction to the argument that these rites
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serve to defend against suicidal tendencies, or whether these two arguments overlap at some point. How far might the visionary take his efforts to negate the body, and see something other than the things around him? It must often seem that the vision that holds the final proof, and ends the quest, can only come after death. It is possible that what has been described as the ideal ego, the glorification of the wounded body, is not a shard in the fractured mirror of the self, but instead the angel of death.
If the fantasy is ceremonial, or theatrical, who are the dramatis personae? This question has produced a very cluttered and confusing array of interpretations. According to Deleuze, in Coldness a n d Cruelty, the masochist aligns himself with the mother and the ego, in order to expel the father and the superego from the symbolic realm.9 By the most modest of reckonings, in the meeting of the masochist and his torturess there are, as Freud says of any sexual encounter, at least four participants. The torturess is both the object of desire and the father as repressive superego; this is a role that the masochist has projected onto her. The masochist is both that which desires-the egoand the father as guilty of the coarseness and brutality of masculinity. This equation will clearly account for much of the masochism in Joyce. When Joyce asks Nora to take down his trousers and spank him as though he were a naughty schoolboy (Ltrs.I., pp. 273-4), he conceives of her as both the Nora he desires, and as the repressive agent of authority. He conceives of himself as both the Joyce who desires Nora, and as the Shaun brother, who will become the coarse, bullying father; the type of boy that the pervert in "An Encounter" particularly enjoys the thought of flogging. Deleuze's system in Coldness and Cruelty, however, does not account for the elements of transvestism in Joycean masochism. If we tinker with the Deleuzian system, bring it up to date with Anti-Oedipus, and assimilate it with Reik's system, it has more direct bearing on Joyce. Where Deleuze proposes that it is the father being punished in the masochistic scene, for Reik it is the object of desire that is punished. The punished masochist is saying to his torturess: "this is what I want to do to you."lO He is punishing the nymph for aligning herself with the father, and for becoming the ideal ego. He atones for his wish to punish her, by imposing upon himself what he feels that a part of himself desires to impose upon her. Deleuze avoids this conclusion because it is important for him discharge the notion of sadomasochism as a single complex, in which the individual's role in the scene does not matter so much as that equations of power are brought into play.11 Although Reik's argument neglects the possibility of elements of charity and renunciation in masochism, if we accept it we may still argue, as does Deleuze, that there is no single sadomasochistic entity. From the very start, at the first emission, the masochist has chosen, probably
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unconsciously, to be victimized rather than to victimize, and to assume the subaltern position in sexual matters. We may still argue that there is a wall between sadism and masochism, and that the masochistic scene and the sadistic scene occupy two separate and independent universes. The sadist's and the masochist's roles in their respective dramas precede the elaboration of the ritual. Furthermore, sadism and masochism do not meet somewhere in the middle. The masochist does not want a sadistic tortures-although his torturess may employ a sadist-and the sadist does not want a masochistic victim. These combinations would undermine the magical equation, and need to be glossed over by the imaginative disavowals that these perverts use everywhere to supplement the ritual. The masochist's real message to his torturess is: "this is what I would want to do to you if I was not a masochist, because I am a male, and because sex needs violence, and the submission of one party. You, therefore, should do this to me, because I am not willing to unleash the sadism in myself." If we assimilate the systems of Reik and Deleuze, we may argue that the fourfold relationship between the masochist and his torturess is as follows. The torturess represents both the object of desire as prohibited-the birdgirl or untouchable virgin-and, at the same time, the prohibiting, punishing authority, or superego. She is the nymph aligned with the fathers. The masochist, on the other hand, represents the sporty boy, the potential father who desires to own the birdgirl, and the birdgirl parodied, the birdgirl made whore: desire itself. This ritual attacks chastity. Chastity, more than law, is parodied. Bloom: "(Bends his blushing face into his armpit and simpers with forefinger in his mouth) 0 , I know what you're hinting at now" (U., p. 652). In the masochistic ritual, the masochist is compelled to produce desire. He is at the same time refused release by the application of a parody of the methods by which he was frustrated and denied outside of the ritual. Although this system will go some way toward accounting for the transvestism in Joycean masochism, it must be considered as no more than a tentative equation. There are other tensions that supplement, and in places contradict this predominant tension. In Anti-Oedipus, and in A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari renounce the validity of such pat systemizations when they propose, instead of the echoing family drama of Freud's oedipal system, a schizophrenic psychological model, which traces the shifting of identities, and the flow and ooze of polymorphous perversity. Masochism is perhaps best accounted for by the only superficially simplistic contention that only minoritarian identifications afford access to becomings. It seems that for both Joyce and Deleuze masochism serves to replace the father in the symbolic realm. When the father is gone, and identity is abandoned, the masochist may dispense of the structure of the ritual, and elude determination. Deleuze moves from Oedipal terms in his interpretation of masochism, to anti-oedipal, schizo free-flow in Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. Joyce moves from inverting and parodying relations of power
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in the masochism in "Circe," to the scattering of these relations, and the schizo free-flow of Finnegans Wake, which, if masochistic, relates to no definable masochistic structures. In Anti-Oedipus and Finnegans Wake, masochism disappears because its overdetermined qualities enable it to be absorbed into all in which it participates. Even in "Circe," however, the masochist does not limit himself to the players of the family drama. Instead, the masochist faces a multiplicity, a "choir" chanting "menace" (U., p. 49). The sexual other is not the mother or the father, but society. Stephen is subjected to the condemnation of this multiplicity immediately after the hell sermons: "We knew perfectly well of course that although it was bound to come to the light he would find considerable difficulty in endeavouring to try to induce himself to try to endeavor to ascertain the spiritual plenipotentiary and so we knew of course perfectly well-~\/lurmuring faces waited and watched; murmurous voices filled the dark shell of the cave" (Port., p. 123).The sins of the past are personified for Bloom also: faces detach themselves from the chorus, and loom on Bloom, representing distinct aspects or facets of this socius, single wolves behind which lurk many: "Mute inhuman faces throng forward, leering, vanishing, gibbering, Booloohoom" (U., p. 650). In the same way that the masochist must become woman in order to summon the woman, and become the torturer in order to summon the torturer, so he must become this scornful socius. Populations migrate across his Body without Organs. The ritual is political and social, rather than familial. Stephen considers paternity to be a legal fiction. His masochistic drama does not lead back to Simon, as much as to the priests and his schoolmates. It does not lead back to the mother, as much as to a series of distinct objects of desire, to which he was forbidden approach. The Novicks notice that: In the beating fantasy [ . . . ] there was a clear differentiation maintained between self and object. The subject was always the victim and the beater was invariably a person ~ 1 1 0figured in the child's real life, often the father or someone drawn from the class of father representatives.12
Although the roles of the victim and the victimizer are structured, the identities of the victim and the victimizer are remarkably labile. The beater may be a man or a woman, but in the fantasy it will tend to be a combination of the two, that will typically multiply in the ascension of arousal. The lability of the masochist's apparent gender, and the predominant movement toward feminization, also seems to support Marcus and Gibson's suspicions that flagellation relates closely to homosexuality. Marcus points out that Victorian pornography occurs much more frequently in girls schools than in boys schools, and argues that this is what we should have expected to be the results of repression. Gibson glosses his argument:
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Guilt and shame n o doubt play a role in the transference from male to female establishments, the pretence of the girls' school acting as a form of defence against the recognition of the male component in the beater. One of the striking features of Victorian pornography is the almost complete absence of homosexual material-this at a time when homosexual relationships seem to have been common in the schools favoured by the privileged classes. Only repression can explain this absence, since pornography was free to do as it wished and would have catered for the demand had it existed. 1.3
The Beater as Father The role of the male beater is important but he only exists with the tortures behind him. The beating male adds to the political energies of the ritual, and partly satisfies the masochist's compulsion to multiply and intensify these tensions. All psychoanalytic writers assume that behind the beater a father figure always lurks. They believe that the masochist submits to being beating by a female because he is unable to admit to himself that, when he was a child, the idea of being beaten by an authoritative male was sexually exciting to him. In "A Child Is Being Beaten" (1919) Freud claims that: "The boy evades his homosexuality by repressing and remodeling his unconscious fantasy." 14 Bersani, however, has drawn attention to Freud's analysis of Leonardo da Vinci, in which sublimation is drawn as an alternative to repression. Freud suggests that da Vinci's character resulted from the absence of a father figure, and a resulting failure to develop a superego. Instead of developing mechanisms of repression, da Vinci established a transformative obsession with the transformative body of the mother, and a reluctance to conclude projects undertaken. Bersani argues that in this essay Freud represses his own suspicions that this might reveal a more primal sexuality, in which sexuality is masochistic from his inception, and that this other sexuality would undermine his need to draw conclusions. For the Novicks, the masochistic construct seems to stand as an alternative to the superego. They insist, however, that this alternative is masculine: It is in relation to this "delusion of omnipotence," the continuing lack of internal and external controls, that one of the important functions of the beating fantasy could be seen. From the material of these children, the timing of the emergence of the fantasy, and the content of the fantasy, it was evident that the beater in the fantasy represented a wished-for ideal father, a strong male who would limit and control the fulfillment of olnnipotent libidinal and destructive wishes. The fathers of all these patients were particularly unsuitable to serve as strong, protective objects for iden-
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tification. In the fantasy the beater was a father or father representative ~ 1 1 0 lvas always a powerful, assertive figure punishing the child, often to stop him from gratifying a forbidden wish.15
The beating fantasy may serve as a supplement for those who have failed to develop a superego, or as an alternative construction of the superego.
The Beater as Mother Despite the indications that the masochistic fantasy is essentially homosexual, it is not possible to disregard the fact that in Victorian literature the figure of the beater is most commonly female. Marcus and Gibson perhaps overestimate the extent of the role which repression plays in the masochistic fantasy when they attempt to remove the mother altogether. The true meaning of the fantasy is as likely to be hidden by the transformations of sublimation as by the blockages and complete reversals of repression. The beater is never simply the father: it is always the father denying access to the mother, the colonizer taking away a Holy Land. Anthony Storr finds the female figure to be susceptible to detachment from the fantasy because, although she is central to the fantasy, she is seldom if ever encountered in real life. He states that: In clinical practice, at any rate, it is not very uncommon to find masochistic women ~ 1 1 0desire to be subjugated, beaten, and ill-treated before they can be fully erotically aroused: but it is rare to find women who actually want to beat or ill-treat men in order to obtain erotic satisfaction[. . . . ] Women in top boots cracking whips are generally either creatures of the masochistic male's imagination, or else prostitutes obliging their clients by trying to fulfil their phantasies. 16
What are the imaginative origins of the beating woman? Masoch, Rousseau, and Joyce are all fixated on breasts. Most commentators on the subject have noted the masochist's interest in round full breasts, and interpreted this to mean that the beater is on some level a surrogate for the mother. Marcus, however, found that in Victorian flagellant pornography "only rarely is the accuser the mother herself," she is "almost always a surrogate for the mother," "unmistakably the terrible mother, the phallic mother of childhood."l7 Breasts may serve as the woman's source of phallic presence, conjured to balance the masochist's openness, or phallic absence. For Deleuze and Guattari, the minoritarian becoming is a defection from a majority, which must be accompanied by an upsurge of the minoritarian into the majoritarian space. We are perhaps mistaken to consider breasts to always mean the mother. In terms of their phallic presence they could as easily mean the father; and then, if the mother means the father, what have we found?
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The Novicks consider masochism to be the result of a series of consolidations, occurring at every phase. The initial determinant, from which the others follow, is the infant's relationship with the mother: [Tlhe child's pain-seelting adaptation to a pathological early relationship continues in the anal phase as the prime mode of attracting and retaining the object. The aggressive impulses of the anal phase are dealt with by the defense of turning the aggression against the self, which prevents destruction of the object and allows for discharge of aggression toward the internalized hated mothec In our view, the adaptive and defensive motives for the masochism that underlies the beating fantasy are preoedipal; the masochistic behavior of the child is not as yet a sexual pleasure in itself.18
It is possible that each of these consolidations is dependent upon a preconscious or a subconscious choice. This hateful, violent energy is an unavoidable presence. He call either direct it against his mother, as a sadist, or against himself, as a masochist. ICrafft-Ebing considers both sadism and masochism to be predominantly heterosexual. In both cases, the normative drive is not disguised by the perversity, but underlined by it. For the masochist, the normative object is the goal that is always distant, receding as he moves toward it. In engineering the ritual, he chooses to amplify this distance, but he never ceases to move toward this normative, heterosexual object of desire. Here, masochism is not a damaged descendant of the family drama, but a representation of a more primal and all-pervasive power politics. Although heterosexual, homosexual and bisexual currents may enter into this equation, they are present as political rather than biological currencies. Masochism cannot be described simply as heterosexual, because there is always an awareness that the intensity of submission might be increased by an engineered compulsion to engage in homosexual practices. For the masochist, the other is inhuman. Perhaps the fantasy is not hiding anything, and homosexuality, heterosexuality and bisexuality are not relevant to the description of this perversity. Although male and female characters may participate, it cannot even be said that the conjurer is bisexual. He does not want to find a beautiful man, and make love to him, and he does not want to find a beautiful woman and make love to her. Surely this is what it would mean to say that he was bisexual. Masochistic sexuality is a different species of sexuality altogether from these straight sexualities. The focus is the equation, and not a simple need for physical intercourse with the body of another, or the bodies of others. It is meaningless to ask whether the straight masochist is hiding a gay masochist, or the gay masochist is hiding a straight masochist. It is equally meaningless to ask whether the masochist is hiding a sadist, or vice-versa, or even whether the perverted sexuality is hiding a straight sexuality, or viceversa. This is because all of these are always at the same time both true and
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false. To be categorical about masochism is to be delusory. Its transgressive nature precludes neat formulations concerning sexual predilection. It is clear that in the conjuration both homosexual and heterosexual energies are indispensable. Nonetheless, it is possible to differentiate between masochists who are predominantly heterosexual, and those who are predominantly homosexual. Joyce, Rousseau and Masoch are typical of masochists who are predominantly heterosexual. Homosocial energies are, however, very powerful in the works of all of these writers. In the cases of Joyce and Masoch, certainly, homosocial humiliation serves as a suffering undergone during the quest toward the perverse ideal. In masochism, all of the humiliations are undergone primarily for the eyes of a woman, although other eyes gather around these eyes, intensifying her gaze. Although she may seem to disappear, in order to heighten his needed sense that she is indifferent, and not his, she is always in the background. Even if she is never seen, as when Bloom is auctioned off to an all-male audience, her presence is written into the ritual as her absence. Bello continually reminds Bloom that Molly is elsewhere. The woman for whose gaze the masochist performs is always and never a single woman. The gaze will tend to orbit a singular other, but her gaze gains in strength from the public behind or before it, and she herself is labile. She is one image of a woman standing as a representative of all desirable women: the perverse ideal. Behind the manifest object of desire is always the ideal that was lost somewhere. Molly is only a stand-in for Selene, or the nymph in "Circe," who are in turn stand-ins for something vaguer again, something even less human, but always feminine.
In the flogging ritual, masochism that is predominantly heterosexual overlaps with masochism that is predominantly homosexual. It is perhaps better to say, however, that the energies unleashed here are polymorphously perverse, because anal eroticism is not necessarily homosexual. Gibson finds that: "Flagellant fantasies as we find them expressed in pornography [ . . . ] concentrate exclusively on the buttocks. It is clear that flogging inflicted on other parts of the body-shoulders, back, palms of the hands-would not be felt to be sexually stimulating."l9 Although this is a very important point, it is possible to exaggerate this element of sexual beating. Severin seems to be beaten on any and all parts of his body by Wanda, though most typically on the back, and the Greek flogs him on the back. It is likely, however, that the beating of Severin on the back disguises, or acts a compromise for a desire to be beaten on the buttocks. Nonetheless, the face-slapping scene, for instance, carries a powerful charge that is more clearly independent of the beating of the buttocks. While the beating of the buttocks is by far the most typical form of sexual beating, it is by no means the exclusive form.
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Gibson continues to make a number of other points about the centrality of the buttocks to Victorian flagellant pornography: I11 all representations of the fantasy the uncovering of the buttoclts by the dominant figure forms an absolutely indispensable part of the ceremony[. . . . ] In the flagellant fantasy the baring of the buttoclts is carried out with deliberate ritual, the details of which vary very little from boolt to boolt, case history to case history, year to yeas.20 As a rule[. . . ] only the buttoclts themselves are bared, their naltedness and uniqueness being heightened by the fact that, during the beating, the rest of the body remains clothed [ . . . . ] When a woman is being beaten in modern pornography, the rest of her body is frequently clothed in blaclt (blaclt stocltings seem to be an indispensable prop), the c h i a ~ o s c w othereby produced stressing further the pre-eminence of the buttoclts. The fact that the beater is usually fully clothed also serves to emphasise the naltedness of the victim.21
Although all of these points are valid, Gibson seems to underestimate the variability of the fantasy. Sometimes the clichC is avoided, to add poignancy. Other charges and meanings are given by a slap of the face, or a petulant, impromptu whipping, and these may be turned to when the energies of more standard rituals and gestures have been drained, and need to be left alone for a while so that they may recharge themselves. Variation is essential, as there is always the artistic need to create something fresh and original. There is always the frustrated hope that all the pieces will fall into place, and the magic of his pain will have served its final purpose, namely, the reification of the perverse ideal, a moment which would be most distant from the burden of excessive consciousness. Gibson's emphasis on the rubric of the beating ritual becomes a difficulty when he attempts to move from Victorian pornography toward a general theory of sexual beating. In contemporary flagellant pornography, such as Jnnus, women are sometimes whipped while standing straight, while lying out flat, while upside down, or while in any of a number of minutely distinct postures. If there were only one posture, why would one photo not suffice, and why the need for the gargantuan concerted project of filling the Internet with tl~ousandsor millions of only minimally distinct images of sexual beating. Like an addict, the masochist always hopes that the next hit will reveal something that is new, finalizing and liberating. The bent-over position is predominant, certainly, but these variations show that the fantasy is not only open to variability, but also dependent upon variability. Gibson's determination to define the flagellant fantasy does injustice to its capacity for lability, its search for variability in the confines of predetermination, and the sense in which its addictive need for intensification requires supplementation of the fantasy with variation.
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Gibson is very thorough in his analysis of the theories that have been devised to explain the centrality of the buttocks to sexual beating. From Meibom to Krafft-Ebing, beating was considered to be sexual because it caused a reflex spinal influence, which transfers this excitement to the "erection center." Joyce no doubt alludes to this theory in his choice of the spine as the organ of "Circe." Recent theories perpetuate this notion of an interaction taking place between the sites of the anal and the genital. Anthony Storr writes: That the anal area is erotically sensitive may not be familiar to everyone; but stimulation of the genitals normally causes contraction of the muscles around the anal orifice, and vice versa, and, after orgasm, the anal sphincter can be seen to open and close conv~ilsively.Both men and women may be capable of reaching orgasm as a result of anal stimulation; and there is no doubt that some people enjoy being penetrated by this route.22
Gibson extends Storr's argument considerably: the contraction of the anus which is bound to occur when the buttoclzs are whipped, or about to be whipped, is likely to have the effect of stimulating the genitals in the way he has described. Moreover, the flagellant pornographers often show their awareness of this tightening of the buttoclzs: "The culprit should be told to relax the buttoclzs' muscles before each stroke is applied, but this requires training and patience which the administer must attend to."(Janzls,vol.5,110.2 [1975], p.49) Thus what Meibom and others supposed to be the physical effect of beating the skin of the buttocks might, in fact, be more correctly related to the tightening of the anus wl~ichis automatic when the buttoclzs are 'clenched.'23
This seems a scientifically sound reworking of Meibom's thesis, and it explains much about why the buttocks are central to sexual beating. It needs to be supplemented, however, for the same reason that Meibom's thesis needs to be. A recognition of anal eroticism does not explain why sexual beatings should be chosen to excite, when so many other less round about ways of producing excitement are available. It explains only in part the level of addiction that is associated with sexual beating, and it fails to explain the sense of subjection that is essential to sexual beating. Freud more fully accounts for the addictive qualities of sexual beating, with the conception of fixation.
In "The Economic Problem of Masochism," Freud claims that: "The part played by the nates, too, is easily understandable, apart from its obvious basis in reality. The nates are the part of the body which is given erotogenic
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preference in the sadistic-anal phase, like the breast in the oral phase and the penis in the genital phase."24 According to the Freudian model, the "sadistic-anal" phase stretches roughly from the second until the sixth or seventh year of life. Although anal pleasure is present from the earliest days of infancy, it becomes predominant in the second year, when the erotogenic mucous membrane of the rectum becomes the focal point of the child's sensual feeling. Freud observed that many children hold back their feces in order to produce a strange mixture of discomfort and pleasure in the rectum: Children who are malting use of the susceptibility to erotogenic stimulation of the anal zone betray themselves by holding back their stool till its accumulation brings about violent lnuscular contractions and, as it passes through the anus, is able to produce powerful stilnulation of the mucous membrane. In doing so it must no doubt cause not only painful but also highly pleasurable sensations.25
The conception of fixation is most typically applied in relation to anal fixation, although children may become fixated at any stage. For the Novicks, the masochist is fixated at every stage of his development. Perhaps the tendency to fixate is closer to the matter than the actual fixations involved, or the tendency to fixate precedes the subsequent fixations at specific phases. Deleuze's argument that in the resexualization of the desexualized, repetition itself replaces pleasure as the end of sexuality has already been discussed. The correspondences between fixation and obsession are obvious. The anal fixation may serve as a model for other fixations, perhaps even the fixations of destiny repetition. In the anal fixation, and in obsession, postponement of conclusion, or release, and a seemingly static ritual, serve to produce not pleasure but intensity. This intensity consists in the reeling between the paradoxical extremes of pleasure and pain, although pleasure and pain are crude instruments for defining these surges. In these broader terms, the anal fixation might even serve as a prototype for all addiction. The closing off, or annulling of the organs that anal fixation entails relates it to Deleuze and Guattari's conception of the Body without Organs. The conception of desexualization becomes relevant to fixation, because most analysts agree that strictness causes fixations because of the frustration involved. Gibson notes that "Victorians were as unremitting in their insistence upon good behavior on the chamber pot as they were about polite eating and other forms of obedience," and that nannies began to impose their toilet disciplines at a very early age.26 Although it is vague, in Portrait there is a connection between the bedwetting scene and the punishment scene. It is as though they are a part of the same constellation. Gibson comments that: For many children the day-time cleanliness anxieties, severe as they were, must have been mild by comparison with those attaching to nocturnal bed-
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wetting. And it is no wonder that in many cases these anxieties came to adhere to the offending organs themselves; nor that, the organs being the same or in close proximit!; sexuality, urination and excretion became inseparably fused in the minds of many children. From such a tangle of prohibitions and conflicting emotions neurosis was bound to be a frequent avenue of escape.2'
These sorts of connections are common early in Portmit. It is perhaps simpler to say, however, that anxiety comes to adhere to nudity itself. Nudity refers to the buttocks, the genitals and the breasts. Nudity, which can only be defined in relation to shame, unites these areas. The Novicks note that all of their masochistic patients: entered treatment displaying a persistence of anal-phase ways of functioning, with excited preoccupation with seeing, smelling and wiping bottoms, thoughts of defecating on people and smearing. One boy of 9 years still played with and hid feces, and several of them masturbated anally.28
In Portrait, after leaving the school play, Stephen finds private solace in the smell of "horse piss and rotted straw" (P., p.65). In "Calypso," Bloom holds back his stool. In "Circe," when Bello demands that Bloom reveal his most disgusting sin, he claims that this was to have "rererepugnosed in the rerererepugnant" (U., p. 650). Joyce's coprophilia is apparent in his letters to Nora. A modified Meiboinian model might explain why the whipping of the buttocks might be sexually arousing, and the notion of fixation might describe the addiction that some people develop for such beating. Neither of these theories says anything about the sense of subjection that is involved in sexual beating.
In The Naked Ape (1967),zoologist Desinond Morris presents an argument that accounts for all three of these aspects of sexual beating. Morris notes that, when in danger, certain primates may adopt the female rump-presentation posture: d e n it displays toward the attacker in this way, it stimulates a sexual response which damps down the mood of aggression. In such situations, a dominant male or female will mount and pseudo copulate with either a submissive male or a submissive female.29
Although this argument emerges from outside of the Freudian sphere, it is not in contradiction. The Novicks also consider masochism to arise as a means of seducing the aggressor, and to serve as a defense against anxiety.
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Morris describes here a sexuality of gesture, rather than of gender. It is interesting to note that, toward the start of "Circe," Stephen describes a language of gestures. In the sexual terms of these gestures, it is irrelevant whether the attacker or the appeaser is male or female, or any combination. Cats and dogs make this gesture to one another, and to people. Rump-presentation is about power and submission, although sexuality is tied up in it. The cat does not really expect the human to copulate with it, although it might be saying: "I am so little a threat that you could if you wanted to." This gesture constitutes a representation of the receptive sexual posture as one and the same as the subaltern position. Morris continues: the more specific case of the adoption of the female sexual rump-presentation posture as an appeasement gesture has virtually vanished, along with the disappearance of the original sexual posture itself. It is largely confined now to a sort of schoolboy punishment, with rhythmic whipping replacing the rhythmic pelvic thrusts of the dolninant male. It is doubtful whether schoolmasters would persist in this practice if they fully appreciated the fact that, in reality, they were performing a n ancient primate form of ritual copulation with their pupils. They could just as well inflict pain on their victims without forcing them to adopt the bent-over submissive female posture. (It is significant that schoolgirls are rarely, if ever, beaten in this way-the sexual origins of the act would then become too obvious.)30
In Morris' opinion, the instruments used in beating represent the erect phallus: "The rhythmic pelvic thrusts have become symbolically modified into the rhythmic blows of the cane." Havelock Ellis makes the same point: the flagellant approaches a woman with the rod (itself a symbol of the penis and in some countries bearing names wlich are applied to the organ)-as in French, where verge has both meanings-"to inflict on an intimate part of her body the signs of blushing and the spasmodic movements which are associated with sexual excitement" (1962, p.166).3'
It is perhaps a mistake to overemphasize the sense in which this is intercourse disguised, and overlook the political resonances of the gesture. The symbolic position of the buttocks needs to be considered. When Rousseau assumed the rump-presentation posture toward a group of girls, he did not want to incite desire, or to appear lewd, but to appear ridiculous. He appeared ridiculous because they saw not him, but his posterior; when he was caught, the girls made a point of seeing his face. It could be argued that the "becoming-ass" is an important node on the movement of becomings, which Deleuze and Guattari have failed to name.32 Is the masochist's assumption of the rump-presentation posture a means of defense against aggression, an aesthete-transformative movement-the
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becoming minoritarian-or a political gesture indicating a refusal to be a victimizer, although this means that he must be victimized instead? Arousal is incited by the rump-presentation, but not from the urge to procreate, or engage in homo or heterosexual intercourse. Rather, subjection and dominance are sexualized, or they have been sexual all along. Morris's argument also comments upon flagellant literature's interest in the reddening of the buttocks. It has been imaginatively suggested by one authority that the reason for sometimes forcing schoolboys to lower their trousers for the administration of the punishment is not related to increasing the pain, but rather to enabling the dominant male to witness the reddening of the buttoclts as the beating proceeds, which so vividly recalls the flushing of the primate female hindquarters when in full sexual condition.33
This topic (the reddening of the buttocks) will be further dealt with in relation to the importance of shame in masochistic ritual. Swinburne, among others, repeatedly compares the blushing of the bottom to the blushing of the face.
It might be useful to keep this arguinent clear of Freud and the nuclear family for a few moments more. For Krafft-Ebing, although the beating of buttocks is clearly involved in the masochist's delights, this does not constitute a homoerotic anal sexuality, but is instead a simple stimulant to heterosexual arousal. As mentioned, ICrafft-Ebing found both masochism and sadism to be essentially heterosexual in direction. He described masocl~ism as follows: By masochis~nI understand a peculiar perversion of the psychical vita sexw alis in \vl~ichthe individual affected, in sexual feeling and thought, is controlled by the idea of being completely and unconditionally subject to the will of a person of the opposite sex; of being treated by this person as by a master, humiliated and abused. This idea is coloured by lustful feeling; the masochist lives in fancies, in which he creates situations of this ltind and often attempts to realize them. By this perversion his sexual instinct is often made more or less insensible to the normal charms of the opposite sex-incapable of normal vita sexllalis-psychically impotent.34
Without recourse to a model of repression, for ICrafft-Ebing the perversity was complete. The masochistic drive does not disguise a homosexual or heterosexual drive for communion with the body of another. Instead, it is simply a drive for active or passive subjection. If beauty is sought in the bodies of those summoned to participate in the masochistic ritual, this is
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because it makes the sense of subjection more keen, and so more compelling. They are less likely to desire or admire him, as they are more interested in others as beautiful as themselves. ICrafft-Ebing recognized that the Meibomian explanation of passive flagellation cannot account for the masochist's or the sadist's use of sexual beating. He supplemented Meibom's argument, by claiming "that passive flagellation occurs so frequently in masochism [because] it is the most extreme means of expressing the relation of subjection."35 An examination of sadistic pornography, however, reveals the weakness in this argument. Flagellating another person is an extreme way of expressing dominance over that person, but it is by no means the most extreme. The subjection involved in submitting to another to be flogged is tame in comparison to the level of subjection involved, for instance, in Frederick Hankey's hopes of having a bible bound in flesh stripped from the genitals of little girls.36 ICrafft-Ebing concludes that in sadism and masochism: the primary or essential thing is the conscio~isnessof active or passive subjection, in which the colnbination of cruelty and lustful pleasure has only a secondary psychological significance. Acts of cruelty serve to express this subjection: first, because they are the most extreme form for the expression of this relation; and, again, because they represent the most intense effect that one person, either with or without coitus, can exert 011 another.:'
This is a sound description of masochism, although it does not say anything about w h y the primary or essential thing is "the consciousness of active or passive subjection." Nonetheless, without a model of repression, it was easier for Krafft-Ebing to accept that masochism might not simply be a means of disguising homo- or heterosexual drives for the bodies of others. Instead, sexuality might become, or already entail, a drive to produce political equations of power which, without renouncing the normative drive, subvert this drive, and postpone its satisfaction indefinitely. The masochist draws the intensities that he seeks from the energies given off by frustration. The frustration afforded by the inaccessibility of the tortures, by her essential indifference, is a reiteration of the retention, or withholding of release at all levels, namely, the fixation, or obsession. In masochism we find anal retention, oral retention and genital retention. The intensity aroused by retention at each of these phases has an addictive quality that is responsible for the fixation. There is also a charge given off by retention at the solar anus, in the refusal to let thought translate into action, and the refusal to renounce the ideal. At this level the Meibomian model reveals its limitations, because the perversity has taken on political and aesthetic dimensions. A body sealed at all apertures is a Body without Organs. The renunciation of the body that retention entails also recalls the
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methods of the visionary, and supports the contention that in the refusal to release, or to spend, the masochist is conjuring the ideal. The boy in "Araby" does not pull money out of his pocket at the bazaar. At the end of this story, he "burns with shame." This is indicative of his relating the normative drive to spending, and of his perception of the cheapness of satisfaction as a degradation of the ideal, as simoniacal. He sees himself as ridiculous standing in the world of barter with his dreams. When he stands as a boy in the minoritarian posture before the shopgirl and the men with whom she flirts, he feels alienated. It might be suggested that he is attracted to the shopgirl, whom he sees in a sexual context that he does not as yet fully understand. Or: he is aroused by the equation of she and these men, and him standing there in the minoritarian posture with only small change in his pocket. His eyes, perhaps, burn with shame, in part because this equation has become sexualized, and will replace his more chaste and idealistic image of Mangan's sister in the impending masturbatory fantasy?38 The awakening of genital sexuality is suggested by his holding of coins in his pocket, which foreshadows Eileen's hand in Stephen's pocket, and Bloom's hand in his own pocket. He is ashamed because he has learned how to spend in two ways, and this seems to cheapen and diminish his unrequitable desire. It does not produce intensity, as does the retention involved in pursuing the unattainable, but deadells the drive instead. The boy's psychical torment, although masochistic due to his idealization, has not as yet established itself at a physical level.39 Beating often plays only a secondary role in the masochistic ritual. It may be used as a refrain, or chorus, which offers a context to other gestures of submission to the perverse ideal. Oral fixation is also powerful, and it is revealed in the kissing of the instrument of castigation. Gibson quotes these examples of the masochist's gestural language: "[After whipping, the] delinquent subsequently thanks the governess! ICisses the rod! then thanks the superintendent"40 (Family Herald). And again: "the delinquents being tightly strapped to an ottoman during the castigation, at the conclusion of which they had to kiss the rod and thank the governess [ . . . . ] "41 (The Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine, December 1868.) In "Circe," Bello tells Bloom that he will kiss the knout. She also makes him kiss the butt of her cigar (U., p. 646). On some level, it seems certain that the kissing of the rod, or the knout, disguises an act of fellatio. This is true also of kissing the feet and licking shoes and boots. Nonetheless, just as sexual beating is something more than anal penetration disguised, so does such submissive osculation reveal more than a disguised homosexual drive.
Although sexual beating is perhaps the most striking element of masochism, the sexualization of shame is more essential to the perversity. The masochist desires to be beaten primarily because of the shame entailed in being beaten.
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Shame as Punishment Like beating, shame has proven to be an effective method of punishment, and it too is subverted to serve masochistic arousal. In recent times, public humiliation is often avoided, in the way that the beating of the buttocks, or for that matter corporal punishment in general is avoided, because there is a typically unstated awareness of the sexual implications of these disciplinary methods. Like flogging, shame is able to awaken sexuality prematurely, and to cause the sexual drive to become fixated upon it. If, as has been suggested, "Araby" is about the awakening of genital sexuality, sexuality is born in the shame of the boy's seeing himself as "a creature driven and derided by vanity" (Dub., p. 21). Gibson notes that the opinion that shame might have a greater deterrent effect than physical punishment has long been common. He quotes from a Family Herald of 1847: the flogging of a criminal should never lacerate the flesh, never even break the skin. It should always be attended with ridicule, not sympathy. Whenever you create sympathy, you destroy its efficacy. Let the scoundrel get a smack, and then get up, writhe, and rub it, amid the laughter of the spectators. He would feel it for life, not in the flesh, but in his pride; and no p~iblicsubscription, as in the case of army victims, would ever be raised in his behalf by popular sympathy The very leniency of the punishment in a corporeal sense, would constitute its efficiency, because the ridicule, wl~ich is an important element of punishment, would come to supply the defect of corporeal severity.42(18 Sept 1847) Such punishment, based on ridicule, rather than corporal laceration, is at the heart of the use of the stocks. Although standing in front of the class may seem a method of removing the student from a portion of the classroom in which he has proven t o be disruptive, its effect is generally the production of shame.
Mechanical Explanations of Shame Just as there is a mechanical explanation of the sexual element in beating, so is there a mechanical explanation of the sexual element in shame. As with the mechanical explanation of beating, however, the mechanical explanation of shame needs to be supplemented. In order to understand the sexual element in shame, we need also to examine the socio-political symbols involved in shame, and its participation in a language of gestures. Flagellant pornography's interest in the reddening of the buttocks has already been mentioned. There is a paradoxical sense in which blushing draws attention to the blusher. As an involuntary signal, blushing seems to be in the service of the perversity from the beginning. Blushing entails a
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betrayal of the self, by the self. One's anxieties, secrets and innermost thoughts are given public expression. In Three Contributions to the Theory of Sexuality (1905) Freud interprets shame as a defense against the urge to exhibit or look at the genitals. Blushing, the most obvious manifestation of shame, is explained as a "conversion symptom," a "hysterical upwards displacement of sexual excitement from the genitals to the face." The initial flow of blood to the genitals is checked by the super ego, and the blood is deflected to the face. Some exhibitionistic urge is satisfied in this way, but at the same time the punishment is exacted. For Sartre, in Being and Nothingness, the root of shame is a perception of the body as being under the scrutiny of others: "To 'feel oneself blushing,' to 'feel oneself sweating,' etc., are inaccurate expressions which the shy person uses to describe his state; what he really means is that he is vividly and constantly conscious of his body not as it is for him but as it is for the Other."43
The Politics of Looking At the start of Ulysses, Stephen acquiesces to look into a mirror that Buck holds up to him, a mirror stolen from Buck's female servant. Stephen refers to the image of himself as "dogsbody," an appellation that Buck applied to him moments before. Here, Stephen chooses to surrender without a struggle in the power politics of the gaze, in which he who looks gains power over, or transcends, he who is looked upon. Buck becomes the eye and the mind, and Stephen the objectified and mortal body-Tatters or Caliban. In shame, we feel exposed before a gaze, and this gaze seems to gain a magical, intrusive power. There is always something irrational, and sexual, about the feelings of exposure involved in shame. In his chapter on blushing in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, Darwin notes that: Under a keen sense of shame there is a strong desire for concealment. We turn away the whole body, more especially the face, which we endeavour in some manner to hide. An ashamed person can hardly endure to meet the gaze of those present, so that he almost invariably casts down his eyes or loolzs aslzant.44
Darwin here describes a language of gesture, or posture, which involves the hiding of the eyes. In O n Shame and the Search for Identity (1958), Helen Merrell Lynd writes: experiences of shame appear to embody the root meaning of the word-to uncover, to expose, to wound. They are experiences of exposure, exposure
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of peculiarly sensitive, intimate, vulnerable aspects of the self. The exposure may be to others but, whether or not others are involved, it is always [ . . . ] exposure to one's own eyes.45 The combination of a posture that hides the eyes, and vulnerability, make the signs of shame akin to the rump-presentation posture. Before we may be ashamed, we must be taught contexts in which to experience shame: shame is always socially determined. In so far as shame is socially determined, it is related to the superego or, as will be argued, the ideal ego. Shame, like beating, is used as a disciplinary method in the socialization of children. Eventually, the subject learns what he should and should not do, primarily from the establisl~mentof a sense of shame. After socialization, shame constitutes a perception of the self first, before this perception is projected onto-and often reinforced by-external gazes. As when Buck holds a mirror up to Stephen, the other acts as a mirror for the self. Unlike pride, which also entails being looked at, in shame that which is exposed evokes a negative judgment. Shame is more powerful when this response leaks out into the undifferentiated public, so that even strangers know the secret of the person who is shamed. They have identified him, and he cannot identify them: they are seen without being seen. Joyce explores this aspect of shame in "Circe," when Bloom is judged and rebuked by the myriad voices of the general public. Shame is exacerbated by name-calling. There is, in Joyce, a recurring tone of rebuke, in which the imagination emulates, or conjures, the scorn that his community would heap on him were his naked soul revealed to them. One of the first instances of this vague rebuke is in the semi-coherent muttering which precedes the apparition of the goat fiends (Port., p. 123).We hear it again in "Circe" when Bloom, before entering the brothel, is scorned and exalted by a metamorphic phantasmagoria of his community. In Finnegans Wake, there is the scandalized, rebuking tone of Shaun, the cad, the four masters and the washerwomen. Such internalization and intensification of scorn is a reaction to actual gossip and disapproval-to the sense that the community stands allied against him, and that his secrets have been disclosed, and become the subject of gossip. Joyce, and Stephen, suffer from a destiny repetition which compels them to confess to friends who will later betray their trust. Joyce's creative preoccupation with imitating the mocking, gossiping voices of his society, like his preoccupation with embodying the voice of woman, in Gerty, Molly and Anna Livia, is related to his masochism. The ability to imagine the self as revealed before the community, and their disapproving, mocking response, is essential to the masocl~isticfantasy. Joyce learned much of this sneering tone from his father. The masochist must be able to identify with these disapproving others, in order to play their part, and let them speak in the fantasy. He must be able to empathize with their disapproval. In masochism, to be found out, and rebuked, becomes a source of lust. When the sirens laugh at the idea of being married to the chemist in Boyd's,
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the highlighting of the sexual undertones of their laughter coincides with Bloom's transformation of their laughter into laughter at the notion of being married to him: "0 greasy eyes! Imagine being married to a man like that, she cried [ . . . . ] Douce gave full vent to a splendid yell, a full yell of full woman [ . . . . ] All flushed (O!), panting, sweating ( O ! ) all breathless. Married to Bloom, to greaseaseabloom. 0 saints above! [ . . . . ] I wished I hadn't laughed so much. I feel all wet" (U., pp. 334-5). Whereas sadistic literature tends to focus upon the similarities between gestures of pain and of sexual arousal in the object of desire, for the masochist the object of desire expresses sexual arousal through laughter. Later, in "Circe," after Father Dolan calls out "Any boy want a flogging," the narrative moves from a focus on Stephen back to Bloom's masochistic fantasy. The abrupt transition occurs after Stephen complains that he has hurt his hand somewhere. STEPHEN: [ . . . . ] I a m twent) two too. S~xteenJ ears ago I twent) two tumbled, twentj two ears ago he sixteen fell off 111s hobb) horse ( H e wznces). H ~ i r In! t hand somewhere. [ . . . . ] (Zoe whzspers to Florr): The)' gzggle. Bloom releases hzs hand and wrztes zdljl on the table zn backhand, penczllzng slow cz~rues.) FLORRY What? ( A hacknejlcal; number three hzlndred and twent)'fozll; wzth a gallantbzlttocked mare, drzuen bjl James Barton, Harmon)' Auenz1e, Donnj'brook, trots past. Blazes Bojdan and Lenehan sprawl swa)'zng o n the szdeseats [ . . . . I ) (U., pp. 66-9)
Here, the laughter and the secrets of Zoe and Florry conjure Boylan and the masochistic fantasy. This aspect of the masochistic fantasy is the hardest to actualize, because it will leave the most indelible mark on the non-masochistic life of the masochist. For this reason, great effort must be made to imagine it into being, and great silence and cunning must be utilized to minimize lasting damage when this is not enough. In "Circe," we see the tone of rebuke become hypnotic and aphrodisiac: Bloom moves in orbit, reiterating this flowing, conjured voice of his disapproving society, magnetized and sexualized by a sense of shame.
WHATIS BEINGSHOWN Becoming Buttocks
Gibson remarks on the relationship between nakedness and shame in sexual beating: By ordering the passive flagellant to reveal those parts which, as a child, he was not allowed to display, the ban on genital exhibitionism is temporarily
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lifted and the sexual excitement associated with it allowed to reassert itself. At the same time the victim is humiliated by being placed in a passive position by the dominant adult. Thus the flagellant ceremony always contains a mixture of sexual excitement and shame.46
It is, however, not so much the genitals as the buttocks that are being displayed in sexual beating. Furthermore, in sexual beating the buttocks are not simply exposed, but presented in a vulnerable position. They are, in fact, presented in the rump-presentation posture, and so stand as symbols of the feminine, the blind, the defenseless and the receptive; as the face of the subaltern position. A society which renders the buttocks taboo will utilize the resultant sense of shame associated with their revelation in public. The buttocks are covered because they are considered to be the sexual, animal, non-volitional, and possibly feminine, object of the gaze. The buttocks, as they are situated behind, can only be looked at, and can never look: they are always objectified by the gaze. It is for this reason, also, that they are vulnerable. They are in symbolic opposition to the eyes, which are so closely connected to the conscious mind. Whereas the eyes suggest the rational, the buttocks suggest the instinctual, and the defenselessness of the objectified. In The Confessions, Rousseau describes an occasion on which he presented his bottom to a group of girls. It is likely that he was compelled to do this because he wanted to extract intensity from such a pure distillation of vulnerability and shame. His gesture is the opposite of genital exhibitionism, which is grounded in pride, and the desire to prove the self to be a man. Here, the urge is to display the self as something less than a man, as something more vulnerable. After describing his obsession with fantasies of sexual beating, Rousseau confesses: My agitation became so strong that, being unable to satisfy my desires, I excited them by the most extravagant behaviors. I haunted dark alleys and hidden retreats, where I might be able to expose myself to women in the condition in which I should have lilted to have been in their company What they saw was not an obscene object, I never even thought of such a thing; it was a ridiculous object. The foolish pleasure I took in displaying it before their eyes cannot be described. There was only one step further necessary for me to take, in order to gain actual experience of the treatment I desired, and I have no doubt that someone passing by would have been bold enough to afford me the amusement, while passing by, if I had had the boldness to wait [ . . . . ] I exhibited to the girls who came to the well a sight more laughable than seductive. The more modest pretended to see nothing; others began to laugh; others felt insulted and made a noise. I ran into my retreat.4'
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Rousseau's arousal drives him to elicit laughter by his assumption of the rump-presentation posture, and his becoming a "ridiculous object." There is a sense in which he is hiding behind the anonymity of the buttocks, and of his object state. Afterwards, when he is apprehended by the man with the big moustache, the girls make a point of trying to see his face. Sartre has the following to say on the sense of objectification that accompanies shame: Pure shame is not a feeling of being this or that guilty object but in general of being an object; that is, of recognizing myself in this degraded, fixed, and dependent being which I am for the Othec Shame is the feeling of an original fall, not because of the fact that I may have committed this or that particular fault, but simply that I have "fallen" into the world in the midst of things and that I need the mediation of the Other in order to be what I am. Modesty and in particular the fear of being surprised in a state of nalzedness are only a symbolic specification of original shame; the body symbolizes here our defenseless state as objects. To p ~ i on t clothes is to hide one's object-state; it is to claim the right of seeing without being seen; that is, to be pure subject.48
All of this is especially the case when it is the naked buttocks that are being shown. To assume the rump presentation posture, naked, in front of a group of clothed strangers is to be seen without seeing, and to make the self a thing among things.
Becoming Object Sartre relates shame to becoming an object under the other's gaze, and through this describes shame as the essential element of masochism: Masochism is an attempt not to fascinate the Other by my objectivity, but to cause myself to be fascinated by means of my objectivity-for-others [ . . . . ] ~ n a s o c h i s ~isn characterized as a species of vertigo, vertigo not before a precipice of rock and earth but before the abyss of the Other's subjectivity49
In this sense, the masochist sexualizes the condition of alienation: alienation from others and from his own body. Masochism will, however, always fail in its goals of tasting objectivity, and melding with the other, because of the paradox that inheres in the heart of the perversity. This failure will result in frustration and obsession. [I]t is useless for the masochist to get down on his knees, to show hilnself in ridiculous positions, to cause himself to be used as a simple lifeless instrument. It is for the Other that he will be obscene or simply passive, for the
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Other that he will undergo these postures; for himself he is forever condemned to give them [these postures] to himself. It is in and through his transcendence that he disposes of himself as a being to be transcended. The more he tries to taste his objectivity, the more he will be submerged by the co~~scio~isness of his subjectivity-hence his anguish.jO
In order to account for the masochist's concessions to such a solipsistic sexuality, we must posit the perverse ideal-the very transcendence, perhaps, that he is attempting to draw down into body. Garry Leonard suggests that "sexual orientation is much more about positionality and secrecy than it is about desire," and that "[tlo accumulate secrets is to feel an increase in interiority, which is also to feel like a subject capable of producing meaning and constructing interpretations."51 He also argues that it is not the content of the secret that is pertinent, but rather the possession or loss of the secret. In masochism, the subject attempts to free himself of the burden of holding secrets. As the content of the secret is of little matter, the deepest secret that the masochist can show is the self as an appropriable, pliable object. If secrets grant subjectivity, and an increase in interiority, masochism's denudation of secrets is an effort to taste the state of the object, and find release from excessive consciousness. "To have secrets discovered, or to feel pressured to confess them, is to feel increasingly subject to the Symbolic order in general, and law in particular, and thus to collapse into a posture of feeling judged, rather than able to judge.""2 That Bello, who is, after all, Bloom's construction, compels Bloom to reveal his dirtiest, most shameful secrets, tells us that masochism actively seeks this loss of self, or subjectivity. Again, however, it must be stressed that masochism is not a condition, but a movement. The masochist seeks to lose his secrets as relaxation, and as release from the more normative impulse to accumulate and keep secrets. He attempts to escape his subjectivity, and his psychological integrity, and become object. Leonard also relates the becoming object entailed in the loss of secrets to becoming woman: for Joyce's early narrators, as well as for Richard and Stephen, any sense of self as "masculine" is directly related to their confidence in themselves as subjects capable of signification, and [ . . . ] this confidence, by and large, comes from secrets kept in Stephen's secret cave. Steal from the cave and he becomes "feminine," not in terms of sexual orientation, but strictly in perceived phallic potential, \vl~ichis an effect of relationship, not a n essence, and its ability to pose as an essence relates to a retroactive sense of one's own interiority brought on by producing a secret and/or stealing someone else's.jj
In renouncing his secrets, the masochist renounces both his subjectivity and his masculinity.
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Becoming Tool There is also in shame a sense in which the body is reduced to the state of being a tool for the other. Sartre explains: My body as alienated escapes me toward being-a-tool-among-tools, toward being-a-sense-organ-apprehended-by-sense-oras, and this is accompanied by a n alienating destruction and a concrete collapse of my world which flows toward the Other and which the Other will reapprehend in h ~ s world [ . . . . ] '4
Rousseau describes the delight which he took in acting as a servant to Mademoiselle de Breil, a young lady of nearly his age, who was "tolerably good looking [with] that expression of gentleness [ . . . ] which my heart has never been able to resist": my ambition, limited to the pleasure of serving her, never went beyond my rights. At table I was always on the looltout to assert them. If her footman left her chair for a moment, I was behind it immediately; otherwise I stood opposite her; I looked in her eyes to see what she was going to look for, and watched for the moment to change her plate. What would I have done if she would only have deigned to give me some order, to address a single word to me! But no! I had the mortification of being nothing to her; she did not even notice that I was there.'j
Becoming an Object of Desire Gibson notes that the patients of Sandor Feldinan were all intensely ashamed of displaying feminine behavior traits that had been imposed upon them in early childhood and had become second nature through the agency of the internalized conscience. Many of Feldman's blushers were also compulsive masturbators, but he found that they were ashamed, not so much of the practice itself, as of the passive fantasies and other perverse scenes which they conjured up during it: "It is the perverse fantasy which is responsible for the shame and blushing, and it is this that the blusher fears the observer will detect."jh In Freud's later writings, he suggested that beating fantasies represented not only Oedipal wishes but also a confession of masturbation. Stephen's shame for his compulsive masturbatory habit is an important theme in Portmit. Shame relates not only to exposure, but also to exposure in the submissive position. The masochist wants to be seen as weak, helpless, ridiculous, laughable, incompetent, impotent, a cuckold, and an ass. The hierarchical downward spiral toward becoming nothing may be mapped as follows: becoming woman, becoming animal, becoming ass (in all its connotations), and becoming molecular.
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Sartre describes the essence of masochism as follows: It is my own subjectivity which above all must be denied by my own freedom. I attempt therefore to engage myself wholly in my being-as-object. I refuse to be anything more than an object. I rest upon the Other, and as I experience my being-as-object in shame, I will and I love my shame as the profound sign of my objectivity. As the Other apprehends me as object by means of actual desire, I wish to be desired, I make myself in shame an object of desire.j7
For example, in T h e Story of 0, when 0 arrives at Roissy, she is given a number of rules to abide by during her stay.58 She should never let her lips or her knees touch, and when she sits, she should lift her skirt from beneath her, so that her bare bottom is in direct contact with the chair. Most importantly, she is never to look in the faces of her masters, but should instead direct her gaze toward their clothed but emphasized genitals. They explain to her that the purpose of these rules is to continually remind her of her openness, her nakedness and her vulnerability. The sexual politics of looking and being looked at is explicit in these rules.
The Witnesses Because shame entails feelings of being looked at, there must be someone who is looking, even if this someone is a figment of the mind. Even when others are looking there is a conspiracy between the witnesses and the person experiencing shame. On some level, the shamed party must acquiesce to feel ashamed. It is perhaps useless to look to the mother or the father for an explanation of the sexual nature of shame. Here, the other has become the public, or a net of tensions in which the public is caught. This is a sexualization of the condition of alienation: the masochist is not so much loving, as making love to his symptoms.
All for the Female Gaze The sense in which the shamed party acquiesces, and the sense in which a tangible external gaze is not needed for the experience of shame, as an illusory gaze may suffice, suggest that shame is related to an internal mechanism. The masochist seems to present himself to the feminine ideal ego, instead of judging himself against the superego. As she is a figment of his mind, this presentation reveals itself as narcissism. He seeks to impress the internalized object of desire, the perverse ideal, rather than obey an internalized father. In masochism, he shows himself to be what she is not-that is, lowly and physical-as an act of devotion to her. Bloom's perverse idealism is a descendant of Stephen's perverse Mariolatry:
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His sin, \vl~ichhad covered him from the sight of God, had led him nearer to the refuge of sinners. Her eyes seemed to regard him with mild pity; her holiness, a strange light glowing faintly upon her frail flesh, did not humiliate the sinner who approached hec If ever he was impelled to cast sin from him and to repent the impulse that moved him was the wish to be her Itnight. If ever his soul, re-entering her dwelling shyly after the frenzy of his body's lust had spent itself, was turned toward her whose emblem is the morning star, bright and musical, telling of heaven and infusing peace, it was when her names were lnurlnured softly by lips whereon there still lingered foul and sha~nefulwords, the savour itself of a lewd kiss. (Port., p. 80)
The sexual element of shame would suggest that for the male masochist the internal or external gaze that evokes shame is feminine. In "Such, Such were the Joys," George Orwell recounts that, before the first of a number of beatings for wetting his bed, the wife of the headmaster of his school went out of her way to humiliate him in front of a female visitor. She told this woman about his bed-wetting, and threatened to instruct the sixth form to cane him if he did not immediately learn to exercise control over his bladder. To this day I can feel myself almost swooning with shame as I stood, a very small, round-faced boy in short corduroj knickers, before the two women [ . . . . ] my dominant feeling was not fear or even resentment; it was simply shame because one more person, and that a woman, had been told of my disgusting offence. '9
It was essential to Rousseau's sexualization of shame that his first beating should have been from a beautiful woman: Mademoiselle Lambercier. [Tlhis chastisement made me still more devoted to her who had inflicted it. It needed all the strength of this devotion and all my natural docility to keep myself from doing something which would have deservedly brought on a repetition of it; for I found in the pain, even in the disgrace, a mixture of sensuality which had left me less afraid than desirous of experiencing it again from the same hand. N o doubt that same precocious sexual instinct was mingled with this feeling, for the same chastiselnent inflicted by her brother would not have seemed to me at all pleasant.60
The particular intensity of shame before the female gaze is seen when Stephen is commanded to come out from under the table and apologize, presumably to Eileen. In "Counterparts," Farrington is shamed before Miss Delacour, and then before the memory of the girl with the yellow gloves. In this story, there is a third female witness to the humiliation of males at the hands of one another, in the evocation of the Virgin Mary, to whom the child promises to say a prayer. In Ulysses, Bloom recognizes the difficulty that
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men have in being shown to be less than other men before the female gaze. He wonders why John Henry Menton dislikes him, and then concludes that it is because women witnessed Bloom best him at bowling: "Why he took such a rooted dislike to me. Hate at first sight. Molly and Floey Dillon linked under the lilactree, laughing. Fellow always like that, mortified if women are by" (U., p. 146). Masochistic shame is not for the eyes of the idealized authority figure, but for the eyes of an idealized normative object of desire. The sublimation involved in the sexualization of shame constitutes an alternative to repression, and to the construction of the superego. The gaze of the normative object of desire is always the locus of other gazes that gather around her, and sometimes cover her. She has become an ideal, however, and she maintains this status for as long as he postpones his approach to her. In worshipping the ideal, he is withholding at the solar anus, for the same reason that he might withhold at the other anus: for the sake of intensity. This fixation, this retention, gives off the energy required to erect the structure of his magical omnipotence.
The Masochist's Appropriation of Shame When the conjurations of the psychic enactment fail to satisfy, the masochist must engineer and enact the perverse scene. The perverse ideal will always hover like a sprite among or behind the tangible witnesses. The subject engineers a situation in which shame may be sexualized. Though he will always struggle to resist, at some point he will be compelled to risk exposure. At its root, his primary sexual drive consists in a desire to be in contact with a female body, but he lives this once removed, or desexualized: a darker passion. By default, he longs for exposure and vulnerability before other people. Masochism is particularly dangerous to the subject for this reason. Rousseau describes his impulse to exhibit his buttocks to girls to be the result of shame, and the inability to communicate to women what he wanted from them: Shame, the companion of a bad conscience, had made its appearance with advancing years; it had increased my natural shyness to such an extent that it made it unconquerable; and never, neither then nor later, have I been able to bring myself to make an indecent proposal, unless she to whom I made it, in some measure forced me to it by her advances [ . . . . ] G I
In the masochist's exhibitionism there is an attempt to evade chains of secrecy and reservation. In this sense it is a sexualization of the urge to confess. Rousseau's confession, and his gesture by the well, are expressions of the same compulsion. He loves his shame as the profound sign of his objectivity. Here, Rousseau remakes the body as words:
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I desire to set before my fellows the likeness of a Inan in all the truth of nature, and that man myself [ . . . . ] I have shown myself as I was: mean and contemptible, good, high-minded and sublime, according as I was one or the other. I have unveiled my inmost self even as Thou hast seen it, 0 Eternal Being. Gather round me the countless host of my fellow-men; let them hear my confessions, lament my unworthiness, and blush for my imperfections.62
Rousseau's presentation of his book as the likeness of a m a n m a y be compared t o Joyce's use of a n organ for each chapter of Ulysses. If the text is the body, then this is exhibitionism rather than confession: the body rather than thought is shown, with the former encapsulating the latter; the latter cannot encapsulate the former. Joyce is presenting a human being from 3 6 0 degrees, the whole man, even more so than is Rousseau (although his presentation is more oblique than Rousseau's). Rousseau's Confessions is a conventional expression of the form, whereas Joyce's confession is enmeshed in the novelistic form, and hidden in the spaces between Stephen and Bloom. Writing is involved in the sexualization of shame. This is apparent in Bloom's response t o his exchange of letters with Martha Clifford. In "Lotus Eaters," Bloom thinks of Martha: " G o further next time. Naughty boy: punish: afraid of words, of course. Brutal, why not? Try it anyhow. A bit at a time." While continuing t o think of Martha, he thinks, "Also the t w o sluts in the Cooinbe would listen," and then, of the idealized oriental woman t o w h o m he hearkens back all day: "She listens with big dark soft eyes. Tell her: more and more: all" (U., p. 96-7). H e moves into All Hallows Church, and contemplates the confessional: "Confession. Everyone wants to. Then I will tell you all. Penance. Punish me, please [ . . . . ] Lovely shame" (U., p. 102).
Fluctuations between Shame and Pride Pride and shame are inversions of one another, and equally dependent o n the gaze of the other. T h e relation between Stephen's Satanic pride a n d Bloom's masochism has already been discussed. It seems that the masochist draws shame upon himself not because it does not matter t o him, but because it matters t o him intensely. There is a sense in which, through the enactment of shame, he is attempting t o banish briefly the tyranny of his reservations. Rousseau writes: I am a Inan of very strong passions, and, while I am stirred by them, 110thing can equal my impetuosity; I forget all discretion, all feelings of fear and decency; I am cynical, impudent, violent and fearless; no shame keeps me back, no danger frightens me; with the exception of the single object which occupies my thoughts, the universe is nothing to me. But it all lasts only a moment, and the following moment plunges me into complete annihilation.
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In my calmer moments I am indolence and timidity itself; everything frightens and discourages me [ . . . . ] fear and shame overpower me to the extent that I would gladly hide myself from the sight of my fellow-creatures.h.3
Rousseau is able to exhibit his bare buttocks to a group of girls when he is aroused, but his shame prohibits him from purchasing a delicacy: Coming to a pastrycoolz's shop, I notice some women at the counter; I think I can already see them laughing amongst themselves at the little glutton. I go on to a fruiterer's; I eye the fine pears; their smell tempts me. Two or three young people close by me look at me; a man who lznows me is standing in front of his shop; I see a girl approaching in the distance; is it the housemaid? [ . . . . ] I take all passers-by for acquaintances; everywhere I am intimidated, restrained by some obstacle; my desire increases with my shame, and at last I return home like a fool, consumed with longing, having in my pocket the means of satisfying it, and yet not having the courage to buy anything.@
As with the boy in "Araby," there is, for reasons related to vanity and shame, a reluctance to reach into the pocket and spend. Masochism perhaps serves as a means of alleviating the pain of alienation, by forcing an extreme participation in-or subjection to-community. In his resexualization, the masochist renounces his aloofness, and proves that others are alive, and that he himself is made of flesh, by submitting completely to the gaze of the other. He is forever impeded in this endeavor by his need to construct this audience. Even when alone, the masochist must conjure an audience to witness his degradation: it is not the degradations themselves that he finds compelling, but that he is seen to be degraded. Reik describes the masochist's desire to draw attention to his shame as the demonstrative quality of the perversity. As in so much else in masochism, however, the message here is paradoxical, or hidden. Through cunning, the masochist disguises the message that he wishes to convey. It is as though he looks into one corner of a room, to distract attention from what lies hidden in the other corner.65 Through shaming himself before others, the masochist perhaps declares: "I cannot be shamed. I have stripped myself of such illusions. I am a world unto myself." He displays his suffering, and says: "See how despite this suffering, despite punishment exaggerated to absurdity, I will achieve my pleasure: I am indomitable." Reik describes a child who, as his father beat him, shouted repeatedly: "I am laughing, I am laughing! "66
It may be the case that, rather than really feeling shame, the masochist is only parodying shame, in order to overcome the tyranny of shame. There may also be a sense, however, in which the masochist calls shame upon
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himself not to evade his alienation, but to underline or consolidate this alienation. Given the paradoxical nature of masochism, it is possible that both of these contradictory motivations are present in the perversity. Most commentators on masochism remark upon its humorous or mocking element. Reik emphasizes that the masochist's grotesque distortions and exaggerations serve as a means to express "defiance and vindictiveness, irony and disdain."67 He notes that in dreams grotesque or distorted elements mean that the subject matter of the dream is "absurd, nonsensical."6~The masochist's humor may be a parodic demonstration of the defeat of educational methods or of later discipline. Deleuze also recognizes the mocking tone of masochism, and he makes a distinction between the irony of the sadist and the humor of the masochist.69 Irony consists in "A figure of speech in which the intended meaning is the opposite of that expressed by the words used; usually taking the form of sarcasm or ridicule, in which laudatory expressions are used to convey condemnation or contempt" ( O E D ) .It also implies "A condition of affairs or events of a character opposite to what was, or might naturally be expected; a contradictory outcome of events as if in mockery of the promise and fitness of things" ( O E D ) .When Dolan prepares to pandy Stephen, he steadies Stephen's hand gently, so that Stephen thinks for a moment that he is going to shake hands with him (Port., p. 57). The masochist makes play of punishment. He usurps its discourse and makes it his own, just as he usurps the signifiers of femininity, and dresses himself as a woman. All established, accepted things are susceptible to being dragged illto the cyclone of his resexualization, to being turned upside down in his pantomime. He drags images of the father and the desired object from the world without into his world within. When he emerges from his underground, he brings carnival, and the nymph and the king are compelled to dance in his parody. In "Circe," Dolan is parodied in this way. When Stephen complains that his hand hurts he is unconsciously recalling being pandied by D o h . This oppression, and its attendant humiliation and fear, have sunk deep into his mind, and have empowered the kings "in here." Nowhere more than in "Circe" do the psyches of Bloom and Stephen overlap and intertwine, and so it is suggested that Stephen will overcome the kings "in here" through a method such as Bloom's, through masochistic parody. In the masochistic parody, the punishment and the punisher are exaggerated to absurdity. Just as Bello is Bloom's toy, a bogeyman with which he plays, so Dolan becomes a toy for Stephen, a jack in the box repeating mechanically: "Any boy want a flogging?" (U., p. 667) Althougl~it is not emphasized in Reik or Deleuze, parody seems to define the masocl~ist'smode of mockery. In parody, there is a mocking imitation of stylistic habits, through exaggerated mimicry, and through applying these stylistic habits to "ludicrously inappropriate subjects" ( O E D ) . The masochistic fantasy parodies both power and submission.
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The masochist, however, although he engineers a parody of power, is primarily parodying submission. Masochism can exist without a parody of power, but not without the parody of victimage that is its essence. Sometimes the masochist might emphasize the parody he embodies, through a stark contrast with the unparodied normality of the shocked and amused witnesses of his shameful exhibition. He then identifies the torturers with the socius, or the standard mean from which he has defected, and contrasts his deviance to their indifference, to the sense in which they are not playing along, and are unaware of the status of the parody as fantasy. He may focus on his own shame, parodying victimage, or on the cruelty of the torturess, parodying power, but his own parody of shame is indispensable to his arousal. Masochism always appropriates through parody. The overdetermined nature of masochism is the result of the very broad scope of its appropriative mechanism. Through parody the masochist subverts prohibitions to make them serve his ends. Although he seems to serve, this is no more than a cunning mask, which enables his rebellion and his defiance to strike more deeply at the heart of that which he opposes. Ellmanil notes that in response to an inquiry about his feelings on Ireland's independence, Joyce responded: "Tell me why you think I ought to wish to change the conditions that gave Ireland and me a shape and a destiny" (J.J., p. 109). Joyce needed to feel himself in a continual state of opposition to tyranny: "he fattened on opposition, and grew thin and pale when treated with indulgence" (J.J., p. 109). The masochist never negates the systems of prohibition that have made him, but instead turns them on their heads. He expresses himself through the symbols of the Black Mass and carnival. For Mikhael Bakhtin, in the carnival relationships of high and low must be identified and emphasized before an inverted view of society may be given. The carnival is in this way a communal movement of becoming. Carnival is important for Bataille's discussion of eroticism also. He emphasizes the inversion of established order that occurs at the time of carnival, stressing that it is during the carnival that the tabooed object may be approached.70 Carnival in Dublin is given spatial expression in Nighttown; it is a step beyond Stephen's beach, into the fluidity of orgy. As Bloom approaches Nighttown, the street throngs with mutants, dwarves and colored lights (U., pp. 561-2), in a grotesque subversion of classical categories. There is a dangerous mystique about Nighttown, like that possessed by the taboo object itself. Power too slips its tentacles into the fertile humus of Nighttown, and as its power of panopticon diminishes in that dark, its brutality becomes tumescent. That Nighttown is beyond moral bounds is stressed when Bloom stumbles through elaborate excuses for his presence in Night-
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town, upon encountering an imagined Mrs. Breen (U., pp. 572-3), and later, when he and Kelleher exchange excuses for being in Nighttown (U., p. 700). Nighttown is shrouded in minoritarian secrecy, and in it oblivion is sought.
ROMANTIC LOVEAND SEXUALSERVITUDE Nighttown and the carnivalesque are counterpointed and paralleled by the chaste world of romantic love. The masochist submits to the degradations of Nighttown in order to increase the distance between he and the perverse ideal. He submits to degradation as part of a larger chivalrous project, which has as its objective the approach to the unapproachable perverse ideal. In "Araby," the boy's errantry is rehearsed in the following passage, where the exotic squalor of a Nighttown world is shown in its quotidian form. Just as the Nymph is an absent presence in Bloom's masochistic quest through Nighttown, so is Mangan's sister an absent presence inspiring the boy's passage through a squalor in which she has no part: [He and his mother] wallzed through the flaring streets, jostled by drunken men and bargaining women, amid the curses of labourers, the shrill litanies of shop-boys who stood on guard by the barrels of pigs' cheeks, the nasal chanting of street singers, who sang a come-all-)'ozl about O'Donovan Rossa, or a ballad about the troubles in our native land. These noises converged in a single sensation of life for me: I imagined that I bore my chalice safely through a throng of foes. Her name sprang to my lips at moments in strange prayers and praises wlich I myself did not understand. (Dub., p. 18)
Although masochism may indulge in the obscene, it is essentially chaste and chivalrous. Rousseau describes having tasted "the sweetest and purest joys of love" while spying on a married women who had employed him in her house as an act of charity. I was embarrassed and confused [ . . . . ] I devoured with greedy eyes everything I could look at without being observed: the flowers in her dress, the tips of her pretty feet [ . . . . ] I threw myself on my lznees on the threshold, stretching out my arms toward her with passionate movement, feeling certain that she could not hear me, and not thinlzing it possible that she could see me; but over the mantelpiece was a loolzing-glass, which betrayed me. I do not lznow d a t effect my attack of madness produced upon her; she neither looked at me, nor said a word; but, half turning her head, with a simple movement of her finger she pointed to the mat at her feet. To tremble, to utter a cry, to fling myself down on the spot that she indicated, was for me the work of a moment; but it will scarcely be believed that, in this position, I did not attempt anything further, to say a single word, to lift my eyes up to her, or even to touch her, in my uncomfortable attitude, to support myself for an instant upon her lznees. Although unable to speak or
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move, I was certainly not tranquil; everything about me betrayed my agitation, my joy, my gratitude, my ardent desires, which, without definite aim or object, were restrained by the fear of displeasing [ . . . . I 7 ' In reflecting upon this event, Rousseau concludes that: "None of the feelings caused by the possession of women have ever equaled the two minutes I spent at her feet without venturing to touch her dress."72 In "Circe," Bloom's worship of the nymph is similarly avid: THE NYMPH: [ . . . ] Unseen, one summer eve, you lzissed me in four places. And with loving pencil you shaded my eyes, my bosom and my shame. BLOOM: (Humbly kisses her long hair) Your classic curves, beautiful immortal. I was glad to look on you, to praise you, a thing of beaut!; almost to pray. THE NYMPH: During dark nights I heard your praise. (U., p. 656) It is impossible to exaggerate the extent of Bloom's adoration of the female bottom: BLOOM: It overpowers me. The warm impress of her warm form. Even to sit where a woman has sat, especially with divaricated thighs, as though to grant the last favours, most especially with previously well uplifted white sateen coatpans. So womanly full. It fills me full. (U., p. 661) Here there is a worship of the woman's lowliest, most profane or most fleshy parts, and also a sense in which, when distance becomes sexualized, absence is the highest form of presence Such devotion is also evident in Yeats's: "But I, being poor, have only my dreams; 1 I have spread my dreams under your feet; 1 Tread softly because you tread on my dreams." The epiphany of shame experienced by the boy in "Araby" is at least partly due to his recognition of this vain posture in himself. In Mangan's sister, and Eileen's hands and hair, we see the genesis of perverse idealization in Joyce. The idealization is embodied in the fetish. In "Lestrygonians," Bloom dallies in front of the window of Brown and Thomas. H e notices: "Gleaming silks, petticoats on slim brass rails, rays of flat silk stockings."(U., p. 214) These fetishes of women remind Bloom of the masochistic scene that he is enacting that day. He thinks: "Useless to go back. H a d to be. Tell me all" (U., p. 214). At first this recollection comes as a stab of remorse, but it is quickly re-appropriated by his masochistic drive. From this, he is buoyed up by an idealization of woman, and a masochistic craving to adore. Just as the boy in "Araby" has Mangan's sister as a guiding light during his passage through the city, Bloom's odyssey is similarly illuminated by the beacon of an idealized woman who is a composite of all desirable women.
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High voices. Sunwarm silk. Jingling harnesses. A11 for a woman, home and l~ouses,silk webs, silver, rich fruits, spicy from Jaffa. Agendatl~Netaim. Wealth of the world. X warm human plumpness settled down on his brain. His brain yielded. Perfume of embraces all him assailed. With hungered flesh obscurel!; he mutely craved to adore. (U., p. 214) He plummets, however, when he is confronted by the stark opposite of his feminine ideal. See the animals feed. Men, men, men. Perched on high stools by the bar, hats shoved back, a t the tables calling for more bread free charge, swilling, wolfing gobfulls of sloppy food, their eyes bulging, wiping wetted lnoustacl~es[ . . . . ] Smells of men. His gorge rose. (U., p. 214.)
It is worth noting also that the birdgirl appears just after Stephen is disturbed by the "repellent" "medley of wet nakedness' of the boys bathing at the strand. Whereas the nymph eats electric light, and has no hole there, and no hair either, these men are rude orifices only. The high voices and jingling harnesses are replaced by shouts for "Roast beef and cabbages," and "chewchewchew," and the working of tooth and jaw. Whereas his brain yields to the idealized image of women, here his senses are appalled. As well as parodying punishment and shame, the masochist parodies the romantic idealization of a woman. He distances himself from her to prevent consummation, and the consequent collapse of her ideal aspect. The worship of the ideal ego can be described as mystical continence, a phallic retention that unleashes vision. In the masochistic scene, this translates into impotence. The masochist does not approach the object of desire; in order to demonstrate that he is unworthy he does not strive for consummation. H e wants t o be seen as unable or forbidden to consummate. In resexualization, the distance between the desiring subject and the object of his desire is a source of lust. This aspect of masochism extends the courtly ideal and the notions of chastity and purity to absurdity. Through thrilling in unrequited love, he intensifies desire, and avoids satiation, the cancellation of desire. The masochist's ideal must be both virgin and whore, however; untouchable to him, but free to enjoy sexual pleasure with other men. In a sub-genre of this perverse chivalry, Lancelotism, the masochist worships a woman who belongs to another man. The emphasis here is not on her untouchability, but on his inability to touch her. In this we see again the masochist's lust for his own emasculation. He is aroused by such mockery as that which the inhabitants of Barney IGernan's level against Bloom: "He's a perverted Jew [ . . . . ]
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Do you call that a man? [ . . . . ] I wonder did he ever put it out of sight [ . . . . ] there were two children born anyhow [ . . . . ] And who does he suspect?" (U., pp. 438-9) It is not that Bloom would take pleasure from actually hearing these comments in the pub, as they occur outside of the context of the fantasy. If he did hear them, however, he would use them later in his fantasy. Perhaps he desires this in the fantasy because he feels so vulnerable to it in his life. Although Bloom is lusty, and in fact preoccupied with sexual desire, he feigns practical impotence to Molly, it is never clear how consciously, so that she will seem to him untouchable. When Molly thinks that she will make Bloom pay her for the privilege of masturbating over her bottom (U., p. 930), we see how fully she understands Bloom's sexuality. Although she must deny her own desire in order to do so, she understands that Bloom wants her to reject him, so that he may toy with the tensions between the touchable and the untouchable, and thrill in the intensified attraction of the partly covered nude. Although Bloom makes Molly untouchable to himself, emphasizing the ethereal rather than the bestial pole of these tensions, he desires to see Molly as a whore as well as a virgin. Bataille stresses the centrality of the juxtaposition of the ethereal and the bestial to sexual desire.'; As Molly must remain untouchable to Bloom, a third party is required to supply the bestial pole, which will sully her purity, as Bloom cannot. The tortures stands ethereal behind the bestial males who degrade the masochist, and then engages willingly in sexual embrace with the masochist's torturers, showing the masochist that the reason he and she cannot come together in sexual consummation does not reside in her untouchability, but in his emasculation. She shows him that she has not been a virgin, but a whore, and that in his idealization of her, he has been deceived. This recalls the boy's position in "Araby," of being let down or betrayed by the ideal. In his masochism, he continues to worship her as a whore. His role is in accordance with courtly tradition, but hers is modified. She becomes the patron saint of carnality. There is a sense in which his degradation supplies the lowliness, the bestiality required to make sex erotic, and so absolves her enjoyment of shame and guilt. In "Circe," Bloom takes the guilt of Molly and Boylan's intercourse into himself, being made a whore so that she might retain her chastity. What is shameful now is not to have sex, but to not have sex: to be alone. After he is tortured, she and her accomplice in torturing him engage in sex with the purity of animals, as though they had never been desexualized, as though the masochist had absorbed the shame of their fall into desexualization. He wishes to keep all guilt and lowliness for himself, and so to absolve her of her carnality, or help her return as a body, while maintaining her ideal aspect.
ICrafft-Ebing considers the psychical characteristics of masochists to be essentially feminine:
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It cannot be doubted that the masochist considers himself in a passive, feminine role towards his mistress and that his sexual gratification is governed by the success his illusion experiences in the complete subjection to the will of his consort. The pleasurable feeling, call it lust, resulting from this act differs per se in no wise from the feeling which women derive from the sexual act.'4
This point is misleading in that it seems to posit a stable condition of inversion, rather than a periodical movement. The masochist is compelled more by his departures from masculinity than by his assumption of a female posture. The masochist's object remains feminine, even when he assumes a feminine posture toward her. He understands that his tortures wants to be negated, possessed and overwhelmed in sex, as does he. That she wants what he wants, serves to make his position more ignominious, and degrade him more fully, insofar as it emphasizes his feminization. Wanda's explanations of what she seeks in a man, and what she admires in the Greek, are similar to Severin's explanations of what he seeks in a lover. She says: "I can indeed imagine belonging to one man for life, but he would have to be a real man who commands my respect and enslaves me by his innate power [ . . . . ] I could only love a man before whom I myself should have to kneel."7' Masochism does not simply reverse gender roles; rather, it plays with the politics of desire, without ever negating these relations of power. Although the masochist becomes woman, "man" remains majoritarian, and "woman" remains minoritarian. According to Reik's argument regarding masochistic transvestism, once the masochist has learned to identify himself as a woman, he may establish his body as his own female sex slave. This, no doubt, is a part of it. If this, however, were the whole story, masochism would disappear once a submissive woman had been found. In this sense, masochism is an expression of hatred for the desired object. The masochist uses his own body as an effigy of her, and degrades and humiliates this image in himself. This hatred for the transcendent ideal that he has embodied is seen in "Circe," when, after escaping Bello's clutches through his own death, Bloom faces up to the nymph who has been behind Bello, animating her: BLOOM: (Coldlj,)You have broken the spell. The last straw. If there were onlj ethereal where would all be, and nov~ces?Shj but willlng, like an ass p~ssing[ . . . . ] THE NYMPH: (Wilth a cr); flees from h m zlnuezled, her plaster cast crackmg, clozld of stench escapzng b o r n cracks). (U., p p 661-2)
Here, the nymph and the statues that Bloom contemplated earlier in the day are conflated. The woman that the masochist draws in himself is a parody of the nymph, rather than a true embodiment of her; she is distinctly subaltern. The
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masochist thrills in turning upon himself a social view of women as weak, silly and colonized, as the epitomic minoritarian. When he becomes woman, he draws femininity as submissiveness. There is also always a sense, however, in which he wishes to be seen as a man suffering the ignominy of being dressed as a woman, and so lower again than the stereotypical woman he denotes. As neither man nor woman, he achieves Stephen's objective of being "elusive" of all "social or religious orders" (Port., p. 144), but at a heavy price. In the masochistic fantasy it is essential that this femininity should appear to be forced upon him, in order to intensify his sense of shame and submission. The feminization is a punishment. The masochistic transvestite may always be differentiated from the willing transvestite by his gestures of resistance. Despite his show of resistance, he has orchestrated the scene in which he is feminized. His gestures are grounded in his perception of his transvestism as shameful. It is just because he finds it shameful to be dressed as a woman that he has brought it to pass. If it were not perceived as shameful, transvestism would fail to compel him. In the fantasy, and in the scene, someone must always impose this crossdressing upon him. Bello forces Bloom to dress as a woman, and to become a prostitute: A man I Itnow [ [ .. . ] is on the loolto~itfor a maid of all worlt at a short ltnoclt. Swell the bust. Smile. Droop shoulders. What offers? [ . . . . ] Right. Let them all come. The scant!; daringly short skirt, riding up at the knee to show a peep of white pantalette [ . . . . ] Learn the smooth mincing walk on Louis XV heels, the Grecian bend with provolting croup, the thighs fluescent, ltnees modestly Itissing. Bring all your power of fascination to bear on them. Pander to their Gomorrahan vices. (U., p p 651-2)
As a prostitute, it is Bloom's duty to entice manly men. He is "shy but willing," as he himself later describes the nymph who stands behind Bello. The details of Bloom's feminization closely mirror Gerty's preoccupation with what may be called the signifiers of the feminine. Like Issy, she is preoccupied with mirrors. Bloom's cross-dressing is similar to Gerty's discipline of the looking glass. A connoisseur's fascination with fetishes is brought to bear upon his feminization. The silk stockings and the corset enclose Bloom in immanence, pin him down to earth beneath the gaze. He as the birdgirl is dragged down into the world, into body, and made real beneath the gaze. His feminization sets him up to be seen, and again, shame entails being seen. Like the Dublin virgins for whom Stephen feels contempt, he displays a hypocritical chastity. On the one hand, he makes gestures of reluctance, and on the other, he is dressed to entice. In The Cold and the Cruel, Deleuze argues that the masochist's rites serve to castrate the masochist symbolically, and so to expel the father's image from the masochist. He makes no mention, however, of the feminization that
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is implied by this castration. In Anti-Oedipus, and A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari propose that it is through a ininoritarian identification that the blockages of Oedipal identity are overcome, and the individual is freed to flow through becomings. The first becoming is always a becomingwoman, as man is the inajoritarian par excellence. To engage in becoming, the individual must resist the tyranny of the body as an organism, and become a Body without Organs. In his symbolic castration, the masochist resists the tyranny of the penis, so that he may become woman, become minoritarian, and finally become nothing, and so everything. In Bloom, the birdgirl is violated with a vengeance: her Apollonian distance and her classical closure are lost as Bello plunges an arm elbow deep into her. "BELLO: [ . . . . ] (He bares his arm and plunges it elbowdeep into 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! "(U., p. 651) She is now all orifice, and anything but untouchable. The masochist identifies with the female because of this intrinsic, mechanical symbolism. The female is imposed upon; she is opened, entered and discharged into. She is passive and receptive as the male uses her, moving into her to achieve his pleasure, and force his image into her. This aspect of the feminine allows the masochist to rest after the effort required to fly; he falls from his classical closure, and becomes the grotesque, the open. Bataille contends that the female is negated more fully in the sexual act than is the male, and it is this negation, this loss of the discontinuous self, this tragic sinking from the principle of the individual into Dionysian unity, that is sought in sex. Sex is sacrifice; its "little death" the result of a "little murder." By identifying with the female, the masochist heightens the intensity of sex, exploiting more fully its promise of disappearance and of annihilation.
The masochist's transvestism is a step on his movement toward self-negation. Masochistic rites afford the masochist a heightened sense of the selfnegation that is sought in the sexual experience. In the carnival of "Circe," where identities are lost, alcohol almost does for Stephen what masochism does for Bloom. Like laughter, both are important Joycean means of escape from excessive consciousness. As Bloom loses himself, and becomes metamorphic in his fantasy, flowing through schizo becomings, Stephen sinks deeper into drunkenness and confusion, his identity unraveling. The masochist, however, unlike the drunk, descends into oblivion along the rails of a self-made system, through carnivalistic rites. When Bloom's fantasy ends he is Bloom again, fully himself, whereas Stephen is flat on his back, his schizo breakthrough a breakdown. He suffers an assault because he does not, like Bloom, succeed in becoming imperceptible. Stephen's becomings seize; he is caught in his becoming Irish. In "Circe," Bloom is made a naughty child, a prostitute, an animal, and
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then a meal. Each of these becomings leads toward his becoming imperceptible. In each case, his volition is further diminished, a n d he is made clay t o the finger of power. This, however, is his fantasy. H e becomes nothing, but he is the Holy Ghost holding in place the framework of the fantasy enacted. There are always apparatuses, tools, engines involved [in masochism] there are always artifices and constraints used in taking Nature to the fullest. That is because it is necessary to annul the organs, to shut them away so that their liberated elements can enter into the new relations from which the becoming-animal, and the circulation of affects within the machinic assemblage, will result [ . . . . 176 T h e masochist severs all ties, a n d enters exile, declaring himself t o be a n outsider w h o "knows n o sexual love, n o property, n o fatherland, n o cause, n o work; w h o dies of his o w n willing, embodying the idea of huinanity."77 This is the darkening t h a t Stephen perceives Shakespeare t o have undergone, a n d thus the connection between he a n d Bloom. For Deleuze a n d Guattari, becomings lead toward becoming nobody, a n d so everybody. The masochist ceases t o be a subject, "to become events, in assemblages that are inseparable from a n hour, a season, a n atmosphere, a n air, a life."78 But d a t does becoming imperceptible signify, coming at the end of all the molecular becomings that begin with becoming woman? [ . . . . ] to be like everybody else [ . . . . ] If it is so difficult to become "like" everybody else, it is because it is an affair of becoming [ . . . . ] 'Eliminate all that is waste, death and superfluity,' complaint and grievance, unsatisfied desire, defense or pleading, everything that roots each of us (everybody) in ourselves, in our molarity. For everybody / everything is a molar aggregate, but becoming e u e ~ ) ' b o d/~eue~)'thing l is another affair, one that brings into play the cosmos with its molecular components. Becoming everybody / everything is to world, to make a Again, this is a movement, rather t h a n a state. O n e does n o t become everybodyleverything once a n d for all. Rather, one lunges toward it again a n d again, without ever reaching it. N o n e of these ideas are new. There is a direct line of descent from Plato's ideal forms, t h r o u g h S c l ~ o e p e n l ~ a u e r World 's of Will a n d Idea, Keats's conception of Negative Capability, Masoch's idealism, a n d into The Cold and the Cruel a n d Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Yeats speaks in these terms also, in his obsession with the Romantic Image, a n d his belief that the death of the body frees the soul. Perverse idealism is latent in all idealism. It meets idealism a t the point where the ideal must be conjured through a n annihilation of the self. It is a means of escape from excessive consciousness, a flight from the material world. Only through negation is the idealist able t o fly o r the perverse idealistic
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able to plunge. The idealist loses himself in the ether, and the perverse idealist in the world of things. The latter becomes the sacrificial victim, absorbed by the oppressive society from which he has had to maintain a tense relation of exile. In this, we see the fluctuational principle of masochism, its extreme reaction to an extreme position. He has resisted absorption and mental impregnation by his society so much so that now he falls drastically. The Apollonian strength of will which he has needed to maintain his flight, his aloofness, his autonomy and his authenticity, is now relaxed; his identity disintegrates, and he falls into, and is absorbed by his society. Now he dances the dance the oppressors have demanded. The oppressor, however, has now become the mother, or the object of desire, so that all of this is rest and play; he has returned. His mother had a nicer smell than his father. She played on the piano the sailor's hornpipe for him to dance. He danced:
T ~ a l a l alala, T ~ a l a l at~alaladd); T ~ a l a l alala T ~ a l a l alala (Port., p. 3 )
In Coldness and Cruelty, Deleuze considers the interruption of ascending desire to constitute the death of the masochist as born of his mother and father, followed by his rebirth as born of his mother and himself alone.80 The father is replaced by a non-oedipal, feminine alternative to the superego: the ideal ego. He no longer acts to avert the wrath of the authoritative father, but to please the beautiful mother. He becomes nothing but obedience and acquiescence, and finds that this is the bazaar he has sought all along; the foreign, the exotic, is his own parodic carnival. The new, inverted laws demand that he desire. This desire, however, must be ongoing. In order to evade satiation, and the cancellation of his galloping desire, he appropriates the laws of the father, but parodies them, to use them as the apparatuses that allow his desire to be ongoing. Bataille notes that in primitive societies, within the limited time frame of the festival or the feast, transgressions are not only permitted, but directed.81 The carnival serves to differentiate this time frame from the everyday, profane world of work. Sexual masochism functions in a similar way. Its principles are hostile to the profane life, so that when the masochistic scene is initiated, multiple inversions serve to differentiate the time of transgression from the time of the world of work. Deleuze notes, as one of the characteristics of masochism, the limited time frame of the contract drawn up between the masochist and his torturess.82 The time frame places limits upon the rush to annihilation that the masochistic carnival unleashes. It is essential to the masochist that his self-negations should remain within the framework of the fantasy, although he must continually fight with the
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perversity to keep it this way. While aroused, he might be fully aware that something he wants to do might destroy him, but this will only lure hiin more. In the first description of the brothel in "Circe," "[a] shade of mauve tissuepaper dims the light of the chandelier. Round and round a moth flies, colliding, escaping" (U., p. 620). In the carnival, there is always the sense that all shall be forgotten by tomorrow. The masochistic fantasy works on the same principles, and often emerges in the carnival for this reason. The limited time frame of the fantasy serves to counter masochism's hunger to be made real. There is always the hope that if the fantasy is pushed further the ideal might become manifest, and he might step into her timeless realm. The perverse impulse strives to leave an ineradicable mark on the life of its host that will prolong its own extension, and establish its supernatural purity. This is the danger of masochism, and the reason that the host must place his perversion within the bounds of carnival. This is perhaps the primal tension with which the masochist plays: the perverse impulse tries to make final the dissolution of identity, and the subject must hold tight to the reins, if he is to resist desire's canter into death. The perversion attempts to intrude on the profane life, and destroy everything that its host values: love, respect, comfort and belonging. Before the first appearance of the Nymph in "Circe," which is quoted as the heading of this chapter, Bloom's first inasocl~isticfantasy reaches its crescendo: BELLO: Die and be damned to you if you have any sense of decency or grace about you [ . . . . ] Sign a will and leave us any coin you have. If you have none see you damn well get it, steal it, rob it! We'll bury you in our shrubbery jalzes where you'll be dead and dirty with old Cuclz Cohen, my stepnephew I married, the bloody old gouty procurator and sodomite with a crick in his neck, and my other ten or eleven husbands, whatever the buggers' names were, suffocated in the one cesspool [ . . . . ]
VOICES: (Sighing) So he's gone. Ah, yes. Yes, indeed. (U., p. 654)
Disgust This self-negation, and this idealism, entail a disgust for the body. After the hell sermons, and his mother's death, Stephen contracts into a posture of classical closure. He sees all life as floundering and clasping blindly in a sordid sea of body. The body comes to be represented for him by the liquefaction of corruption and decay, and by the clinging, binding goo of emission. In the grotesque environment of body, the proximity of the mutually immersed seems magnified, Brobdignanian, and loathsome. To counter this claustrophobic sense of immanence, Stephen devises the escape route of Daedalian flight. He attempts to seal all his orifices, bodily and emotional, against the sea of body and community. Having constructed and entered the arc of his isolation, he slams shut the doors against the desperate cries of his
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mother and his sister, because his love for them threatens to drag him down again into the sea of body, pity and community. In order to evade the loneliness that his retreat entails, he periodically flips around the Brobdignanian lens that the superego has forced on him, and through the wrong end spies a Lilliputian, a birdgirl beautified by distance. She does not exist bodily, but ideally, and he calls her into the arc of his isolation, where she may live as his ideal ego. For Joyce, as for Bloom, in the resexualization of the desexualized, that which evoked bodily disgust in Stephen becomes a source of lust. In his letters, we see Joyce's desire to view Nora from a Brobdignanian perspective. He is aroused by orifices opening, and by the excremental. One of the acts of which the Sins of the Past accuse Bloom is that he gloated "over a nauseous fragment of wellused toilet paper presented to him by a nasty harlot, stimulated by gingerbread and a postal order" (U., p. 649). This accusation recalls the letters that Joyce and Nora exchanged. That which is disgusting comes to bear on his masochistic fantasy, driving him down deeper into the shameful and the sordid. Molly, whom Bloom has taught so well, recognizes his masochistic urge to dive as deeply as possible back into immanence, when she thinks: "if he wants to stick his tongue five miles up" (U., p. 929). When Bello forces Bloom to confess his most sordid sin, we may expect that his confession will reveal an inverted view of that which has driven him deepest into desexualization. By this logic, the most powerful source of his desexualization proves to have been the bodily disgust that the hell sermons and the mother's death have taught Stephen. Bloom's most sordid sin is to have "rererepugnosed in the rerererepugnant . . ." This suggests both the anal and the excremental. Masochism inverts the Apollonian stance of the Satanic artist: pride becomes shame, closure becomes openness, and male becomes female. The air at Apollonian heights proves too thin to support human life, and so the masochist as Icarus dives deep into the human sea. To reach extremes he must fluctuate between extremes.
Rejection of Masculinity Bloom considers male penetration of the female to be a violence done on her, and he refuses to perpetrate this violence, because of a sense that his object of desire is sacred. He envisions a phallic killing-machine underlying any act of penetrative genital sexuality, and he finds himself unable to play the sadistic role that his gender has imposed upon him. Violence, however, is intrinsic to sexuality, whether it reveals itself as merely passionate, animal intensity, producing friction, or as the staged violence of sadism or masocl~ism. Neither Stephen nor Bloom wants to dominate or bully others. They would rather withdraw, and evade rather than oppose oppression, through
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silence, exile and cunning. Escape may be the only truly revolutionary gesture. When Stephen is bullied by Heron, his anger, and his impulse to be revenged quickly disappear, stripped from his mind like the skin from a ripe fruit. Such confrontation is a game for which he feels himself unsuitedaesthetically, politically and ethically. He would rather retreat to his inner world, to his phantasmal comrades and his ideal ego-~Vercedes. He has already surrendered the outer world to the fathers and would-be fathers, to the paranoiacs and sadists, and accepted his exile. During the idealistic movement, he lets the conquistadors take it all, and turns away, to pare his fingernails, which become her fingernails. The masochist's acquiescence is not merely meekness: he has made himself king of an alternative kingdom of flowing molecules, where, being nothing externally, he can become all things internally. His suffering and his refusal to act empower his fantasy of magical omnipotence. They draw the cold ideal toward life. Stephen's lack of interest in revenge also entails Apollonian arrogance. Like Richard and Bloom when cuckolded, his enemies, other males, do not matter to him. He does not care what they think, as it is all about her. Here his withdrawal is misandrous: he studies other males as though they were venomous bugs in a petrie dish, and he strips them of parts to serve as props in his parodies. He desires to be shamed before them, because this would demonstrate his indifference to them, and disguise his concentration upon her for whom his shame is an act of devotion. For the masochist, the penis stands as a symbol of bullying, bestial power. Molly recalls Boylan driving his penis up into her like a stallion (U., p. 877), and Bello tells Bloom that: "a man of brawn is in possession there [ . . . . ] Well for you, you muff, if you had that weapon with knobs and lumps and warts all over it" (U., p. 652). The masochistic scene is a carnival in which the brutalizing phallic king is overthrown and mocked. In the masochistic scene, the masochist is found guilty of possessing a penis, and he strives to redeem himself of this crime of coarseness and brutality, and of his resemblance to the bullying fathers and brothers, through a series of rites and inversions. The masochist's interruption, and thus prolongation, of the ascent toward emission, and his transvestism, may be interpreted as symbolic castration. Although the penis is derided and diminished in the masochistic scene, it is the masochist's penis that is so negated. The penises of other males may play some part in the masochistic scene, as props, exaggerated to emphasize, by contrast, the masochist's emasculation. Again, any defection from the majority is accompanied by an upsurge in the majority. To demonstrate further his emasculation, the scene may progress toward a situation in which the masochist wishes to feel himself forced to adopt a feminine posture toward the penises of other males. If he engages in a bisexual act, he does so for the very reason that he finds it repellent and shameful to do so: the tortures will always have to be in the wings, directing and compelling him. He will assume a submissive posture toward another male, in order to atone to the
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nymph for what he would have done to her, had his desexualization not made her transcendent. The masochistic tortures considers the penis as ridiculous. This attitude is displayed by figmentary prototypes. Eileen proves to be prototypical, when she puts her hand in Stephen's pocket and runs away laughing. The Sirens laugh at men, and consider them "frightful idiots" (U., p. 331), because men are slaves to desire. Molly is also capable of considering the penis as ridiculous. In "Penelope," she thinks of "what a man looks like with his two bags full and his other thing hanging down out of him or sticking up at you like a hat rack" (U., p. 892). The desiring male is only funny, however, until he forces the satisfaction of his desire, or blames women for inciting his desire. Joyce's masochistic rejection of the coarseness and brutality of phallic power contributes to an almost total indictment of masculinity. This is because he associates masculinity with sadism. The champion of the masculine arena, the Citizen, is dogmatic, narrow-minded and bullying. He is completely preoccupied with violence and power. He is the epitome of the sadistic pole of the paired characters that can be seen in Joyce: Cotter's sporty boy and that Rosicrucian; Mahoney and the narrator of "An Encounter"; Mulligan and Stephen; and Blazes and Bloom, et al. The nature of this binarism is made explicit in Joyce's notes to Exiles, when he describes Robert as a sadist and Richard as a masochist. In sadism, there is a paranoiac identification with the bogeyman of the prohibitive threat. The subject attempts to ingratiate itself with the menacing master race, and to believe as they do. In order to make this identification, the subject renounces the object of desire, and attempts to distance and distinguish himself from this object. Later, in the resexualization of this desexualization, the sadist projects his repressed desire onto the object that has provoked his desire. He then attempts to cancel and renounce his desire again. The bogeyman of the prohibitive threat causes the sadist to react as does Winston in 1984: "There was only one way to save himself. He must interpose another human being, the body of another human being, between himself and the rats."s: "Do it to her! Do it to her!" This is a succinct reenactment of the Oedipal imbroglio. Just as the father impedes the child's desire for the mother, so does Big Brother impede Winston's desire for Julia. The child sees the father's threat to be proven by the mother's lack of a penis, and so he capitulates to this threat, and joins the father in his domination of the female. The desire for self-preservation leads him not only to re-channel the father's violence from himself to the mother, but also to become an active agent of the father's violence against her. In order to make this identification with the father, he has to repress his desire for the mother. When this repressed desire arises, he projects it onto the female, situating it in her. The masochist's renunciation of desire works very differently. He only pretends to renounce the object of desire. Instead, he draws an image of this into himself, and focuses his subversive desire upon her. His reaction to
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threat is t o disguise his object, and t o remain furtive, silent and cunning. In the resexualization, he balances his urge t o draw her back into body with a need t o recreate his initial exile from her, and her ideal status. Unlike the sadist, the masochist identifies with a minoritarian group, with positions outside of power: "As Faulkner said, t o avoid ending up a fascist there was n o other choice but t o become-black."84 However: There is no becoming-man [emphasis added] because man is the molar entity par excellence, whereas becomings are molecular [ . . . . ] man constitutes the majority, or rather the standard upon which the majority is based: white, male, adult, "rational," etc., in short, the average European, the subject of enunciation. Following the law of arborescence, it is this central Point that moves across all of space or the entire screen, and at every turn nourishes a certain distinctive opposition [ . . . ] male-(female),adult-(child), white-(black, yello~,or red); rational-(animal). The central point [ . . . ] thus has the property of organizing binary distributions within the dualism machines, and of reproducing itself in the principal term of the opposition; the entire position at the same time resonates in the central point. The constitution of a "majority" as redundancy8j In masochism, there is a sexualization of the minoritarian position. In Cork, Simon portrays himself as a sporty boy, an extrovert. Stephen, by contrast, he considers "not built that way" (Port., p. 90). Although the sadism of sporty boys is much disguised in adult life, it is in childhood that the masochistic neophyte learns t o recognize the brutality that is intrinsic to masculinity. Stephen is pushed into a slime filled ditch by Wells (Port., p. 26), and beaten with a phallic cabbage stump by Boland (Port., p. 80). In Joyce, extroverts are almost always given names that suggest in some way their aggression, their coarseness and their sadism. There is Nasty Roche, Kickham, Robert Hand, Buck Mulligan and Blazes Boylan. After the pervert has described his desire to punish sporty boys, the young idealist feels himself t o be in conspiracy with the pervert, and thinks of Murphy, w h o has been chasing a cat: "I had always despised him a little" (Dub., p. 16). Here, as elsewhere, the cat suggests the feminine. Murpl~y'spursuit, sling shot in hand, is predatory. It is directed at an external object, and not a t a n image in the mind.
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CHAPTER FIVE
The Cuckold A Logician of Consequences
I awoke during the night with a cry of terror; I had been dreaming that I was stranded on a field of ice. An Esltimo appeared on a sled drawn by reindeers [ . . . . ] 'What are you loolting for here, sir?' he exclaimed. 'This is the North Pole.'l Desire is an exile, desire is a desert.2
The masochist brings about his cuckolding through cunning, and persistent manipulation. He uses his cuckolding to evoke and harness an overwhelming emotional intensity, a "wild delight" (P.+E., p. 208). Altl~ougl~ he strives for it, however, his cuckolding is always a predominantly painful experience. This pain is entwined with a peculiar fascination. His delight is most intense when his position is most ignominious, and when he feels most utterly betrayed. He is tortured by isolation, and compelled by emotional exile: his Gethsemane and Calvary are combined. Joyce's particularly jealous disposition caused him to suffer from a sense of betrayal, and attendant ignominy. It seems likely that it was because of, rather than despite this jealousy that his masochism urged him to be cuckolded. When Cosgrave claimed that, while Joyce had been courting Nora, he had been with her during the nights that she said she could not meet Joyce, Joyce suffered intensely. His pain is evident in the letters he wrote to Nora immediately after hearing Cosgrave: "My eyes are full of tears, tears of sorrow and mortification [ . . . . ] Oh, Nora, pity me for what I suffer now. I shall cry for days [ . . . . ] It is half past six in the morning and I am writing in the cold. I have hardly slept all night [ . . . . ] They say here that I a m in consumption" (Ltrs.I., pp. 232-3). Byrne's account of Joyce's visit to him in Eccles Street confirms that Joyce's accounts of his agony are not exaggerated: I had always ltnown that Joyce was highly emotional, but I had never before this afternoon seen anything to approach the frightening condition that convulsed him. He wept and groaned and gesticulated in futile impotence as he sobbed out to me the thing that had occurred. Never in my life had I seen a human being more shattered.3
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The trauma of this experience prodded Joyce to explore its pain-perhaps in order to master it-and he soon after began to confess to a fascination for jealousy. He confessed to being jealous of the life Nora lived before she met him. He describes himself as torn between extremes of fascination and agony upon encountering images of her past: "0,darling, I am so jealous of the past and yet I bite my nails with excitement whenever I see anybody from that strange dying western city" (Ltrs.I., p. 281). Upon meeting a policeman from Galway, and considering that Nora may have admired him before she and he ever met, he writes: "I had to speak to him because he came from Galway but 0 how I suffered, darling. I am dreadfully excited. I don't know what I am writing" (Ltrs.I., p. 281). Of course, this compulsive interest in Nora's past is given its finest expression in the immortalizing of Michael Bodkin as Michael Furey in "The Dead." When they were apart, with Joyce in Dublin and Nora in Trieste, and they exchanged masturbatory letters, Joyce warned Nora not to become so excited that she would give herself to someone else (Ltrs.I., p. 272). O n the other hand, in another letter he tells her that if he found out she were guilty, it might only arouse him more (Ltrs.I., p. 270). In Ulysses, Molly recognizes that Bloom is similarly torn between a desire to be cuckolded, and the pain that it will cause him, when she thinks "hes coronado now anyway whatever he does and then he going to the other extreme about the wife in Fair Tyrants" (U., p. 924-5). This powerful and obsessive jealousy caused Joyce to encourage Prezioso to court Nora. Nora complained to Budgen: "Jim wants me to go with other men so that he will have something to write about" (J.J., p. 445). Why would the masochist work so hard to bring himself such suffering? Stephen proclaims, "A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery" (U., p. 243), to support the argument that Shakespeare chose the woman who would cuckold him, and chose to be cuckolded. The willing cuckold is a logician of consequences. He is like the girl that Reik describes as splashing water on herself in the bath, knowing that her nurse will soon come and rinse her with buckets of cold water.4 In Venus in Furs, the wish to be cuckolded is at the heart of Severin's masochism. He toys with Wanda's affections, insisting upon diminishing his power to accept her loyalty. Wanda repeatedly asks him to reconsider his wishes, and to claim her loyalty, but he repeatedly turns away from this choice, despite the fact that it is what the greater part of him desires. He claims that he would prefer: "a noble and spirited woman willing to share my destiny in complete faithfulness," but that if he can not have such a woman, he wants "no half-measures": "If I cannot enjoy to the full love's perfect bliss, then let me empty to the dregs its cup of bitterness and woe, let me be ill-treated by the woman I love, and the more cruelly the better. For this is also a form of pleasure."" Despite his claim that he would prefer a faithful woman, he seems resigned to push Wanda toward betraying him. He lures Wanda into a pecu-
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The Cuckold liar sparring match, by continually renouncing his urge to be dominated, but taking it up again as soon as she has agreed: 'If you love me, Severin,' she said sternly, 'never speak of this again, do you hear, never again, or I might really . . . .' 'Try to forget yesterday's horrible scene,' she says, in a trembling voice. 'For your sake I satisfied these mad wishes, now let us be reasonable. We shall be happy and love each other, and in a year's time I shall be your wife.'
[....I 'I beg of JOLI . . .' I stammered, 'but ~ O Lwill I be angry.. . .' 'Do with me what you will,' she whispered, 'I belong to you.' 'Then trample me underfoot, I implore you, or I shall go mad.'6 Initially Wanda promises to be his loyal wife after a year, but she warns him that if he worships her he will lose her, and that if he continues to strive for it, he will find his pain. Severin, however, is not dissuaded. In Exiles, Richard attempts to justify and intellectualize his erotic impulse to be cuckolded. The impulse itself is mostly hidden beneath this, tangled in conceptions of justice, in pangs of conscience, and only revealed when he confesses to a "wild delight," or an "ignominious lust," and when he interrogates Bertha about what passed between Robert and her. Ellmann notes that Joyce conducted "minute interrogations of Nora even before their departure from Dublin" (J.J., p. 243). The sexually obsessive, masturbatory and voyeuristic nature of Robert's interrogation of Bertha is underlined when he rubs his hands together (P.+E., p. 168), as does the boy in "Araby" when declaring devoutly "Love! 0 Love!" The masochist desires to be cuckolded as a demonstration or parody of courtly love. Richard is worried that in freeing Bertha to cuckold him, he is only freeing her in order that he may capture her more completely. Bertha also worries that he is urging her to cuckold him so that he may take the high moral ground, and that in doing so he is turning others against her (P.+E., p. 174). Richard tries to consider his erotic desire to be cuckolded as a moral gesture, that would emancipate Bertha, and he struggles against the sense in which it is a selfish, cold hearted gesture, consolidating his own isolation at her expense and, ultimately, making her more dependent upon him. In Bloom, we see the erotic impulse unanalysed. He does not wish to be cuckolded for justice (as a moral gesture), but purely for a "wild delight," although justice is necessarily involved in this delight. Despite this delight, however, his cuckolding hurts him deeply, alienates and isolates him, as is the case with both Severin and Richard. Through renouncing his rights "over whom he calls his wife" (U., p. 264), he moves toward becoming nothing. From his cuckolding, he renews the wound of exile and of isolation, on which his inner life and his integrity depend. Although Gabriel is not cuckolded literally, he is cuckolded emotionally, when he discovers that while he has been watching his wife with desire, and
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anticipating their sexual union, her mind has been engrossed by memories of a past lover. It is initially her distance that evokes this desire in Gabriel when, unseen by her, he observes her turned away from and indifferent to him, lost in the resonance of another man's song (Dub., p. 146). Throughout the evening, there have been suggestions that Bartell D'Arcy is interesting to Gretta (Dub., p. 133), as he is to Molly (U., pp. 881-2). When, however, Gabriel discovers that his rival is not Bartell, but a boy who died of love for Gretta, and whose image therefore can never be taken from her, he acknowledges his emotional exile, while plummeting deeper into it. Gabriel's epiphany at the end of "The Dead" is similar to Richard's experience of hearing demons speaking as he walks on the strand while Bertha is with Robert. Rather than anger, or resentment, he feels pity for his wife, a pity mingled with indifference. Through his cuckolding, the masochist attempts to evade the pity of love, and experience the freedom and the pain of his solitude. Gabriel's Christine moment-"crooked crosses," "spears," "barren thorns"-causes his soul to swoon. The masochistic cuckold's pain is very real. He is torn between the extremes of excruciating jealousy and loss-on the one hand-and compelling erotic fascination and delight-on the other. Pleasure is by no means the right word to describe what drives the masochist to bring his cuckolding to pass. Rather, he brings it to pass for the sake of intensity, for the sake of a tension between extremes. Like the flagellant who mortifies the flesh for the sake of vision, Richard welcomes this pain so that he may walk alone and hear demons speaking on the strand (P.+E., pp. 244, 260-1). The masochist often brings about his cuckolding in order to recharge his flagging or stifled desire for his partner. The pain Joyce experienced after hearing Cosgrave's story was followed by the unfettering of his lust, and the expression of his perverse sexuality. In his letters, he began to share with Nora the private icons of his masturbatory imagination, and to acknowledge the fascination that jealousy and degradation held for him. It was as though the wall of shame, behind which his sexuality had resided in secrecy, had been blown apart. Until he feared that she had cuckolded him, that she was a whore, and not a virgin, he worried that he was losing interest in her, and that she was becoming a burden to him. After the fear that she had cuckolded him with Cosgrave passed, he was able to feel that she was a prize, and not a burden of sympathy that, like Stephen's mother and sister, might drag him "with her together down." Although Deleuze considers the masochist to be a teacher, and Richard would like to consider himself to be a liberator, the masochist may as easily be considered a manipulator, a stage director. In his notes to Exiles, Joyce emphasizes that: "Richard must not appear as a champion of women's rights [ . . . . ] He is in fact fighting for his own hand, for his own emotional dignity and liberation" (P.+E., p. 348). It is never clear to what extent the masochist is liberating his tortures, or to what extent he is manipulating and controlling her. Bloom supplies Molly with erotica, and gives her a gift of purple
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The Cuckold garters, which he knows she will wear for Boylan's benefit, re-enacting the story line of The Sweets of Sin, in which a man buys lingerie which his lover will wear during her tryst with another man: Raoul (U., pp. 302-3). He is projecting onto her his ideal of a woman who is sexually free. The manipulative aspects of this projection are more obvious in Joyce's relations with Nora. He tells her: "I wish you would study how to please me, to provoke my desire for you" (Ltrs.I., p. 249). As early into their relations as his third letter to her, he is urging her to overcome constraints, and to make herself more attractive to him: "Please leave off that breastplate as I do not like embracing a letter-box" (Ltrs.I., p. 43). He encouraged Nora to drink cocoa morning and night, so that her figure would become voluptuous, like Molly's, and so that she would appear more powerful, and less frail, and so more desirable to him. (His prescription of cocoa is first directed at the opening of a letter immediately following the second letter in which he feared that their love had been destroyed by Cosgrave's story.) After Byrne assured Joyce of Nora's loyalty, Joyce felt that he had won her back, through his pain, and that she was desirable to others, and so he set himself to work on heightening her desirability. He was trying to mould her into his perverse ideal. He wanted to partake of her feminine attraction by tailoring it. His directions to her to drink cocoa, so that her body "(or rather certain parts of it)" would grow fuller, becomes a constant refrain: "I hope that you will take cocoa every day and I hope that little body of you[rs] [ . . . is] getting a little fuller. I am laughing at this moment as I think of those little girl's breasts of yours. You are a ridiculous person, Nora! [ . . . . ] Damn it, Nora, you must try to live up to your reputation" (Ltrs.I., p. 249). Later, he hoped to dress her to suit his tastes. He gave her very specific instructions for the tailoring of a new suit, and he described in detail furs that he intended to purchase for her. He urged her to read the works of Sacher-Masoch (J.J., p. 417), and to free her sensual desires. The love of a woman makes the masochist feel guilty, and he strives to be just to her, because he recognizes his own coldness. In accepting her love, he feels that he is stealing her youth and innocence. In his letters to Nora, Joyce often expresses a concern that he is soiling her, and that he is unworthy of her. He contrasts her simple, honest and giving soul, to his own frigid and closed complexity. In a letter to Stanislaus, Joyce expresses the hope that he will be able to be loyal to Nora, because her love for him is greater than his for her (Ltrs.I., p. 80). Monogamous desire, for him, is a lie, although monogamous love is not. Because he can not offer her a monopoly on his desire, and because he loves her, he does not wish to accept a monopoly on her desire. Joyce recognized, from the Cosgrave episode, the pain of jealousy, and he knew that he had betrayed Nora: physically with prostitutes, and emotionally with Amelia Popper and Marthe Fleischmann. In a letter, written while he was in Dublin, and she in Trieste, Joyce writes: "It is very good of you to inquire about that damned dirty affair of mine [ . . . . ] I was alarmed at your silence first [ . . . . ]
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But you are all right, are you not, dearest? Thank God! Poor little Nora, how bad I am to you!" (Ltrs.I., p. 259) In a footnote, Ellmann considers this "dirty affair" to be "a minor complaint probably contracted from a prostitute." In his next letter to Nora, written, presumably, in response to a rebuking letter, Joyce complains: I dare not address you tonight by any familiar name [ . . . . ] I have been awake now for two whole days and I wandered about the streets lilte some filthy cur whose mistress had cut him with her whip and hunted him from her door [ . . . . ] I have lost your esteem. I have worn down your love [ . . . . ] Let me sink back into the mire I came from [ . . . . ] Leave me now to the things and companions I was so fond of [ . . . . ] It is a degradation and a shame for you to live with a low wretch lilte me. (Ltrs.I., p. 265)
We are witnessing here what Reik describes as "the provocative element" of masochism. Joyce is like Richard in confessing to his infidelity, to "feed the flame" of Nora's "innocence with his guilt" (P.+E., p. 195).He manipulated a situation in which he needed to be forgiven, and placed her on high moral ground. He purposely gave her a reason to cuckold him. If he could not give himself wholly to her, why should she give herself wholly to him. To be unjust to her in this way would burden him. It is to counter, or evade such a burden, that Severin encourages Wanda's Grecian ideals, and Richard encourages Bertha to believe as does Robert. It is primarily Richard's devotion to his ideal ego that impedes his monogamous devotion to Bertha, and makes him unable to give himself to her wholly. Although his ideal ego has become identified with Beatrice, it is her untouchability, and the impossibility of sexual consummation with her, that has enabled this identification. Like Eileen, Beatrice is a Protestant (P.+E., p. 128). More significantly, she is dark, like the Jewess Amelia Popper who, before writing Exiles, Joyce drew in a series of literary sketches, in Gincomo Joyce (J.J., pp. 342-7). As with Amelia, Beatrice's distance enables him to view her as Lilliputian. The impossibility of consummation with her, her unwillingness to give herself to him sexually, means that she is too far away to stifle and drag him down, in a claustrophobic, Brobdignanian embrace. This distance means that he does not need to suffer pain in pitying her, and that he may worship her instead. As Stephen's Shakespeare theory suggests, the work of creative writing may be considered as a love letter addressed to the ideal ego. Writing constitutes a conciliatory consummation with the untouchable object of desire. In Gincomo Joyce, Joyce envisions his words to Amelia as having sunk like "cold polished stones" into the "quagmire" of her mind (G.J.,p.l3). After writing about her, teaching her, and being read by her, he thinks: "Her eyes have drunk my thoughts: and into the moist warm yielding welcoming darkness of her womanhood my soul, itself dissolving, has streamed and formed and flooded a liquid and abundant seed [ . . . . ] Take her now who will!"
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(G.J., p. 1 4 ) This mutually overbearing intellectual and emotional intercourse is a sexual exchange alternative to genital intercourse, but it does not alleviate isolation or a sense of disconnection: "Write it, damn you, write it! What else are you good for?" (G.J., p. 1 6 ) Amelia Popper, Marthe Fleischmann-who Joyce considered to look like the birdgirl-and Beatrice Justice are all identified with the ideal ego, and recipients of writings that are to some degree love letters. Richard recognizes that he is in a sense cuckolding Bertha by sleeping in his study, as it is in his study that he engages his ideal ego (P.+E., p. 241). Bertha is wrong, however, to think that he intends or hopes to achieve sexual union with Beatrice. His worship of the ideal ego, of an untouchable object of desire, constitutes his choice of exile, his intention of always holding a part of himself in reserve from all others. Again, Bloom's ten years of celibacy is related to the ten years that Stephen intends to take to write a novel. Richard neglects Bertha by choosing to remain an androgynous angel, and by continuing to worship his secret rose. Another factor linking Amelia and Beatrice is that each of these women suffer an illness for which they are operated upon: they are wounded bodies. It is suggested that Beatrice's illness is responsible for her celibacy and her selfishness, her inability to give herself to another (P.+E., pp. 124-5). Like Duffy, in "A Painful Case," she is exiled from "life's feast" (Dub., p. 79). In his cuckolding, it is the masochist's intention to assume this wound from her. Richard's chastity, which is suggested by the nights he spends in his study, is like Bloom's chastity. Both men are exiled from life's rich feast, at which Molly and Boylan, and Robert and Bertha, sup with the purity of animals. For Freud, psychic impotence may generally be attributed to a failure of the currents of affection and desire to commingle and run in a single channel. Psychic impotence "affects men of strongly libidinous natures, and manifests itself in a refusal by the executive organs of sexuality to carry out the sexual act, although before and after they may show themselves to be intact and capable of performing the act, and although a strong psychical inclination to carry it out is present."; The two currents of love of which Freud speaks -affection and desire-may be observed in the discrepancy between Richard's and Robert's definitions of love: for Richard, love is affection, "To wish her well," while for Robert, love is desire, "to possess [ . . . ] the woman whom he loves" (P.+E., p. 190). Freud argues that the male tends to degrade his sexual partner, in order to escape the current of affection, which inhibits desire.8 Degradation, however, is a difficult term, particularly within a Joycean context: as it only exists within a framework of desexualization, it is always touched by paradox. In his letters to Nora, when urging her to abandon her sexual inhibitions, Joyce informs Nora that he hopes to "degrade and deprave" her (Ltrs.I., p. 271). For Joyce, however, the primary degradation of the body is the original wound, that is drawn and stanched by desexualization. To liberate from desexualization is thus to degrade, although, for
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the masochist, this degradation no longer implies a negative value judgement: rather, this liberation heals and glorifies the wounded body. The masochist's degradation of the woman, which frees her to lust, is very different from the sadist's degradation of the woman, which makes her a sewer into which he may expel his spent desire. The distinction between pity-love and lust is central to the Joycean inquiry into love: Ah not lust, dearest, not the wild brutal madness I have written to you these last days and nights, not the wild beast-like desire for your body, dearest, is what drew me to you then and holds me to you now. No, dearest, not that at all but a most tender, adoring, pitiful love for your youth and girlhood and wealzness. 0 the sweet pain you have brought into my heart! (Ltrs.I., pp. 272-3) Joyce's difficulty in reconciling pity-love and bestial desire is a constant refrain in his letters to Nora: "I wonder is there some madness in me [ . . . . ] One moment I see you like a virgin or madonna the next moment I see you shameless, insolent, half naked and obscene!" (Ltrs.I., p. 243) That his difficulty in making these currents run in a single channel may have caused some degree of psychic impotence is suggested by the fact that, in the letters, he says that he would like to get an extra bed for nights when he is working late, so that he, like Richard, may sleep alone (Ltrs.I., p. 276). The masochist's urge to be cuckolded is an urge to overcome, or come to terms with psychic impotence, by making the two currents of love run in a single channel. He attempts to make his beloved become more than one woman, so that he may direct toward her both channels of his love: his desire and his affection. To do this, he omits genital penetration from his pleasures. To be cuckolded is the apotheosis of masochism, because it draws extremes together, focusing them upon a single image, which is charged with a double meaning: the union of the virgin and the whore. Freud proposes that a conscious duality often has its source in an unconscious unity.9 Socialization imposes dualities when it draws the body as wounded. Cuckolding allows the masochist to return to the sea, but a sea sanitized and frozen over. Richard's ideal of love ("to wish her well") is central to Joyce's work. In his letters to Nora, Joyce stresses that the essential contradictions between love and lust do not reside in their perception, but in their natures, and in their points of origin: "My prick is still hot and stiff and quivering from the last brutal drive it has given you when a faint hymn is heard rising in tender pitiful worship of you from the dim cloisters of my heart" (S.Ltrs., p. 180). Significantly, Bloom confesses that knowledge of Gerty's lameness would have killed the sexual arousal that watching her afforded him (U., p. 479). Feeling a soft, tender caring for the loved one, suffering a sorrowful pitylove for her, kills the lover's sexual desire. He does not want to bring the violence of his genital drives to bear upon her.
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The Cuckold In his letters to Nora, Joyce often adopts a tender tone, in which he laments the frailty of her shoulders and arms, as his pity-love makes him aware of the sorrow of separate existences: "Why do I cry? I cry because it is so sad to think of her moving about that room, eating little, simply dressed, simple-mannered [ . . . . ] I cry too with pity that she should have chosen such an ignoble love as mine" (Ltrs.I., p. 266). Such pity-love makes him feel burdened by responsibility. This desexualizing responsibility is heightened when she has borne his child. Joyce wrote to Nora: "Our children (much as I love them) must not come between us" (Ltrs.I., p. 242). He wrote to Stanislaus, complaining that: "The child is an unforgettable part of the problem" (Ltrs.I., p. 95). The existence of a child made Nora more dependent upon him, and made him feel that he could no longer simply escape. He complained that Nora's effect on him: "has so far been to destroy (or rather to weaken) a great part of my natural cheerfulness and irresponsibility" (Ltrs.I., p. 96). Of Giorgio he said: "My new relation has made me a somewhat grave person" (Ltrs.I., p. 75). The sorrow and the pity that inhibits desire echoes Joyce's regrets for having conspired in the victimization of his mother. In Ulysses, Stephen resents and repels memories of his mother just because the pity they evoke causes him such pain. Although he cries: "No mother. Let me be and let me live" (U., p. l l ) ,he also recounts, with tender sympathy, the possessions she left behind (U., p. l o ) , the immanence that cups her absence. Similarly, when Severin prepares to take his own life, his memories of dead loved ones at this point suggest that his pity for his dead is somehow at the source of his masochism: "I think of my mother whom I loved so dearly and whom I saw die of a dreadful illness, of my brother who perished in the flower of his youth, without ever tasting the pleasures of life [ . . . . ] All is dust and returns to dust."lO For Freud, the failure of the currents of affection and desire to combine and run in a single channel is a result of the prohibitions on incest.11 The first form of love is pregenital affection, directed toward the mother. By the time genital sexuality has awakened, with its specific goal, the incest taboo has been established. Affection, however, recalls the original love directed to family members, and so, when it awakens in a context of desire, it brings the inhibiting taboo on incest to bear upon the consummation of desire. In coming to this conclusion, Freud seems to overlook a much simpler explanation, one that he had used elsewhere, and that could have consolidated another trend in his thought. In "The Taboo of Virginity," his third essay on loving, Freud concludes that it is because taking a woman's virginity may be considered as a violence done on her that a man other than the future husband, or in cases an elderly woman, is in certain societies employed to break the hymen.12 Through the employment of this surrogate, the husband and wife are able to avoid founding their nuptial life upon an act of violence, perpetrated by the husband upon the wife, which might cause her to resent the husband. From this, Freud might also have concluded
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that, if male penetration of the female constitutes a violence done on her, even by recollection alone, the failure of the currents of affection and desire to combine is due to a reluctance on the part of the male to do violence on one for whom he feels affection. Stephen fears May and Dilly dragging him with them together down, and Richard, Gabriel, Bloom (and Joyce) find their desire to be impeded by a similarly painful affection. Deleuze argues that the masochist reacts against the coarseness and brutality of masculinity, and rejects the father's likeness in himself. " T h e father's likeness represents b o t h genital sexuality and the superego as the agent of repression."l; In interpretations of masochism, the role of the superego as the agent of authority is often stressed, to the neglect of the part that genital sexuality plays in the masochist's overturnings. As Bersani emphasizes, however, the superego-as the internalization of the external agent of authority-is violent because it appropriates an intrinsic and primal violence, which has as its nexus the phallus.14 He considers Freud to evade this truth whenever he approaches it, by turning back to the notion of the superego as the repressive, Oedipal agent of authority. In "The Taboo of Virginity," for instance, a recognition of the violent assault that is implicit in genital penetration is covered over by the conception of "penis envy." In Joyce, the innate violence of the phallus is emphasized. Molly refers to Boylan, the penis personified, as "the savage brute" (U., p. 894). His penis itself is a "tremendous big red brute of a thing [ . . . ] like some kind of a thick crowbar standing all the time" (U., p. 887). When she thinks: "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" (U., p. 877), we are reminded of the vulgar, bullying Cyclops. The introduction of this image with "no," in a chapter in which so much depends on "yes," is significant. The penis is monstrous, inhuman, a machine: "strength those engines have in them like big giants and the water rolling all over and out of them all sides like Loves old sweet sonnnng" (U., p. 894). Molly enjoys the prospect of "jaunting in a train" (U., p. 885) and, particularly in "Sirens," Boylan is described as "jaunty." Although Boylan is inhuman-or rather, inhumane-and therefore unlovable, Molly's polygamous, nomadic desire recognizes him as an adventure. She, like Bloom, recognizes sex as sacrifice, and wants to disappear and be transported. Molly is unable to love Boylan, however, because of the very qualities that lure her to him sexually. The strongest image of the phallus as violent, in Ulysses, is diffused throughout "Penelope." Molly recalls Boylan "like a Stallion driving it up into you [ . . . ] with that determined vicious look in his eye" (U., p. 877). Later, while complaining of the way in which feminine clothing inhibits mobility, and makes women vulnerable, she thinks: "thats why I was afraid when that other ferocious old Bull began to charge [ . . . ] ripping all the whole insides out of those poor horses" (U., p. 895). That Boylan the stallion becomes Boylan the bull, ripping the insides out of Molly
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The Cuckold the mare, is suggested when Molly begins to bleed, and attributes this to "all the poking and rooting and ploughing he had up in me" (U., p. 913). "[Nlice invention they made for women for him to get all the pleasure but if someone gave them a touch of it themselves theyd know" (U., p. 877). That Molly locates the nexus of human violence, "the trace of fascism in the flesh," in the phallus, is clear when she thinks, of a hardened criminal who murdered an old woman: "Id cut them off so I would" (U., p. 909). Bloom, from another perspective, recognizes the violent hunger of the phallus, when he considers that to become a eunuch might be "One way out of it" (U., p. 101). Without identifying with the penis, he recognizes it as the source of discontent and frenzied hunger. It is significant that the chapter in which he makes this remark, "Lotus Eaters," ends with Bloom's penis becoming "a languid floating flower" (U., p. 107). For ICrafft-Ebing, sadism is "nothing else than a monstrous pathological intensification" of normal sexual aggression in the male, a perversion "in which the need to subjugate the opposite sex forms a constituent element.'l" After having described an incident in which a man sexually molested him, Rousseau describes an abiding disgust for masculine sexuality, which contributes, in turn, to a tendency to idealize women. I could not understand what was the matter with the wretch. I believed that he was attacked by epileps!; or some other madness even more terrible; and in truth, I lznow nothing more hideous for any cold-blooded person to see than such filthy and dirty behavior, and a frightful countenance enflamed by brutal lust. I have never seen another man in a similar condition; but if we are like it when we are with women, their loolzs must certainly be bewitched, for them not to feel disgusted at us [ . . . . ] the appearance and gestures of my frightful Moor, always inspiring me with such horror, that I had difficulty in concealing it. O n the other hand, women, to my mind, gained much by comparison; it appeared to me that I owed them tender feelings and personal homage by way of reparation for the insults of my sex; and the ugliest strumpet became an object of adoration, when I remembered the false African.16
In his masturbatory letters to Nora, Joyce reels between his pity-love and his bestial urges, unable to reconcile these conflicting feelings for her: But, side by side and inside this spiritual love I have for you there is also a wild beast-like craving for every inch of your bod!; for every secret and shameful part of it. My love for you allows me to pray to the spirit of eternal beauty and tenderness mirrored in your eyes or to fling you down under me [ . . . . ] It allows me to burst into tears of pity and love at some slight word, to tremble with love for you a t the sounding of some chord or cadence of music [ . . . . ] (Ltrs.I., p. 269)
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This "beast-like craving" is not the same as Richard's "ignominious lust," as ignominious lust is the masochist's means of reconciling these contradictions. This bestial lust is closer to Robert's conception of love. Robert represents the sexual, phallic impulse, which is innately sadistic. The masochist possesses a phallic drive, but reverses it, and perverts it, prolonging and frustrating it to punish the father in himself. Bloom is clearly able to empathize with Boylan's brutal sexuality, when he watches through the keyhole in "Circe," and urges: "Plow her! More! Shoot!" (U., p. 671) It is because Richard is driven by the impulse to possess, as is Robert, that his cuckolding causes him such pain. The masochist brings about his cuckolding, not because he is indifferent to being cuckolded, but because he recognizes and rejects his own phallic impulse to possess, and to objectify his beloved. The masochist does not want to behave toward the object of his desire as would Corley, Boylan or Robert, who would degrade and disregard women for their own pleasure. This sporty triumvirate have freed themselves from the conventions of marriage, but not from the more hidden king "in here," which makes them perceive of women as capital, and use women as receptacles for their violent urges. They have escaped the desexualizing tyranny of law, to be enslaved by the violent hunger of the phallus, the bonds of "love" of which Richard tells Bertha he wants them to be free. The phallic impulse is tyrannical and sadistic by nature, and it is this that necessitates law. When Wanda expounds the advantage that women have over men, because "It is man who desires, woman who is desired," and because men "are so vulnerable to passion," her position is dependent upon law, and upon the suppression of anarchy.17 Women may only make men slaves once the violent impulse of the phallus is restricted or desexualized. If the tyrannical phallus is set free, women become the coin in Corley's palm. Corley, Boylan and Robert have no sympathy or empathy for women: they want only to possess. We cannot imagine this triumvirate lamenting the frailty of their beloveds' arms. When explaining to Richard his impulse to take and to kiss whatever he finds beautiful, Robert picks up a stone which Richard uses as a paperweight, and says: "This stone [ . . . . ] It suffers our passion: and it is beautiful [ . . . . ] And so I kiss it" (P.+E., p. 155. emphasis added). For Robert, this stone, like the loved object, is an appropriable object, to be touched, held or stolen. When Richard tells Robert that he can not steal from him, because his doors are open (P.+E., p. 188), he stresses that he is an exile, possessing no property. His lover is not a thing that may be stolen. Richard's paperweight, a gift from Bertha, holds down his writing, his love letters to his ideal ego, and offers him stability against dissipation and disconnection, a place to return. Joyce wrote, in a letter to Nora: "Everything that is noble and exalted and deep and true and moving in what I write comes, I believe, from you," and in another: "If I am to write anything fine or noble in the future I shall do so only by listening at the doors of your heart" (Ltrs.I., pp. 248,254). In resolving to listen at the doors of her heart, Joyce acknowl-
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The Cuckold edges her interiority, her autonomy, and her hidden life. Love is to possession as cruelty is to violence, and as eroticism is to sex: it is reflective and socialized, capable of seeing a self in the other, and of drawing a non-appropriative analogy: a golden rule. Despite the questions of justice that are inextricably caught up in this, the primary impetus behind the masochist's urge to be cuckolded is the hunger for masochistic satisfaction. Any efforts to determine whether the masochist's impulse to be cuckolded is predominantly selfish or just will inevitably run up against aporia, against the black hole of the paradox. Undoubtedly, Richard is attempting to release his own sense of justice, based upon love, from the jurisdiction of institutions, convention, law and, finally, sexual impulse, as the power before which his desire must repent and abase itself. He is intent upon emancipating Bertha whether she desires such emancipation or not. Having all but overcome the bonds of convention, institution and law, he discovers the primal bond in a primal hunger; the sexual impulse that says he should possess her, that says access to her body should be only his. Robert speaks to Richard first of "nature's law," and then he transposes this to the law god has written on man's heart: that man should long to possess women (P.+E., pp. 190-192). Later, somewhat inconsistently, Robert says to Bertha: "There is no law before impulse. Laws are for slaves" (P.+E., p. 228). Although he does not deny being subject to what Robert describes as "nature's law," Richard responds: "Did I vote it?" (P.+E., p. 190).He rejects his own powerful impulse to make woman a thing that may be violently possessed and disregarded, his impulse to make her an appropriable object. Although he recognizes these urges within himself and, like Joyce, suffers deeply from jealousy, he does not believe that to indulge these impulses unrestrainedly would constitute freedom, as does Robert. Rather, he considers the phallic impulse to possess to be the deepest roots of the father, the king " in here." Stephen considers the penis, his likeness to the father, to be an alien presence, striving to usurp his will, "feeding itself out of the tender marrow of his life" (Port., p. 126). Robert has only been able to follow Richard's quest for emancipation from tyrant kings "in here" so far. He cannot follow Richard so far as to recognize that the phallus is a king "in here." For him, the phallic impulse represents freedom. Wanda clarifies this, in her comments that cruelty "is the very substance of sensual and natural love. It is woman's true nature to give herself wherever she loves and to love whatever pleases her [ . . . . ] You northerners take love too seriously. You speak of duty where it is purely a question of pleasure [ . . . . ] I shall deny myself nothing, I shall love everyone who attracts me."18 Her views, like Robert's, allow for no loyalty, and define love as hunger. Richard and Severin, in their quests for liberty, have moved back to and again beyond animal sexuality. They have returned to eroticism, desexualized now not by law and prohibition-as is the sadistbut by pity and love. '
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Although they have rejected, for themselves, enslavement to the phallus's appropriative, possessive impulse, they want to worship and be enslaved by such a will to power, so long as it issues from beyond themselves. Desire must be distinguished from the worship of desire, just as the sexual is distinguished from the erotic. The masochist wants to worship his tortures as both immanent and transcendent, as both the object of desire and the prohibited object of desire. Althougl~he is always already desexualized, he hopes to relieve others of their desexualization. He is, as Wanda says of Severin, a martyr to desire: "I actually believe that in unusual circumstance and in a more exalted age than this, what appears to be your weakness would reveal itself as impressive power. Under the first emperors, you would have been a martyr [ . . . ] during the French Revolution you would have [ . . . ] walked to the guillotine with the Marseillaise on [your] lips."lg (Without a doubt, as such a martyr, Severin would have praised the bare breasted, feminine figure of Liberty.) One of the ways in which the masochist evades enslavement to the phallus is through various methods of symbolic castration. The masochist takes the ideal ego's wounded body into himself, glorifying this wound by choosing it. At the end of Exiles, Richard describes his victory: "I have wounded my soul for you-a deep wound of doubt which can never be healed. I can never know, never in this world. I do not wish to know or to believe. I do not care. It is not in the darkness of belief that I desire you. But in restless living wounding doubt" (P.+E., p. 265). Gary Leonard goes too far in suggesting that neither Richard nor Robert "desires Bertha for her erotic potentiality as they do for her capacity to secure the interiority of one man by helping him to breach the interiority of another."20 True, the erotic tension in the play is one step removed from the union of bodies, however its foundation is the normative and conventional desire for heterosexual union, and Richard's desire is a mirroring (and reversing) image of this normative desire. The sexualization here is not so much only of secrecy, but also, and more importantly, of being betrayed, and left alone. Secrets shared entail loyalty, and it is primarily the alienating loss of this loyalty that is sexualized for Richard. Richard's play with secrets does not serve as the erotic charge in this play, but is instead the construction of a safety net against the loss that his self-annihilating sexual urge might bring about. The self-contradiction that is evident when Richard admits he both "wanted Robert "not to do anything . . . secret against me" and, at the same time, "longed to be betrayed by you and by her . . . secretly,"21 suggests that Richard's erotic goal is more complex than simply securing his interiority by sharing secrets with Bertha, and breaching another man's interiority by being privy to his secrets with her. The difference between "want" and "longing" is pertinent here. Like Bloom with Molly and Boylan, Richard encourages and helps to construct this triangle. Also like Bloom, he both wants and does
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The Cuckold not want the situation that he encourages. Again, masochism is a movement rather than a condition. Richard's normative self does not want to lose Bertha's loyalty, and to have another man deposit his secrets in her, but his masochism sexualizes and makes compelling this alienation and loss of loyalty, so that he longs for that which he does not want. The masochist's symbolic castration (the wound of doubt) facilitates his minoritarian identification, his becoming woman. In the first of his three essays on loving, Freud claims that it is frequently the case that masculine sexuality needs an injured third party, and a degraded loved object, as preconditions for loving.22 He seeks an Oedipal explanation for this, rather than simply identifying the phallus as a source of violence. Both Robert, and the Robert in Richard, correspond to these types of male object-choice, but Richard overcomes these impulses in himself, by inverting them. The masochist wants not to injure a third party, but to be the injured third party. In the same way, he wants not to degrade the loved object, but to elevate her and, in so doing, be degraded by her. The problem he faces however, is that, as Freud notes, women do not have the tendency to degrade men in love.23 In assimilating her into his ritual he must therefore, if she is to degrade him, himself become-woman, and endow her with a maleness. To do this, he himself makes gestures of passivity and chastity, at the same time that she becomes sensually hungry, and sexually free, as their society permits only males to be. Women do not degrade men in sex for the same reason that woman is the first becoming: it is due to woman's "special situation in relation to the manstandard," "They steal the body first from the gir1."24 To feminize is to degrade, and to degrade is to feminize. As the masochist's symbolic castration entails a minoritarian identification, the masochist, in order to consolidate his becoming-woman, may engage in bisexual rites. As with masochistic transvestism, however, he does not engage in such rites from straightforward desire to do so, but in order to negate his primal urges. As he becomes, something must rise up in the inajoritarian space he has evacuated. When Buck shows Stephen his image in a mirror pinched from his own female servant, a hidden element of their friendship is suggested. Stephen does not admit to himself that he has an impulse similar to that which leads Bloom to make use of Boylan, and Richard to make use of Robert. Buck is involved in Stephen's sexuality, however, not from straightforward desire for bodily contact, but for an equation of power that he and Stephen might embody beneath the female gaze. Buck might serve to consolidate Stephen's minoritarian identification, and so intensify his becoming. Contact is only secondary to sexual desire; at its source it is about tensions and equations of power. One of the more obvious, but still complex expressions of this power game might be seen in the scenario in which the masochist serves his tortures and her lover:
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At lunch the prince is at her side and I am condemned to wait on them; they exchange jokes and ignore me totally. As I am pouring out the Bordeaux, a dizzy spell comes over me; the wine spills over the tablecloth and on to my mistress's gown. 'How clumsy!' cries Wanda, and she slaps my face. The blood rushes to my head and they both laugh heartily.25 BOYLAN: (jwnps s11rely fi'om the car and calls lozldl)' for all t o hear) Hello, Bloom! Mrs. Bloom up yet? BLOOM: (In f11mke)"s prune plush coat and kneebreeches, buff stockings and powdered wig) I'm afraid not, sir, the last articles . . . BOYLAN: (tosses h i m sixpence) Here, to buy yourself a gin and splash. (He hangs his hat smartlj, o n a peg of Bloom's antlered head) Show me in. I have a little private business with your wife. You understand? BLOOM: Thank you, sic Yes, sir, Madame Tweedy is in her bath, sic MARION: [ . . . . ] Raoul darling, come and dry me. I'm in my pelt. Only my new hat and a carriage sponge. (U., pp. 669-70) Richard stresses that, although he could n o t touch Robert sexually, through Bertha, Robert a n d he might be drawn into sexual contact (P.+E., pp. 208, 350-351). Severin, like Richard, insists t h a t he could n o t be touched by a n o t h e r male,26 b u t later confesses t h a t this is t h e apotheosis of his masochism. W h e n Wanda ties Severin with his face t o a column, hiding his male sexuality, a n d exposing his femininity-his buttocks, the symbol of his passive body-she invites the Greek to: "Do with him w h a t you will." T h e suggestion of sexual contact between him a n d the Greek is obvious. Severin experiences intense shame a n d equally intense arousal. H e confesses that this shame is both pleasurable a n d unbearable: [Tlhe tears streamed down my cheelzs. Meanwhile Wanda lay on the ottoman, her head in her hand, watching the scene with fiendish curiosity and amusement. The sensation of being whipped before the eyes of a woman one adores by a successful rival is quite indescribable; I was dying of shame and despair. What was more humiliating was that I felt a supersensual pleasure in my pitiful situation, lashed by Apollo's whip and mocked by the cruel laughter of my Venus.2' Such homosocial abasement is also present in Masoch's "The Red ManorHouse." Here, Sergei has lost his lover, Maruvka, t o a wealthy, powerful a n d violent man, Bogratski. His continued devotion t o M a r u v k a compels him t o submit t o Bogratski, s o t h a t he m a y maintain some proximity t o Maruvka:
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The Cuckold Sergei lznelt before his lord and lzissed his hand. 'That's right,' said the latter. 'You shall remain here in the manor-house and do our bidding.' Sergei rose and sighed. 'It amuses me,' Bogratslzi stated, turning towards Maruvlza, 'that your lover should become my lackey.' 'Me too,' she replied, smiling [ . . . . ] Thus Sergei was brought into submission. He lay under Maruvlza's feet and began to lick her soles; and when she had had enough, Bogratslzi made him pull off his own red morocco leather boots and perform the same servile function for him. While Sergei like a dog, like a worm even, lay beneath his feet, he tallzed to Maruvlza, ~ 1 1 0was lounging lasciviously, resting her head upon his shoulder. 'This is real delight, and the pleasure it gives me is doubled d e n I reflect that it is your erstwlile lover, that is in fact my rival, who is obliged to apply it.'28 Through his torturess, the masochist is brought into sexual contact with other males. This is what he most fears and most desires. This is his negation. He is so thoroughly possessed by her that he has become a part of her. Becomi n g ~entail alliances, contagions, reversals, unnatural participations. His movement into the minoritarian group is counterpointed by her movement in the opposite direction. Severin serves and worships, while the Greek takes and commands. The Greek rules Wanda, and Wanda rules Severin. Severin gives himself to Wanda, and Wanda gives herself and Severin to the Greek. This is the final stage of his abasement. H e becomes nothing, becomes imperceptible, but he is the ghostly author, holding in place the framework in which they operate. It is significant to Bloom's becoming-nothing, which is facilitated by his cuckolding, that Stephen argues that Shakespeare played the part of the ghost in Hamlet. The torturess joins the master race against the masochist, but she is a double agent. The honesty of the torturess to the masochist is essential to their conspiracy. Severin says to Wanda: "You would have to be entirely honest with me, however, and have the diabolical grandeur to admit."29 Richard too stresses to Bertha that it is essential to him that she be honest about what passes between Robert and her, and that she be willing to submit to his detailed interrogations (P.+E., p. 175).In a sense, this ritual serves to prove her love for him, and her loyalty. They move beyond the politics of gender, beyond relations of power. He wins her pity-love by renouncing his violent, appropriative and selfish genital sexuality. They may speak on equal terms: he has repented, done his penance, and won her forgiveness. Other males are mere toys, caricatures, or ornaments in her harem. By endowing her with maleness, and by making her secure in her possession of
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his pity-love, he has enabled her to see other men as appropriable objects. The male who cuckolds him does not come out the winner; he is more victimized than any other party in the ritual. Robert is manipulated and toyed with by both Richard and Bertha. He is forced to play the role of the villain, the soon-to-be-toppled tyrant in the masochist's cosmogony. Richard's faith in the disciple whose role it is to betray him is condescending (P.+E., p. 150). He feels pity for Robert as he observes his ridiculous contortions. Robert's flowers, his perfume, and his compulsive need to fix his hair, seem pathetic to both Richard and Bertha. Similarly, while Boylan is desirable to Molly, he is not loveable to her. He is a caricature with which both she and Bloom toy. At the end of Exiles, it is Robert who enters exile, and at the end of Ulysses, Bloom sleeps in Molly's bed. In "Circe," after the faces of Bloom and Stephen are transformed into that of Shakespeare, and Shakespeare is transformed into Martin Cunningham (whose domineering wife sings "And they call me the jewel of Asia") Stephen thinks: "Et exnltnbuntur cornun iusti. Queens lay with prize bulls" (U., p. 672). He is here quoting from a passage in Psalms 75: "And the horns of the just shall be exalted." The psalm continues: "and the horns of the wicked shall be cut 0ff.";0 Boylan is a prize bull, and not a king. Richard and Bloom still hold their lovers' pity-love, and Boylan and Robert disappear. Bloom, and not Boylan, will be privileged with breakfast in bed.
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CONCLUSION
The Emperor's New Clothes
The Emperor was desperate to procure the most wonderful clothes, in which he might present himself to the people. He viewed numerous garments, and rejected them, considering all to be too common. Two tailors arrived, stripped him naked, and told him they had dressed him in magnificent clothes, invisible only to his eyes. Dressed only in their praises, he went out to the people. The crowd was silent for a moment, and then it "oohed" and "ahhed" about the rich fabrics, the crisp edges. Not until a young fellow pointed and stated "he's naked," did the people begin to titter and blush. The value of Ulysses is that it shows a whole man, from 360°, with unprecedented candor. This is apparent in a way, and to an extent, that is not apparent in any other piece of literature. Although it is not as openly confessional as Rousseau's Confessions, it seems to probe much deeper. The reason it manages to go deeper is related to Joyce's eschewal of the conventions of the confessional form. He focuses on the minutiae, rather than the great movements, and lets accident and coincidence subvert the impetus of any destiny. In certain respects, Joyce's success in presenting the full man to such an extent is due to the distance afforded by the fictionalization of his confession. Nonetheless, Joyce leaves a clear trail back to himself (though what "himself" entails is not clear). The sense in which Joyce acts as a bridge between Stephen and Bloom is often unrecognized. New critical dogmas preclude many from realizing that between Bloom and Stephen there is a hypertextual link leading to written and yet to be written biographies. Stephen's preoccupation with cuckoldry has meaning only in relation to Bloom. The jumps between Stephen and Bloom are effected through the themes of masochism. Masochism also directs a jump from Stephen-JoyceBloom to other characters, and brings into relief a whole man. By tracing the many masochistic lines of force that run through Joyce's work, we may succeed in discerning the development of a man, drawn with an honesty that amounts to vision, and which eclipses any non-fictional confession. Perhaps masochism, however, is also responsible for the seeming opacity of Joyce's presence between Stephen and Bloom. Certain New Critical assumptions have attained the status of dogma. Although these assumptions are often overlooked-in part to afford people
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an opportunity to wear boaters on Bloom's day-they have proven damaging to certain more rigorous approaches to Joyce. New Critical assumptions may safeguard against a great deal of bad writing, but they may also drain the capacity of literature to conduct and accrue significance. A focus on the text's wholeness and self-completion may be useful as a rule of thumb, but this guideline can often be inhibiting. This is particularly the case when it constitutes an unreflective imperative to compartmentalize works, and take them out of their human (as distinct from historical) contexts. The presence of Joyce in Ulysses is most relevant for the extent to which it develops our understandings of the characters of Stephen and Bloom. Joyce as a structural device is perhaps more relevant to the confessional programme of Ulysses than is that other fictional figure-the Joyce of the biographies, the letters, and the photographs. Joyce, as a structural device, is written into the text when Stephen talks about Shakespeare's personal life, details of interest only to the parish clerk. This linkage of Stephen and Bloom is also apparent in "Circe," in the fluid vacillation between the concerns of Stephen and those of Bloom. One of the most obvious instances of this has already been cited. Not long after Stephen sees ( ? ) Dolan as a jack-in-the-box, waving a pandy bat and repeating, "any boy want a flogging?" he says: "See? Moves to one great goal. I am twentytwo too. Sixteen years ago I twentytwo tumbled, twentytwo years ago he 1 6 fell off his hobbyhorse. (He winces) Hurt my hand somewhere" (U., p. 668). Immediately after this, Zoe and Florry whisper and laugh, and we are back into Bloom's masochistic fantasy. In "Scylla and Charbydis," when asked what Shakespeare could have had to learn from a shrew, Stephen replies: "dialectics." O n his first appearance in "Circe," in relation to the topic of a language of gestures, Stephen adds to his dialogue with Lynch: "We have shrewridden Shakespeare and henpecked Socrates. Even the allwisest stagyrite was bitted, bridled and mounted by a light of love" (U., pp. 564-5). This should warn us that any links between Bloom's masochism and Stephen's conjectured masocl~ismare relevant not only in developmental terms, but also in terms of the relation of Bloom's masochism to Stephen's exile and artistry, and in turn to Joyce's (Shakespeare's) intellectual project. This linking is clearest in "Circe," when: "(Stephen and Bloom gaze in the mirror. The face of William Shakespeare, beardless, appears there, rigid in facial pamlysis, crowned by the reflection of the reindeer antlered hatrack in the hall)" (U., p. 671). Through the use of Bloom, Joyce reveals a sense in which the sexual drive may seem to be a presence alien to that which constitutes the self. It is also suggested that the alienated presence of Bloom, and his masochism, are a product of, an extension of, or a subversion of Stephen's development, his status as an artist, and his tendency to enter into exile on multiple levels. Stephen's exiles are related to his idealism, and these are subverted in Bloom's perverse idealism. It has already been stated that Joyce's linkage of Stephen and Bloom
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Conclusion
22 1
allows us to posit Joyce as a structural device, which in turn enables us to consider Bloom's masocl~ismas a logical development of Stephen's condition. As a structural device, Joyce's presence as a bridge does not compel us to look for the meanings of the text beyond itself. The arguments associated with "the death of the author" are not contradicted by this reference to an author as something external to the text. Here, absence is the highest form of presence. There is no need to assume any stability of identity in order to posit Bloom as the logical conclusion of Stephen. The delicate balance between the confessional and fictional elements of the book calls into question the conception of stable identity, and this questioning is participant in both the fictional and the confessional aspects of the book. Perhaps it is this specific questioning which has enabled Ulysses to be the fullest and most honest confessional ever written. A number of writers in Quare Joyce point out that sexuality in Joyce is a sexuality that eludes or disintegrates stability of identity. Tim Dean refers to Bersani's account of the relationship between the self-shattering of masochism, and a certain type of art. My argument here has been that masochism entails the most resolute renunciation of the "saleable" or "normal" subjectivity of "ego psychology," and that, although it is never more than a movement, it is the most pronounced rejection of the mental illness of the ego. This is why masochism has always eluded psychologists, and why it is impossible to analyse coherently. Masochism disintegrates any coherences that it touches. The term masochism does not wholly account for Joycean sexuality, in terms of the existential Joyce, the biographical Joyce, or the Joyce (or Joyceness) that inheres to Stephen and Bloom, and acts as a bridge between them: it is, again, a movement rather than a condition. Masochism is one avenue through which sexuality becomes more than itself, and partakes of political, ethical and aesthetic constructs. Joyce shows us how this happens. In masochism, a blind drive becomes textualized, and contextualized: it is written into a theory of life. A cluster of nodes on a continuum of sexualities to which Joyce had access has been described. This includes parody, gender bending, idealism, carnivalization, minoritarian identification and mystical self-begetting. Masochistic sexuality is dependent upon the inversion, or subversion, of a pre-existent sexuality, or of a multiplicity of normative sexual drives. The study of masochism in Joyce reveals a self that is spurious, paradoxical, parodic and subversive. There may be concerns about the validity of masochism as a point of entry into the Joycean body. Clearly, masochism is a notoriously overdetermined conception, in the sense that it may be extended to cover too many practices and ideas, such as "minor literature," parody, gender bending, carnivalization and mystical self begetting, to name only some of these. This, however, is the subversive nature of the beast. Masochism-by broader or
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narrower definitions-is inherent in and unites a number of subnarratives in Joyce's oeuvre. There are positive gains to be made in choosing a broader rather than narrower definition of masochism, and examining the implications of the perversity's tendency to be overdetermined. Masochism implicates itself throughout the text, creating meaning, and linking meanings. A broader view of masochism links exile and masochism, and extends the meaning of both of these conceptions. Such a perspective will aid us in examining the Romantic, or idealistic quest, and the masochistic parody that is inherent in such excessive consciousness. It might also cast light on often overlooked Romantic tendencies in Joyce; tendencies overlooked most frequently, perhaps, by Joyce himself. Masochism is the sexual manifestation of an exile that is more absolute than many people can imagine. Masochism may be a metaphor for life, in which life is a beautiful woman who is worshipped although (because) she denies satisfaction. Given the importance of masochism as a bridge between Stephen and Bloom, it is unsurprising that many readers of Joyce miss the mark by failing to recognize the nature of Joyce's masochism, and the centrality of this masochism to Joyce's confessions.
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Notes
INTRODUCTION 1. J.F. Bjrne, Szlent Years: An Azltobzograph)' of James J o j w (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Young, 1953), p. 176, p. 156. 2. ww\i7.0\v1t.cz 3. Georges Bataille, Erotzczsm, trans Marj Dalwood (London: Boj ars, 1987), pp. 121-3, 136-7. 4. Henry Havelock Ellis, Stztdies in the Psj~holog)'of Sex, 7 Vols. (Philadelphia: Davis, all except Vol. 7 published in 1910). 5. ICrafft-Ebing, Richard yon, Psychopathia Sexztalis, with Especial Reference to the Antipathic Sexual Instinct: A Medico Forensic Stzld)', the only authorized English translation of the tenth German edition (London: Rebman, 1899). 6. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Vo1. 1, An Introdztction, trans. Robert Hurley (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990) 7. Richard Brown, James Jo)'ce and Sexzlalit)' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,l985), pp. 52-3, 157. 8. Grant Allen, A Splendid Sin (London: White, 1896). 9. Henry Johnson, The World of Sin (London: Aldine, 1913). 10. Huine Nisbet, A Sweet Sinner (London: Aldine, 19 13). 11. For Joyce's Itnowledge and use of these and related titles see Richard Brown, James Jo)'ce and Sexualitjl, p. 188. 12. Richard Brown, James Joyce and Sexztality, pp. 133-5. 13. Michael Tratner, "Sew and Credit: Consumer Capitalism in Ul)'sses," James Joj'ce Qzlarterl)' Vo1.30, No.4 (Summer 1993 1 Fall 19931, pp. 697-8. 14. Suzette Henke, James Joyce and the Politics of Desire (London-New York: Routledge, 19901, p. 215. 15. Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977). 16. Daniel Lagache, The Works of Daniel Lagache: Selected Papers, trans. Elisabeth Holder (London: ICarnac, 1993). 17. Gilles Deleuze and FClix Guattari, Anti-Oedipzts: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurle!; Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane (London: Athlone Press, 1988 c. 1987). 18. Ellie Ragland-Sullivan, "Psychosis Adumbrated: Lacan and the Sublimation of the Sexual Divide in Joyce's Exiles," J a v m Joj'ce Quarterljl, Vol. 29, No.1 (Fall 19901, pp. 51-2. 19. Daniel Lagache, "La psychanalyse et la structure de la personnaliti," in Oeztures, Vol. 4 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1982). 20. Michel Foucault, in the Preface to Gilles Deleuze and Fdix Guattari, AntiOedipzts, p. xiii.
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224
Notes
21. Julia ICrister-a, Powers of Horror: A n Essay o n Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New Yorlz: Colulnbia University Press, 1982). 22. Leo Bersani, T h e Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art (New York: Columbia Unir-ersity Press, 1986). 23. Jonathan Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence: Augustine t o W i l d g Freud t o Foucault (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 33. 24. Richard von ICrafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, p. 11.5. 25. Gilles Deleuze, Sacher-Masoch: A n Interpretation, together with the entire text of Venzts in Furs from a French reading by Aude Willm, trans. Jean McNeil (London: Faher and Faher, 1971). From here on I shall refer to Deleuze's interpretation of Sacher-Masoch as T h e Cold and the Cruel, as it is conventionally referred to as such. 26. Ian Gibson, T h e English Vice: Beating, Sex and Shame in Victorian England and After (London: Gerald Duclzworth & Co. Ltd., 1978), p. 47. 27. Ibid., p. 308. 28. Quoted from Ian Gihson, T h e English Vice, p. 2. 29. Quoted from Ian Gibson, T h e English Vice, p. 6 . 30. Ian Gihson, T h e English Vice, p. 6. 31. Ibid, p. 218. 32. Quoted from Ian Gibson, T h e English Vice, pp. 2-3. 33. Quoted from Ian Gihson, T h e English Vice, p. 12. 34. Quoted from Ian Gihson, T h e English Vice, p. 1. 35. Ian Gibson, T h e English Vice, p. 5. 36. Ibid., p. 4. 37. Ibid., p. 6. 38. Ibid., p. 6. 39. Ibid., p. 8. 40. Ibid., p. 10. 41. John Cleland, Farm)' Hill: Memoirs of a W o m a n of Pleasure (England: Mayflower, 1974, first published 1748 or 91, p. 17.3. 42. Ian Gihson, T h e English Vice, p. 11. 43. Ibid., pp. 21-2. 44. Ibid., p. 32.
1. William Blake, "America: A Prophecy," in Complete Writings of Blake: W i t h Variant Readings, ed. Geoffrey Keynes, new ed. (London: Oxford Universtiy Press, 1969), p. 196. 2. To an extent, the two modes of desexualization that I will elaborate here are similar to Viclzr- Mahaffer-'s concentions of "nkre-version" and "im-mkrsion" in Qztare Joyce, hower-er there are important differences, particularly as regards her conception of "im-mkrsion." She does, however, situate Stephen's movement from "pkre-version" to "im-mkrsion" after the death of his mother, which agrees with my situation of Stephen's mor-ement from oedipal triangulation and repression to narcissism and sublimation. Vicky Mahaffy, "Pkre-version" and Im-mkrsion: Idealized Corruption in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and T h e Picture of Dorian Gray," in Quare Joyce, Ed. Joseph Valente (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1998). 3. Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy A n Essa)' o n Interpretation, trans. Denis Savage (New Har-en: Yale Unir-ersity Press, 1970), p. 486. 4. Sublimation is a very difficult term, because Freud did little to elaborate upon this conception. In "Against Ulyses," Bersani spealzs of "the enormous author-
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Notes
5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 1.3. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.
225
ity of sublimation in our time," and describes Ulysses as "modernism's monument to that authority." In Quare Jo)'ce, Tim Dean presents Bersani's conception of sublimation as follows: "The idea of suhliination underpins the culture of redemption insofar as it rationalizes a diversion of gross sexual impulses into the more refined spheres of artistic creation and scientific investigation. By transforming the ephemeral materiality of sex into the permanence and ideality of art or intellection, sublimation performs a virtually religious operation of trallsubstantiatioll, effectively redeeming sexuality from any unmediated expression saye what is required for species propagation. It is fairly e ~ i d e n t how this understanding of suhliination implies a demluation of sexuality." Tim Dean, "Paring His Fingernails: Homosexuality and Joyce's Impersonalist Aesthetic," in QuareJoyce, p. 259. When I use the term sublimation in this argument, I will use it in a manner similar to Tim Dean's "countersublime perverse jouissance," or "anti-authoritarian mode of sublimation." In his guarded analysis of Bersani's critique of Ulysses, Dean points out that "the symbolic order's evisceration of jouissance gives us the model for normative sublimation. In Lacan's view, Joycean sublimation is fundamentally perverse." Tim Dean in Quare Joyce, p. 259. In my argument, the key to sublimation is that it offers an alternati~eto, or an escape from repression, into a mode of sexuality that is, alas, necessarily perverse. Gilles Deleuze, The Cold and the Cruel, p. 102. Didier Anziueu, in "Foreword" to Daniel Lagache, Lagache: Selected Writings, p.xiii. Leo Bersani, The Freudian Body, p. 100. Sigmund Freud, "On Narcissism: An Introduction," and "Instincts and Their Vicissitudes," in The Complete Psj~chologicalWorks of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 14, pp. 76-9, and Vo1.14, pp. 117-9, 124-6. Sigmund Freud, "Beyond the Pleasure Principle," and "Ci~ilizationand Its Discontents," in The Complete Ps)'chological Works of Siginund Freud, 1920, Vo1.18, pp. 52-3, and 1930, Vo1.21, p. 122. Sigmund Freud, "The Ego and the Id," and "Ci~ilizationand Its Discontents," in The Complete Ps)'chological Works of Sigmund Freud, 1923, Vo1.19, p. 40, and 1930, Vo1.21, pp. 119-21. Leo Bersani, The Freudian Body, pp. 32-3. Ibid., p. 34. Ihid., p. 35. Gilles Deleuze and Ftlix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p. 32.3. Ibid., p. 293. Ihid., p. 315. Ihid., p. 340. Georges Bataille, Eroticism, p. 239. Ihid., pp. 40-1, 49-50. Sigmund Freud, "Beyond the Pleasure Principle," in The Coinplete Psychological Works of Siginund Freud, Vo1.18, pp. 40, 46-50. Georges Bataille, Eroticism, pp. 13, 97. Sigmund Freud, "Beyond the Pleasure Principle," in The Coinplete Psychological Works of Siginund Freud, Vo1.18, pp. 52,53, 56. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tmgedy: Out of the Spirit of Music, trans. Shaun Whiteside, ed. Michael Tanner (London: Penguin Books, 1993), pp. 14-27, 113-117. Patrick Parrinder, James Joyce (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 19841, p. 1.3. Ibid., p. 9. Ihid., p. 9.
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Notes 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.
Jonathan Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence, p. 64 Ibid., pp. 65-6. Gilles Deleuze and FClix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p. 380. Jonathan Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence, p. 64. "Colo~~ial Bildung is not a transcendental metanarrative that hails or disavows subjects, nor is it an uncrowning of transcendence. It unsettles classical subject positions, de~elopingin rebellion within them, never fully abdicating the "classical" inscriptions. It erupts into oppositional mimicry in which hierarchies are levelled, rituals tra~estied,subject positions inhabited in exorbitant and often ~iolentways, caricaturing the so~ereignautonomy of the Western "subject" by fracturing it in every act of habitation. "Confessing Oneself" in Quare Jojw, p. 160. 32. Siginuild Freud, "The Ego and the Id," in The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmlnd Freud, Vo1.19, pp. 31, 36-7, 48, 57. 33. Jonathan Swift, Gztlliver's Travels, lithographs by Edward Banden (Great Eritain: W. J. Mackay and Co. Ltd., 1965), pp. 88-9.
CHAPTER TWO:DAEDALUS DESEXUALIZED 1. Gilles Deleuze and FClix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, pp. 274-5. 2. Jack Novick and IZerry N o ~ i c k ,Fearful Synwuetry: The Deuelopinent and Twatment of Sadon?asochisn? (Northvale, New Jersey: Jason Aronson Inc., 1996), p. 6. 3. Ibid., p. 14. 4. Ibid.,p. 16. 5. Ibid.,p. 72. 6. Chris and IZerry N o ~ i c kFearful , Symnwtry, p. 25 7. A11 of Joyce's work seem to be a striving for this state. Consider the formal exercises of Chamber Music with the free-flow of Finnegans Wake, where formlessness acts as a formal principle. 8. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, pp. 352, 354. 9. Ibid., p. 311. 10. Suzette Henke, James Joyce and the Politics of Desire, pp. 62-3, 72. 11. Theodore Reik, Masochism in Modern Man, in Of Love and Lust: On the Psjlchoanalj~sisof Sexual Emotions (London: Souvenir Press, 1975), pp. 231-4. 12. John Gordon, Finnegans Wake: A Plot Sunwuary (Dublin: Gill & MacMillan, 1986), p. 11. 13. Ibid., p. 11. 14. Ibid., p. 12. 15. Richard von IZrafft-Ebing, Ps)'chopathia Sexualis, pp. 149-50. 16. Ian Gibson, The English Vice, p. 64. 17. Ibid.,p. 75. 18. Quoted from Ian Gibson, The English Vice, p. 45. 19. Quoted from Ian Gibson, The English Vice, pp. 51-2. 20. Quoted from Ian Gibson, The English Vice, p. 65. 21. Quoted from Ian Gibson, The English Vice, p. 60. 22. Quoted from Ian Gibson, The English Vice, p. 64. 23. Quoted from Ian Gibson, The English Vice, p. 17. 24. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions, trans. Anonymous (Hertfordshire, Wordsworth Editions Ltd., 1996) p. 13. 25. Quoted from Ian Gibson, The English Vice, pp. 22,24. 26. Ian Gibson, The English Vice, p. 24. 27. Quoted from Ian Gibson, The English Vice, p. 65.
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Notes
22 7
Quoted from Ian Gibson, The English Vice, p. 28. Joseph Valente points out that after Stephen is pandied, he "wants to assert a difference between guilty, robust Corrigan and poor, little innocent Dedalus. But in doing so, he discloses a familiarity with Corrigan's physique apparently gleaned from watching his "every step" "in the bath," and the desire such familiarity would suggest seeins further corroborated by the way Corrigan's bodily image simply takes eyer Stephen's juridical meditation. At the same time, his own comparison of Corrigan's pigmentation to the dirty water in the bath recalls his own iininersion in the square ditch and so indicates how profoundly this desire interfuses with dread. Joseph Valente, "Thrilled by His Touch: The Aestheticizing of Homosexual Panic," in Quare Jo)'ce, p. 57. These sadistic and inasochistic expressions are matter of degree, rather than of absence. Sublimation will always contain elements of masochism in its worship of the ideal, just as the return of the repressed will always contain elements of sadism in its projection of rejected elements of the self. Gilles Deleuze, The Cold and the Cruel, pp. 20,66-9. Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-39, ed. with an introduction by Alan Stoekl (Manchester: Manchester University press, 19851, pp. 5-9, 74, 82. Ian Gibson, The English Vice, pp. 70-71. Wilde attended Portora, near Enniskillen, and then Trinity College, Dublin, before going on to Oxford. Joseph Valente touches on both the sexual and the political dimensions of the "mimic warfare" of boys. He relates the words suck, queer and cock, that Stephen polders in the Wicklow Hotel to the "chain of Stephen's psychic d e x opment." These "put an erotic spin on the sort of roughhousing that lands him in the square ditch and causes his f e ~ e eStephen, remember, a designated mama's boy, will not trade his dandyish "little snuffbox" for Wells's macho "haclzing chestnut, the conqueror of forty"; the box and the nut function as genital symbols for the respectively feminized and masculinized positions of Stephen and Wells. Since the incident exemplifies the sexualized aggression that Joyce attributed to English boarding school activities, and since Joyce was lilzewise shouldered into the ditch with similarly febrile consequences (JJII 281, it is worth noting that the square ditch runs along the perimeter of Clongowes and forms its boundary with the old English pale. It is, in other words, a border zone where the masculinized Anglo-Saxon "conqueror" and the feminized Irish conquered meet and, partly as an effect of the conquest itself, where their ethnoracial differences are both marlzed, even exaggerated, and overridden, even erased. With respect to Joyce's cherished distinction between the rampant homoeroticism of English public-school life and the comparati~einnocence of its Irish counterpart, the square ditch constitutes an objectified instance of "the proximate" itself, that is, a thin margin of dissociation into which the subject might always land or he pushed, and his kinship with the other be uncomfortably reaffirmed." Joseph Valente, "Thrilled by His Touch," Quare Jo)'ce, p. 53. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans. E. F. Payne ( D o ~ ePublications, r 1969). Margaret C. Solomon, Eternal Geomater: The Sexual Universe of Finnegans Wake (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969),pp. 24-9. Ian Gibson, The English Vice, p. 66. Ibid., p. 154 Ihid.,p. 169. Mathew Arnold, O n the Study of Celtic Literature and Other Essays (London: Everyman's Librar!; original pub. 1867, 1910), pp. 78, 79. Ihid., p. 82.
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Notes Ibid., p. 80. Chris and Kerry Novick, Fearful S)'v?metrjl, p. 36. Jean Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions, p. 13. Quoted in appendix to Venus in Furs, pp. 274-5 Ian Gibson, The English Vice, p. 53. Gilles Deleuze and FClix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 276. W. B. Yeats, "Blood and the Moon" in The Poems, p. 238. W. B. Yeats, "Never Give all the Heart" in The Poems, p. 79. Chris and Kerry Novick, Fearful Symnwtry, p. 22. Ibid., p. 29. Ibid., p. 32. Theodore Reik, Masochism in Modern Man, p. 284. Joyce's antipathy to the superego may be seen in his spendthrift nature. Despite his poverty, he brought impractical tokens of desire home to Nora: "James was paid for a lesson and with the money, all there was in the house, was sent to buy food. He returned instead with a haidpainted silk scarf for Nora" (J.J., p. 312). He comp~ilsivelylived beyond his own means, never scrimping and saving, always spellding extramgantly, recklessly iildulging his impulse and desire. Suzette Henke, James Joyce and the Politics of Desire, p. 76. Gilles Deleuze, The Cold and the Cruel, pp. 28-30, 63, 110. Mahaffey suminarizes Lacan's arguinent that "the value of per~ersionis that because "it can find no way of becoming grounded in any satisfying action" it allows one to experience h u ~ n a npassion more profoundly. The perverse lover is in search of himself; therefore his experience of desire opens up a gap within which "all manner of nuances are called forth, rising up in tiers from shame to prestige, from buffoonery to heroism, whereby human desire in its entirety is exposed, in the deepest sense of the term, to the desire of the other." Lacan makes it clear that perverse desire ensures "a reciprocal relation of annihilation" because such desire cannot be satisfied by possession of the object-the ohject is lost through its realization." Vicky Mahaffey, "Pkre-version and Iininkre-sion," in Quare Joyce, p. 124. The masochist maneuvers hiinself into such a position. Although Mahaffey and Lacan are discussing perversion in general here, it must he stressed that masochistic per~ersityis the most resolute in its renunciation of "satisfying action," and the possession of the ohject. Theodore Reik, Masochism in Modern Man, pp. 223-4,228,257. Samuel Beckett, Murphy (London: Pan Books, 19731, pp. 5-6.
1. James J o j d s D~bliners,Jackson and McGinley, p. 18. 2. Tn7o essays in Quare Jo)'ce, "A Walk on the Wild(e) Side" and "Paring His Fingernails," stress that green garments signaled homosexuality in Victorian England. Havelock Ellis comments: "inverts exhibit a preference for green garments." That the jackets of the Flynn and the pervert are green-black, then, combines the colour codes of homosexuality and the church. In "Paring His Fingernails," Tim Dean quotes Edward Carpenter's The Intermediate Sex, to argue that "the "type" of figure we've come to Itnow as "homosexual" has historically been closely associated with priestly functions." Tim Dean, "Paring His Fingernails," in Quare Jo)'ce, p. 254. 3. W.B. Yeats, "Fergus and the Druid," in The Poems, p. 32. 4. Gilles Deleuze and FClix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 241-2. 5. Ibid., p. 244. 6. Ibid., pp. 243-4.
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Notes
229
7. Joyce told Eudgen that Eloom's moly might be "indifference due to masturbation." 8. John Wyse Jackson and Eernard McGinley note that Ned Lainbert in Ulysses, in the "Hades" episode, refers to Eloom as once being a traveler for blotting paper. 9. A number of critics haye suggested that green eyes suggest homosexuality. "The likeliest possibility-that the boy believes sailors with green eyes are homosexuals-tends to be suppressed and displaced onto a contiguous substitute, legitimated by the overdetermination of censored blanks." "A Walk on the Wild(e) Side" in QuareJoyce, p. 27. 10. Gilles Deleuze and Fdix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 246. 11. Ihid., p. 245. 12. Jonathan Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence, p. 148. 13. Gilles Deleuze and Fdix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 247. 14. G.. L. Simons, A History of Sex (London: New English Library, 1970). 15. Ed Cohen, A Talk on the Wilde Side: Toward a Genealogy of Discourse o n Male Sexualities (New Yorlz-London: Routledge, 19931, p. 35. 16. Mathew Arnold, O n the Study of Celtic Literature, p. 80. 17. Quoted from Ed Cohen, A Talk on the Wilde Side, p. 45. 18. Quoted from Ed Cohen, A Talk on the Wilde Side, p. 35. 19. Quoted from Ed Cohen, A Talk on the Wilde Side, p. 35. 20. Ed Cohen, A Talk on the Wilde Side, p. 55. 21. Ibid., p. 49. 22. Ihid., p. 47. 23. Ihid., p. 42. 24. Ibid., pp. 39-40. 25. Ihid., p. 45. 26. Ihid., p. 46. 27. Quoted from Ed Cohen, A Talk on the Wilde Side, p. 52. 28. Quoted from Ed Cohen, A Talk on the Wilde Side, p. 47. 29. Quoted from Ed Cohen, A Talk on the Wilde Side, p. 56. 30. Gilles Deleuze and Fdix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 154. 31. Ihid., p. 155. 32. It could he said that there are similarities between Flynn, pale in his coffin, holding the chalice (Greek kalux-cup shaped flower) and Bloom observing his "pale body" and limp flower in the bath at the end of "Lotus Eaters," where he had intended to masturbate. Flynn's ascension is perhaps mirrored in Bloom imagining his body "buoyed slightly upward" (U., p. 107). Both bath and coffin are places of repose. 3.3. The geography of the confessional is interesting in that it is di~idedinto three parts. The josser hoping to hear something from the two boys, is similar to the priest in his box with a penitent on either side. Although at the end of "An Encounter," the narrator thinks "I was penitent," his Confiteor (Act of Contrition) is unspolzen (Dub., p. 16). 34. Quoted from Ian Gibson, The English Vice, pp. 5-6. 35. Quoted from Ian Gibson, The English Vice, p. 29. 36. Quoted from Ian Gibson, The English Vice, p. 28. 37. Quoted from Ian Gibson, The English Vice, p. 32. 38. Quoted from Ian Gibson, The English Vice, p. 3. 39. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions, trans. J. M . Cohen (Harmondsworth, Penguin Eooks), pp. 27-8. 40. Ian Gibson, The English Vice, p. 20. 41. Ibid., p. 37. 42. Quoted from Ian Gibson, The English Vice, p. 97.
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Notes 43. 44. 45. 46. 47.
48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59.
60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71.
72. 73. 74. 75.
Chris and Kerry Novick, Fearful Symmetry, p. 10. Ian Gibson, The English Vice, p. 82. Quoted from "A Walk on the Wild(e) Side," in QztareJoyce, p. 24. Harriet Ereecher Stowe, Uncle Toin's Cabin (E~eryman'sLibrary, 1972, first published 1875), pp. 320-1. Terry the barman is a good example of the character type described by George Eernard Shaw in the 1901 Preface to Cashel Byron's Profession: There is an abominable vein of retaliatory violence all through the literature of the nineteenth century. Whether it is [Thomas] Macaulay describing the flogging of Titus Oates [in History of England, 1849-611, or Dickens in~entingthe scene in \vhich old Martin Chuzzlewit bludgeons Pecltsniff, the curious childishness of the English character, its naughty relish for primitive brutalities and tolerance of physical indignities, its unreasoning destructiveness when incommoded, crop up in all directions. Ian Gibson, The English Vice, p. 169. Ibid., p. 171. Ibid., p. 172. Ibid., pp. 50-1. Quoted from Ian Gihson, The English Vice, p. 172. Quoted from Ian Gibson, The English Vice, p. 173. Ian Gibson, The English Vice, p. 175. Quoted from Ian Gihson, The English Vice, p. 174. Quoted from Ian Gibson, The English Vice, pp. 174-5. Quoted from Ian Gihson, The English Vice, p. 238. Quoted from Ian Gihson, The English Vice, p. 260. "The first prosecution was made under the provisions of the new Vagrancy Act [. . .] under this Act, any person convicted of l i ~ i n gon the earnings of prostitution, or soliciting for immoral purposes, might be sentenced to a whipping on a second or consequent conviction of the offense. Only Bernard Shaw [. . .] was prepared to refer at the time to the fatuity of a whipping Act intended to put down prostitution, a prostitution that often itself catered for whipping." Ian Gibson, The English Vice, p. 259. Ian Gibson, The English Vice, p. 58. Quoted from Ian Gibson, The English Vice, pp. 257-8. Chris and Kerry Noviclt, Fearful S)'v?metrjl,p. 7. Ibid., p. 8. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions, p. 25. Gilles Deleuze, The Cold and the Cruel, pp. 104-5. W. E. Yeats, "The Fascination for What's Difficult," in The Poems, p. 93. Ereilda Maddox, Nora: A Biography, p. 426. Sigmund Freud, "Beyond the Pleasure Principle," in The Complete Psjd7ological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vo1.18, p. 22. Ibid., pp. 24-9. Theodore Reik, Masochism in Modern Man, p. 271. Dame sees the affair as being settled by an apology. Stephen's rhyme, however, presents something like a closed system, in which apology and punishment do not necessarily follow in that order. The sequence is interchangeable, and cause and effect are conflated. Furthermore there is no conclusion, and thus no chance of escape from this sequence. Deterreilce becomes incitement. Leo Bersani, The Freudian Bod)', p. 7. Ibid., p. 8. Chris and Kerry Novick, Fearful Symmetry, p. 11. Theodore Reilt, Masochism in Modern Man, p. 207.
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Notes
23 1
76. Arthur Power, Conversations with Janzes Joyce, ed. C l i ~ eHeart (London: Millington Ltd., 19741, p. 54. Synzmetry, p. 21. 77. Chris and ICerry N o ~ i c kFearful , 78. Ihid., p. 53. 79. Ibid., pp. 50-1. 80. Ihid., p. 35. 81. Ihid., p. 53. 82. Ibid., p. 69. 83. W. B. Yeats, "The Secret Rose," in T h e Poenzs, p. 69. 84. Sigmund Freud, "Fetishism," in T h e Complete Psychological Works of Sigm u n d Freud, Vol. 21, pp. 153-6. 85. The word "masturhatlon" is of obscure origin, but it is helie~edto stem from inanus and stuprare (to defile). 86. Brenda Maddox, Nora: A Biograph)', pp. 42-3. Richard Brown, J a v m J o j w and Sexuality, p. 109. 87. Richard Erown, Janzes Joyce and Sexuality, pp. 86-7. 88. Theodore Reik, Masochism in Modern Man, p. 327. 89. W. B. Yeats, "The Choice," in T h e Poenzs, p. 155 90. Hysterical, from the Greek hustera: womb. 91. Quoted from Tim Dean, "Paring His Fingernails" in Quare Jojlce, p. 253. 92. Craig Smith, "Twilight in Dublin: A Look at Joyce's 'Nausicaa,' " Janzes Joyce Quarterly, Vo1.28, No.3 (Spring 1991),p. 632. 93. Ibid., p. 634. 94. Ihid., p. 631. 95. Ihid., p. 634. 96. Chris and IZerry Novick, Fearfitl S j ~ m e t r ) 'p., 35. 97. Brenda11IZennell!; "James Joyce's Humanism," in Journey into Joy, p. 228. 98. Chris and ICerry N o ~ i c kFearful , Synzmetry, p. 31. 99. I am not arguing here that the shatterings of the self in which the visionary indulges actually do produce mediumistic channeling, or a supernatural accessing of the yoices of the dead. Rather, as in Deleuze and Guattari's conception of the Body without Organs, this renunciation of the narrow, socially defined self unleashes imaginatiw possibilities. , Synzmetry, p. 62. 100. Chris and ICerry N o ~ i c kFearful 101. Ibid., p. 64. 102. Gilles Deleuze, T h e Cold and the Cruel, pp. 81, 86, 109-10. 103. In T h e Freudian Body, Eersani refers to this connection as self-shattering. He considers "art" and sexuality to be tautologies for masochism, because in both art and masochism there is a dismantling of the coherent ego. Dean comments: "Eersani locates the same [masochistic] renunciation of authoritative selfhood in "art," which he identifies with those moments of textual collapse when aesthetic self-implosion compels literature to withdraw from any pretension to rhetorical efficacy." Tim Dean, "Paring His Nails," in Quare Joyce, p. 244. Although the argument of The Freudian Bod?, is premised upon masochism, Bersani says Yery little about masochism in it. The inundation of Ulysses with masochism should haye g i ~ e nEersani pause before renouncing it as redempti~e. 104. The extent to \vhich Joyce's work is confessional is a matter of much discussion, particularly when it touches upon the matter of sexuality. Most writers in Quare Joyce make some reference to this issue. Joseph Valente writes: "uoyce], having reclaimed autobiography for the novel, uses Dedalus to "screen," in both contradictory senses of the word, his own sexual desire and anxiety. Dedalus's sexual amhimlences ~ e i Joyce's l while putting them on display and display them while putting them under a veil of doubt. The open closet consists precisely in this practice of double inscription and, as such, it orchestrates what,
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Notes in Lacanian parlance, might he called a sexuality of the "not all," that is, a sexuality that defeats the categories of identity on \vhich it continues to depend or, to turn things around, a sexuality that is framed by categories that cannot finally contain it. Joseph Valente, "Thrilled by His Touch," in Quare Joyce, p. 69. 105. Joyce would have recognized the irony of the Catholic Church's difficulty with Augustan and Rousseau, both of whose confessions could not he read without guidance. Confession ought to be private rather than public, with the priest acting as a conduit for absolution. 106. Stanislaus Joyce, The Conzplete Dublin Diary, ed. George Heale!; new edition (London: Cornell University Press, 1971),pp. 3-4. 107. Siginuild Freud, "The Ego and the Id," in The Coinplete Psychological Works of Siginztnd Freud, Vo1.19, p. 33. 108. Quoted from Tim Dean, "Paring His Fingernails," in Quare Jo)'ce, p. 245. 109. Tim Dean, "Paring His Fingernails," in QztareJoyce, p. 247. 110. Ibid., p. 249. 111. Ibid., p. 254. 112. Ibid., p. 258. 11.3. Ibid., p. 252 114. Quoted from Tim Dean, "Paring His Fingernails," in Quare Jo)'ce, p. 255. 115. Tim Dean, "Paring His Fingernails," in QztareJoyce, p. 256. 116. Ibid., p. 257. 117. Ibid., p. 259. 118. Ibid., p. 260. 119. Ibid., pp. 261-2. 120. Chris and Kerry Noviclz, Fearful S)'v?metrjl,p. 89. 121. Ibid., p. 60. 122. Stanislaus Joyce, The Coinplete Dublin Diary, pp. 140-1.
CHAPTER FOUR:A DARKER PASSION 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.
John Cleland, Fannjl Hill, p. 175. Chris and Kerry Novick, Fearful Symnzetry, p. 23. Theodore Reilz, Masochism in Modern Man, p. 212. John Cleland, Fannjl Hill, p. 176. Ian Gibson, The English Vice, p. 269. Ibid., p. 269. Chris and Kerry Noviclz, Fearful S)'v?metrjl,p. 40. Ibid., p. 39. Gilles Deleuze, The Cold and the Cruel, pp. 52-3, 59, 87-8, 108-9. Theodore Reik, Masochism in Modern Man, pp. 312, 329. Gilles Deleuze, The Cold and the Cruel, pp. 35-41, 90-3, 107-9 Chris and Kerry Noviclz, Fearful S)'v?metrjl,p. 39. Ian Gibson, The English Vice, p. 282. Siginuild Freud, "A Child Is Being Beaten," in The Coinplete Psychological Works of Siginund Freztd, Vo1.17, p. 199. Chris and Kerry Noviclz, Fearful S)'v?metrjl,p. 41. Anthony Storr, Sexual Deviation (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 19641, p. 44. Steven Marcus, The Other Victorians: A Stud)' of Sexualit)' and Pornograph)' in Mid-Nineteenth-Centztry England (England: Corgi Books, 1966),p. 261. Chris and Kerry Noviclz, Fearful S)'v?metrjl,p. 33. Ian Gibson, The English Vice, p. 265.
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Notes 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 3.3. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.
39.
40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46.
Ihid., p. 266. Ibid., pp. 266-7. Anthony Storr, Sexual Deviation, p. 97. Ian Gibson, The English Vice, p. 289. Sigmund Freud, "The Economic Problem of Masochism," in The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vo1.19, p. 165. Sigmund Freud, "Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality," in The Complete Ps)'chological Works of Signmnd Freud, Vo1.7, p. 97. Ian Gibson, The English Vice, p. 290. Ihid., p. 291. Chris and IZerry Novick, Fearfd Sjwmetr)', p. 33. Desmond Morris, The Naked Ape (England: Corgi Books, 19691, p. 1.38. Ihid.,pp.146-7. Havelock Ellis, Ps)'chologjl of Sex (Pan Boolzs, 1962, first published 1933), p. 166. In A Midsummer Night's Dream, the suggestively named Bottom becomes ass when he is given an ass's head. Desmond Morris, The Naked Ape, p. 147. Richard yon IZrafft-Ehing, Psycopathia Sexualis, pp. 159-60. Ibid.,p.236. Ian G~bson,The English Vice, pp. 242-3. Richard yon IZrafft-Ehing, Psycopathia Sexualis, p. 241. That lnasturbation is impending, or even, that impending masturbation is the topic of this stor!; is implied at the start in the image of the apple tree, which alludes to the fall into knowledge, and the rusty bicycle pump beneath this tree, which offers an image of the mechanical worlzings of the sexual organs. It is also suggested at the end in reference to ~anit!; which points to self-loye, and through this the non-generatiye act of masturbation. The words "driven" and "derided" would also support this contention. In The Complete Dublin Diaries, Stanislaus writes: "[Tlhe restrained and perverted lechery of puberty. Meredith, to be sure, alludes to the 'apple season' (Jim did not u~lderstandthis to refer to the Adam and Eve affair till I reminded himj"(2 October 1904) (p.107). A similar state of being is descrihed by Stanislaus Joyce in The Complete Dublin Diar)'. After a dispute with his pubescent cousin Kate!; with whom he was enamored, he felt compelled to apologize to her, because her apology was not forthcoming. Having descrihed the incident, he mused: "This submission on the emotional plane seems to have a correspondent on the physical plane in a certain sexual aberration which once obsessed me" (p.42). This, and "Arab!;" suggests that for some people masochism is derived from frustrated romantic relations, rather than from school beatings. Stanislaus continues to tell us that after apologizing to his cousin: "I made her a small present. It is a humiliating thing to be poor. I would haye liked to have made her a valuable one" (p.42). The circumstances of Stannie's emotional turmoil are similar to those of the boy in "Arahy," in spirit if not in detail. Quoted from Ian Gibson, The English Vice, p. 206. Quoted from Ian Gibson, The English Vice, p. 222. Quoted from Ian Gibson, The English Vice, p. 208. Jean Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenonwnological Ontologj; trans. Hazel E. Barnes (London: Routledge, 1943, 19581, p. 353. Charles Darwin, The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals (187.3), pp. 321-2. Quoted from Ian Gibson, The English Vice, pp. 27-8. Ian Gibson, The English Vice, p. 302.
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Notes 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions, pp. 84-5. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, p. 289. Ibid., p. 378. Ibid., p. 378. Gary Leonard, "The Nothing Place: Secrets and Sexual Orientation in Joyce," in Quare Joyce, p. 78. Ibid.,p.78. Ibid.,p.95. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, p. 352. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions, p. 90. Ian Gibson, The English Vice, pp. 305, 375-6. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, p. 378. Pauline Reage, The Story of 0 (New York: Ballintine Books, 1983). Quoted from Ian Gibson, The English Vice, p. 70. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions, p. 1.3. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions, p. 84. Ibid., p. 2. Ibid., p. 33. Ibid., pp. 34-5. Theodore Reik, Masochism in Modern Man., pp. 297-8. Ibid., p. 304. Ibid., p. 315. Ibid., p. 313. Gilles Deleuze, The Cold and the Cruel, pp. 71-8 Georges Bataille, Eroticism, pp. 65-8, 112. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions, pp. 70-2. Ibid., p. 73. Georges Bataille, Eroticism, pp. 143-4. Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Ps)'copathia Sexualis, p. 237. Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs, p. 140. Gilles Deleuze and FClix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 260. Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, quoted from Gilles Deleuze, in his introduction to Venus in Furs, p. 11. Gilles Deleuze and FClix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 262. Gilles Deleuze and FClix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 279-80. Gilles Deleuze, The Cold and the Cruel, pp. 86-7. Georges Bataille, Eroticism, pp. 65, 68, 71. Gilles Deleuze, The Cold and the Cruel, pp. 58, 67. George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, in The Complete Works of George Orwell, Vo1.9 (London: Secker & Warburg, 19871, p. 299. Gilles Deleuze and FClix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 292. Ibid., p. 292.
CHAPTER FIVE:THECUCKOLD 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs, pp. 179-80. Gilles Deleuze and FClix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p. 377. J. F. Byrne, Silent Years, p. 156. Theodore Reik, Masochism in Modern Man, pp. 231-2. Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs, p. 143. Ibid., pp. 152, 157.
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Notes
235
7. Sigmund Freud, "On the Uillversal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love," 111 The Complete Ps)~chologzcalWorks of Szginund Freud, Vol. 11, p. 179. 8. Ihid., pp. 182-5 9. Sigmund Freud, "A Special Type of Object Choice Made by Men," in T h e Coinplete Psychological Works of Siginund Freud, Vol. 11, p. 170. 10. Leopold yon Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs, p. 216. 11. Sigmund Freud, "On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love," in T h e Coinplete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 11, pp. 180-1. 12. Sigmund Freud, "The Taboo of Virginity," in T h e Complete P s ~ ~ h o l o g i c a l Works of Siginund Freud, Vol. 11, pp. 196-7,208. 1.3. Gilles Deleuze, T h e Cold and the Cruel, p. 108. 14. Leo Bersani, T h e Freudian Bod?,, p p 19, 100. 15. Richard yon Kraaft-Ehing, Psychopathia Sexualis, p. 157. 16. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, T h e Confessions, pp. 64-5. 17. Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Fztrs, p. 121. 18. Ihid., pp. 120, 1.34. 19. Ihid., p. 178. 20. Gary Leonard, "The Nothing Place," in Quare J o j ~ ep., 80. 21. Ihid., p. 81. 22. Sigmund Freud, "A Special Type of Choice of Object Made by Men," in T h e Complete Ps~~chological Works of Sigrzund Freud, Vol. 11, p. 166. 2.3. Sigmund Freud, "On the Universal Teildeilcy to Debasement in the Sphere of Love," in T h e Coinplete Psychological Works of Signzund Freud, Vol.11, p. 186. 24. Gilles Deleuze and Ftlix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 276, 291. 25. Leopold yon Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs, p. 190. 26. Ibid., p. 164. 27. Ihid., p. 226. 28. Leopold yon Sacher-Masoch, "The Red Manor-House," in T h e Master Masochist: Tales of Sadistic Mistresses (London: Talis, 1968),p. 83. 29. Ihid., p. 162. 30. Declan Kiherd, in notes to James Joyce, Ulysses, p. 1144.
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2.50
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Bibliogmphy
