Raiding Joyce

Letters

Vol. 7 No. 9 · 23 May 1985

From Patrick Parrinder

SIR: Denis Donoghue has taken the part for the whole in saying that I read Ulysses as a ‘realistic novel, complete with characters and plot’ (LRB, Vol. 7, No 7). In fact, as stated in the preface to my James Joyce, I specifically avoided using the term ‘novel’ to describe Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Ulysses does have characters, and a plot based on the Odyssey – who ever doubted that? – but my chapter from which Donoghue’s citations are taken is part of a polyphonic reading of the book, examining its generic status and some of its stylistic and symbolic structures. Donoghue himself seems committed to an oversimplified realistic reading when he suggests I have exaggerated the number of Molly’s lovers. I was careful to speak of Molly’s ‘ideal list’ of lovers, and the sentence to which Donoghue must be referring reads as follows: ‘The life-story she tells herself (the mature equivalent of Gerty’s dream of dark strangers) consists of an apostolic succession of lovers: Mulvey, Bloom, Gardner, Boylan, and (should the opportunity arise) Stephen Dedalus.’ Molly doesn’t claim to have had full sexual intercourse with Mulvey and Gardner, but she describes sexual activity with both men. In any case, her list should not be confused with the 25 supposed admirers (excluding Gardner) named by the catechist in the ‘Ithaca’ episode. The 25 I take to be a reflection or refraction of Bloom’s darkest suspicions.

A broader issue that Donoghue raises is whether the analysis of carnival and grotesquerie in Bakhtin’s study of Rabelais is really applicable to Joyce. It is true that the Medieval and Renaissance carnival was a public performance, whereas Bloom’s adventures as Lord of Misrule are offered as expressionist fantasy, reproducing the privatisation of modern life. But the ‘Circe’ episode of Ulysses implies the practice of popular drama as found in the pantomime and the music hall and (by extension) in the brothel, the courtroom and the séance. Elsewhere Joyce draws extensively on written ephemera such as newspapers, advertising slogans, sentimental fiction and pornography. His appetite for urban popular culture and its adulterated languages seems to be strictly comparable to Rabelais’s interest, as Bakhtin reconstructs it, in the Renaissance carnival; indeed, my response to reading Bakhtin was to wonder if he had not been writing (in Aesopian language) a contribution to the understanding of Joyce’s type of Modernism. But to view both Renaissance carnival and modern entertainment as forms of social licence which can then be cannibalised, as it were, in a certain type of high literature is not to deny the reality of historical and cultural change.

Patrick Parrinder
Reading

Vol. 7 No. 11 · 20 June 1985

From Richard Brown

SIR: The discussion between Denis Donoghue and Patrick Parrinder in your pages (LRB, 18 April and 23 May) concerning the actual or virtual adulteries of Molly Bloom is a complex and interesting one that has recurred in criticism of Ulysses over many years. I tried to explain this recurring disagreement in my book James Joyce and Sexuality, reviewed by Donoghue along with Parrinder’s book. Since Professor Donoghue wrote that the word ‘infidelity’ had some ‘occult meaning’ in those parts of my study in which I treat these questions, I feel that I ought to offer the following by way of clarification.

As I see it, the character of Molly’s relationship with her so-called admirers is made deliberately uncertain in Ulysses and for good reasons. From the list in ‘Ithaca’ it is possible to distinguish clearly between Molly’s past boyfriends (like Mulvey), Bloom’s rivals for her hand (John Henry Menton) and such casually encountered figures as the ‘farmer at the Royal Dublin Society’s Horse Show’. Even in Molly’s affair with Blazes Boylan, where a full, adulterous sexual act might seem unequivocally to have taken place, Joyce punctiliously describes a contraceptive intent and practice that makes it incomplete in the strictest casuistical sense. William Empson was, of course, quite right to add Stephen Dedalus to the list of so-called lovers. When is an adulterous sexual act, an adulterous sexual act and when is it not? That is the riddle that Joyce’s presentation of the sexual lives of Leopold and Molly Bloom in Ulysses seems to pose and it is surely posed as a deliberate affront to the church morality that needed to distinguish precisely between such acts in order to build an unwieldy edifice of matrimonial law.

Narrow definitions of infidelity are conspicuously broadened in the situations Joyce chose to fictionalise and it is for this reason that I feel justified in talking of Gabriel’s concern over his wife’s ‘infidelities’ in the way that puzzled Donoghue in his review of my book. It is not quite good enough to say that insignificant incidents are blown up into full-scale adulteries by Bloom’s ‘darkest suspicions’, as Parrinder says in his letter. It is in situations presented outside of the refracting consciousness of individual characters that such issues seem to crop up in Ulysses and elsewhere in Joyce’s oeuvre. Neither Parrinder nor Donoghue will need to be reminded of the relevance here of Exiles, which investigates Richard Rowan’s jealousy (or rather his lack of it) so intently, whilst deliberately obscuring from the audience the nature of any act that took place between Robert and Bertha about which Richard might conventionally be jealous. I should add that an analogous broadening of definitions underpins my discussions of onanism as pertaining to Joyce, which also seemed to give Professor Donoghue some trouble. Rather than offer an explanation here. I would respectfully refer your readers to the relevant chapters of my book where these questions and others are aired in full.

Richard Brown
University of Leeds