A Great Cacophony of Women

[paigerella]

Hey Granola Poet,

 

Thanks for your analysis and contribution, it was great and really informative.

 

I was lost thinking, though, about women. This can't just be about a search for the father/ one's greater purpose. And Molly is not the Eve/ genisis of the Felix Culpa.

 

Joyce is very attentive and respectful towards women. In literature, forever (it seems), we've been dominated by the masculine half, but I believe that Joyce changes the tide a little with his attention to the female side. For example, none of the sirens cause the men's downfall- they are all just pretty women. And the siren's calling is simply a seashell- she holds the shell up to a man's ear so that he can hear the roaring of the sea.

 

Poldy is not really upset about Molly's infidelities-- he has accepted them. In fact, he excuses them, saying that she needs them for her youth. He accepts his responsibility in her infidelities- he cannot perform his part. Though it obviously bothers him, he accepts/ understands why it is happening. He still loves Molly as well. He's not angry; he thinks about earning money to buy her a new pair of knickers. I wonder what is going through his mind. If he could perform, then maybe she wouldn't be like this. There is no reference to her cheating on him while Rudy was alive (is there?)-- but he's been dead a long time now, and it seems that everyone has slept with the great beauty, Molly.

 

And there's the father/ son theme and the mother/ birth theme. All of the fathers end in death. Rudy is dead and Bloom can't procreate, Jesus was crucified, and Hamlet's father is a ghost (ending, ultimately, in Hamlet's death). The women, however, bring the cycle of life, creating the children within their own bodies, then giving birth to the next generations. Birth, along with death, is a major theme in Ulysses, so women must play a major role (lavished with respect). Lavished with respect? Remember the birth that goes on towards the end of the novel, when Bloom is with the doctors and student doctors who are all drinking and telling crude jokes while the woman's screams echo through the halls as she undergoes a terrible birth? Only Poldy seems to hear her and pay attention/ worry about her. Maybe that is Joyce's critique of society and how women's roles in the creation of humanity are not as appreciated as they should be. Perhaps the same could be said for their roles in the creation of literature.

 

As a woman myself, I do search for my higher purpose every day, and I wonder what the hell I'm doing with my life. But I never thought of my higher purpose as being imbued with masculinity, even though one could say that their "purpose" is a calling that God provides-- God, at least in the Christian sense, being the "Father"-- though I do know some nuns who challenge this masculinity.

 

Maybe Poldy's search is not toward his father, but toward his mother/ creation. That's why we start with death- because the goal is life. That's why we have such a great ejaculation in the end and a celebration of Yes- the masculine and feminine parts that, blended, are such stuff as children are made on.  

 

-Paigerella

 

On 6/28/07, Granola Poet <grano...@gmail.com> wrote:

Thanks Paigerella,

In this episode, Molly is about to have a licentious affair with Boylan, and Bloom knows about it (poor Poldy!). Bloom tells himself that she needs sexual flings to keep her youth. They both know that Bloom can no long make love to Molly-- ever since the death of their son, they have been unable to have sex. There is a lot of the father/ son theme throughout Ulysses with Bloom and his son, Rudy; the Christian God and his son, Jesus; and Hamlet and his father's ghost.

 

Indeed, the quest for the father, the oldest tale in the book. Perhaps the ONLY tale in the book! From Jesus to Luke Skywalker, every heroic story is the search for the father. "Telemachus, follow your father."

The father isn't just your biological daddy , the father is your calling, your source, your "god." Atonement with this father is the struggle each and every one of us endures in life. Through birth, through adolescence, and the ultimate adventure: death. In Ulysses. the order is reversed with the funeral at the beginning, the birth towards the end: the unending cycle of birth and rebirth, which is the second oldest tale in the book: Adonis, Osiris, and Jesus again.

 

 

Finally Boylan leaves and, throughout the next few pages, his trip across doublin is interjected in the narrative. Bloom decides, while he's in the restaurant and while he's imagining Molly with Boylan, to write a letter to Martha (with whom he has an "affair" by letters-- they never meet.) However, the letter can't take his mind off of Molly and Boylan and the piano music in the bar only exacerbates his feelings as the songs are about guilt and infidelity. Ah! Finally Bloom can't take it anymore and he has to get up and leave.

 

Oh, the guilt, the paradox of religion. The necessary obstacle to to enlightenment. As Stephen repeats, "Without a sundering there can be no reconcilliation." (Or something like that.) In other words, there is no redemption without a transgression. You must not sin, but to experience His grace, you must sin. (Similar paradoxes can be revealed in every other religious system. Embracing the paradox and transcending it, that is the key.) Anyway. Bloom is burdened with the guilt. He hasn't transcended... YET. He's still obsessed with the sin, the Fall. Falling bodies... 32 feet per second per second.

 

(I've found Joseph Campbell very helpful in understanding Ulysses, although he rarely addresses Ulysses specifically, the mythic hero is always the same. But Campbell did write a Skeleton's Key to Finnegans Wake, which I think will be very very helpful leading up to your next project, Paigerella.)

 

Keep up the great work, and keep the ideas flowing like the Liffey.

 

 

http://granola-poet.blogspot.com/