January 13, 2022 25
that happy pantomime of literary
Dubliners going about in straw boat-
ers or long skirts on June 16. Ulysses
was still a book, a private as opposed
to public experience, and some of the
conversations about it felt a bit pervy.
It seemed to attract a certain kind of
knowingness in clever men, and the
way they looked at me, if I talked about
reading it, managed to make me feel
ashamed.
Is this Joyce’s fault? The culture of
Joyce commentary can be an invitation
to pedantry for men who are interested
in everything that isn’t sex between two
people. Was Bloom masturbating at, to,
or for a young woman on Sandymount
Strand at dusk? The prepositions
seem important. Gerty McDowell, the
woman in question, certainly seems
to enjoy it. The episode is written as a
high romance; she thinks like a woman
in a novelette or like a consumer of the
advertisements in a woman’s magazine.
Perhaps this is why she is so interested
in her own underwear and has an im-
pulse to show it off at just the right mo-
ment for Bloom.
The slyly inadequate correspon-
dence from Homer is that she rep-
resents the marriage- minded Princess
Nausicaa, who helps Odysseus after he
is cast up on her shore. Joyce described
the episode as “the projected mirage,”
and this may explain Gerty’s rhapsodic
participation in Bloom’s excitement.
Of course! The text shows Bloom’s
projection, not Gerty’s reality. She isn’t
thinking about her underwear; she is
thinking, like any young person on a
beach, about life, love, art, and her din-
ner. When Joyce was asked what really
happened between Bloom and Gerty,
he said, “Nothing... It all took place in
Bloom’s imagination.”
But he also said the episode dealt
with “female hypocrisy,” which seems a
typically sour comment about women,
and also unfair. When Joyce lived in
Zurich he wrote some highly roman-
tic letters to a woman named Martha
Fleischman, on whom he had become
fixated after he saw her “pulling a
chain” in her bathroom opposite his
apartment. Later, in the street, he real-
ized that she had a limp. Each of these
details shades his infatuation with para-
philia—coprophilia, voyeurism, devo-
tism. Sexuality stalls at the fetish, and
though Joyce loves to be high- flown
as well as low- minded, the parody can
seem gleeful, while the smallness of his
interest disconcerts.
The prose is not small, however.
Gerty’s thoughts are written not by a
hack writer of romantic fiction but by
a great prose stylist, and the reader is
also transported. The moment when
Gerty limps away is—for us, if not
quite for Bloom—one of great sym-
pathetic enlargement. An image of
Gerty will return in the brothel sec-
tion to accuse Bloom, as one of a se-
ries of sadomasochistic fantasies that
culminate in his being feminized and
violated. Later again, we learn that he
has not come inside his wife, Molly, in
the ten years since their son died. A
book that avoids intercourse has room
for everything else—fantasy, imagina-
tion, remembrance, reproduction, and
love.
If Gerty is a third- person object,
to Bloom and to the book, Molly is
triumphantly a first- person subject.
Sometimes petty, often vain, and very
far from monogamous, Molly consid-
ers various partners past and future,
including the young Dedalus, and she
rails against the double standards im-
posed on women. She thinks about sex
a lot, about motherhood very little, and
about her dead son only fleetingly. She
does all this without punctuation. The
thrill and difficulty of reading Molly
comes from the libidinous rush of a
style that constantly threatens to slip
or surprise, and it can be hard to find
a discussion of her character that does
not feel dated. She is earth mother
or adultress, cheap or mythic, she is
“an invitation to the readers’ voyeur-
ism,” and seldom allowed to be just
herself.
What would happen if she used a few
full stops? Molly farts a bit, gets her
period, and uses the chamber pot. Such
anatomical events are not more shock-
ing because they happen in a woman’s
body—unless they are. They do not
read as arousal, and only sometimes
as the writer’s prurience. “Of course
hes mad on the subject of drawers,”
Molly says about Bloom, because she
is no fool, but she also fell for him be-
cause she saw that “he understood or
felt what a woman is.” Joyce may have
had his own kind of good time writing
Molly, but this adventure in female de-
siring is the opposite of misogynistic,
not just because of the freedom of her
voice, but because there is no doubt-
ing that Molly is in charge of herself:
“theyre not going to be chaining me up
no damn fear.”These days I read everything slowly;
my brain is like an old computer file
with too much information in it. I slow
down, stop. I go back over it again.
This is also a good way to read Ul-
ysses, with a guidebook, notes, the In-
ternet at your fingertips. And I read as
my parents used to watch Irish- made
films: in order to identify the loca-
tions and, loudly, point them out. The
Oval pub still exists and was up till re-
cently frequented by newspapermen;
Davy Byrne’s is still moral; the read-
ing room of the National Library re-
mains open to scholars. I gave birth in
the same building as Mina Purefoy, I
swim with Buck Mulligan, and mourn
the passing of friends in the chapel at
Glasnevin.
For a while I lived in a house named
in the book, a fact that seemed, until
just recently, not especially thrilling.
The address 13 St. Kevin’s Parade is
given for Moses Herzog, referred to in
the “Cyclops” episode as someone to
whom money is owed for sugar and tea.
There I “lived in sin” back in 1985—the
phrase was in active use in my Catho-
lic family, and it made the relationship
feel forbidden and doomed. My fellow
sinner is, in 2021, usefully sitting across
the room from me, so I can ask him to
confirm the number of the house. A
quick search discovers (on Twitter!)
the relevant page in Thom’s Official
Directory of 1904, which Joyce used as
a reference while writing Ulysses. The
house is three up from the intersection
with Clanbrassil Street, which is close
to where the Islamic Relief center now
stands. M. Herzog is listed by Thom’s
at that address, though the official cen-
sus of 1901 shows an Isaac and Abra-
ham Herzog. In fact, Thom’s misspells
and misgenders four other residents of
the street who then turn up, botched, in
the pages of Ulysses.
There are few or no Jewish residents
now in Dublin’s “Little Jerusalem,”the network of redbrick streets where
Bloom was born and where Molly later
walked, while pregnant, with Mrs. Moi-
sel. I had no idea, when I lived there
in 1985, that the house opposite had
once served as a synagogue. The dis-
appeared community was made up of
migrants from Lithuania, who moved
on to larger houses in better areas, and
eventually left an increasingly Cath-
olic, economically stagnant Ireland
altogether.
Of course, Molly did not actually
walk these streets with Mrs. Moisel, be-
cause Molly did not, strictly speaking,
exist. It’s also a bit of a stretch to see
her accepted so easily in a conservative
Litvak enclave. Molly went to Mass,
her father- in- law was Hungarian, her
husband, Bloom, was twice baptized
and nonpracticing. Joyce got the reli-
gion of the residents exactly right, and
their culture slightly wrong. Even so,
because of his insane attempt at accu-
racy and his weird, often libelous insis-
tence on cramming the book with the
names of real people, it is possible to
fall through the text into a place like
Little Jerusalem, which Ireland’s ho-
mogeneous, nationalist history- making
has more or less forgotten.
Because the text is so unstable and,
for many different reasons, inaccurate,
you can also fall into a shouting match
with six academics and your Dublin
mother, who may consider you have got
your facts, or your interpretation of the
facts, a tiny bit wrong. This, with a sa-
cred text like Ulysses, means entirely,
horribly wrong. Joyce was a genius, so
even his mistakes were made on pur-
pose. There is no such thing as a mis-
take. Stick a pin in any page and you
will find a fight.
Is the Pidgeon who gave poor Mary
Shortall the pox a reference to the
Holy Ghost? Hmm. According to the
prostitute Kitty Ricketts, Mary was
“in the lock with the pox she got from
Jimmy Pidgeon in the blue caps had a
child off him that couldn’t swallow.”
The line is followed by a recurring
joke about the “pigeon sacré” who put
the Virgin Mary into an embarrassing
condition. I chase the bird, flapping
and cooing, through the text. Stephen
is reminded of the joke about the Holy
Ghost when he sees the Pigeonhouse
from Sandymount Strand—this build-
ing was named for John Pidgeon, who
had an eatery there in the 1760s, but
there is no clear relation to Jimmy.
In the post office Bloom thinks about
the problem of pox- bearing British
soldiers (the blue caps) while waiting
for the postmistress to retrieve his
letter from a “pigeonhole”—but that
is surely just another decoy among
many.
One commentator says that Pidgeon
was a common Dublin name, but there
were only eighty- two of them in the
1911 census. Among them is a Rob-
ert Pidgeon who worked in the Gen-
eral Post Office, and might well have
been the father of our postman in the
1970s. He was a smiling man, who was
rumored to have fifteen children—“so
far as we know,” my father used to say,
darkly. He also got great mileage from
the phrase “the pigeon post.”
It i s pos sible to spi n out f rom t h i s si n-
gle pin stuck in the text to a historically
shifting map of the real Dublin—the
concrete chimney stacks of the Pigeon-
house are visible from any point along
the bay. I, meanwhile, am back in the
punning proliferation of my comically(not) cuckolded father, who found in
Mr. Pidgeon’s name a daily pleasure.
Habit is also important here, and what
could be more habitual than the post?
I am reminded of a style of nurturing
masculinity, which is always mild, al-
ways funny, and this informs my expe-
rience of Leopold Bloom. Don’t ask
me to read Ulysses without my own
father there—why would I want to do
that?For some years now, I have lived
close to the Joyce Museum in Sandy-
cove, which is housed in the Martello
tower where Joyce once slept and
where he later set the first chapter of
Ulysses. The sea, I am happy to say,
is no more snot- green than Homer’s
was wine- dark. But though the water
resists Joyce’s famous description, the
squat, round stone tower belongs al-
most completely now to the book. It is
populated by shades both fictional and
historical, and by living people who are
their familiars. I walk through a neigh-
borhood of Joyce tourists and badly
behaved Joycean ghosts. There, up the
road, is the house where the real play-
wright J. M. Synge lived and a fictional
Dedalus pissed against the hall door—
unless, as he says, it was Mulligan.
(“—Me! Stephen exclaimed. That was
your contribution to literature.”) An-
other example of Joyce fixing the real
to the literary by a transgressive use of
waste matter.
Recently, just to get the full experi-
ence, I sat on a bench near the Forty
Foot, the swimming spot below the
Martello tower where Buck Mulligan
goes for his dip, and I read a page or
two. It was a mild September after-
noon. The day was so windless and
still, I could hear a man address a quiet
friend, one leaving, one arriving, both
of them with their towels rolled.
“Hello there, young Thomas,” he
said. “Were you aware that a certain
gentleman is home this week? Your
presence may be required.”
And it seemed to me a continuation
of the book I held in my hand.
The dialogue in Ulysses uses tricks
of speech that are as real and abiding
as the streets of the city that Joyce
worked so hard to recreate. This tone
is not exactly camp, but it is rakish,
mock- heroic; a glittering game that fills
the verbal space between men who like
each other—but not too much!
“I’ve been in since four,” the man
went on, cheerfully. “Went for a walk,
took a Barry White in the new jacks
they have up there. Lovely.” The local
council had recently reopened a nearby
public restroom, so this good news was
both personal and civic. It was also as-
tonishingly male.
I felt a theory coming on. I wondered
at the way male speech often confuses
top and bottom, why Irish men are so
happily described as “talking shite” or
“bollocks,” or why an “old fart” is by
default male. So many of the men in
Ulysses are heard huffing and blow-
ing, not to mention gassing about pol-
itics. Perhaps, for Joyce, speech was
just another thing that came from the
body and lingered on the air. If you
ask me what Ulysses has to offer—
despite the maleness of the text, de-
spite the author’s perversion, despite
the way it exists not on the page but
in your reading of the page—the
answer is still “Everything, everything,
everything.” Q