The Columbia History of the British Novel

is among the most modernistic of the narrative techniques in Ulysses. One of the inserted newspaper headlines in the Aeolus episode could well stand for the entire enterprise of Ulysses: 'HOW A GREAT DAILY ORGAN IS TURNED OUT,' and one of the great questions of the day turns on the same issue: whether Leopold Bloom or Blazes Boylan is the best man to «organize» (metaphorically and suggestively) the life of Molly Bloom and the resources, as she imagines them, of her body.

The story of the human body for Joyce is also the story of the artist's incorporation, that is of the artist's making his total experience the story of the race and all its extensions in time and space. Stephen Dedalus began the process by inscribing his name in the flyleaf of his geography book in Portrait, and then imagining how he might extend to the far -773- reaches of the universe. In Finnegans Wake, Shem the Penman sums up his own career in the same way, as

the first till last alshemist wrote over every square inch of the only foolscap available, his own body, till by its corrosive sublimation one continuous present tense integument slowly unfolded all marry voising moodmoulded cyclewheeling history (thereby, he said, reflecting from his own individual person life unlivable, transaccidentated through the slow fires of consciousness into a dividual chaos, perilous, potent, common to allflesh, human only, mortal).

Shem's words track the course first set by the untested artist at the end of Portrait, who hopes to encounter 'for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.'

Part of Stephen's difficulty, however, is that he is listed in Joyce's detailed schematic notesheets for Ulysses as 'having no body.' To have 'no body' for Joyce is not only to lack substance but to lack insight into the tangible resources of life, including a key notion in Joyce's fiction, the need for sexual sustenance. In the kind of aesthetic progress Joyce imagines, the artist first needs a muse in order to image a body, a muse represented in Ulysses by the substance, desire, and warmth of the feminine. And then, in a turnaround, the artist's muse becomes his subject, just as Joyce felt he could begin writing in earnest about something substantial only after his first and life-altering encounter with his future wife, Nora Barnacle, on June 16, 1904. That date becomes the day on which Joyce sets Ulysses. In the last chapter of Ulysses, Molly Bloom, meandering in her interior monologue all over her life and loves, thinks poignantly, 'I wish somebody would write me a loveletter.' Insofar as Joyce derives Molly's nature and language from Nora, somebody has.

As for Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses, he seems resistant to all the sustaining resources of the body. He rarely washes it, feeds it, or satisfies it. He is not even sure he possesses the same self day after day ('Molecules all change'). He does not, at present, want to be touched. Of course, in the Circe episode Bloom mishears Stephen's mumbling of Yeats's poem, 'Who Goes with Fergus,' and mistakenly provides what Dedalus still needs: 'Ferguson, I think I caught. A girl. Some girl. Best thing could happen him.'

Earlier in the day, Joyce asks the question about feminine sustenance for Stephen in light of Dedalus's own question to himself about the sexual component of Shakespeare's poems and plays and about his own -774- ascendant sexual star-'Who will woo you?… Where's your configuration?' This is a question that had lingered from Portrait of the Artist when Stephen thought of himself, 'But him no woman's eyes had wooed.' Without a muse, a subject, a woman, and an inspiration, there is no writing. In the Wandering Rocks episode of Ulysses, Stephen imagines the advice books on the rack in the middle of the city, and centers on the one most appropriate for him: 'How to soften chapped hands. Recipe for white wine vinegar. How to win a woman's love. For me this.'

It is a matter of considerable importance to Ulysses that Joyce designates «Penelope» (that is, Molly Bloom) in his schematic notesheets as muse for the first part of Ulysses (Stephen's chapters) even though she only appears in the last. Molly Bloom herself makes the connection implicit in Ulysses when she says of poets, 'they all write about some woman.' Bloom, who fully appreciates woman's 'splendour, when visible: her attraction, when invisible,' had in his way already offered his wife to Stephen as a gift (more symbolic than actual) by showing him her alluring photograph and suggesting that Stephen provide Molly Italian lessons. Molly comprehends the gesture when she comments on Bloom's showing the photo: 'I wonder he didn't make him a present of it altogether and me too after all.' This makes a special kind of coincidental sense when the reader remembers that Stephen had earlier transformed his own initials into a hoped-for muse in the Library chapter: 'S.D: sua donna.'

For the fledgling artist-even if the context of the day has not fully settled in his mind-the feminine style and substance of the Penelope episode is a potential resource, the body of material upon which to begin. In art the beginning cannot be conceived until the end is imagined. 'Done. Begin!' is the way Joyce phrases it in the Sirens episode. Stephen must at some point register a sense of how the intellect and the body serve each other in life and in art in order to benefit from the inspiration of his muse, who comes at him «rere» first. The same muse is very much present in Finnegans Wake: 'Who in his heart doubts either that the facts of feminine clotheiring are there all the time or that the feminine fiction, stranger than the facts, is there also at the same time, only a little to the rere?'

Joyce continues the motif in Finnegans Wake, also recognizing the human comedy involved. The artist's muse is very personal, so the writer appeals for one in a newspaper 'personal.' The advertisement -775- serves as another portrait of the artist in his pursuit of a feminine muse for the express purpose of helping the exiled writer represent city life in Dublin, Joyce's sustaining focus from 1904.

[Jymes wishes to hear from wearers of abandoned female costumes, gratefully received, wadmel jumper, rather full pair of culottes and onthergarmenteries, to start city life together. His jymes is out of job, would sit and write. He has lately commited one of the then commandments but she will now assist. Superior built, domestic, regular layer. Also got the boot. He appreciates it. Copies. ABORTISEMENT.]

Joyce has substituted his own name for that of Dedalus and Shem, but for any artist it is axiomatic that he or she must draw from the personal experiences that life offers, many of them intimate and some of them perverse. Issy in the Wake actually asks her father-writer ('ye auchtor'), 'Did you really never in all our cantalang lives speak clothse to a girl's before?' Speaking clothes and speaking close to a girl are something of the same thing in Joyce's sexual aesthetics. Indeed, such proximities to the feminine characterize Leopold Bloom in Ulysses to a greater extent than any other Joyce creation. When Frank Budgen suggested to Joyce that Christ was the West's greatest all-round man, Joyce protested that the Savior was a bachelor and never lived with a woman. That was enough to count him out.

Joyce crafts for Bloom as his modern hero in Ulysses what he praised in Henrik Ibsen as an artist, 'an eminently virile man [with] a curious admixture of woman in his nature.' This, of course, is what Stephen Dedalus imagined as well for Shakespeare. In Finnegans Wake, Joyce constructs what amounts to an artistic manifesto around the feminine fiction, calling it a 'mamafesta.' All the energy and festiveness of his work is represented by the mamafesta, the testimony of his muse. This is something that Joyce understood deeply-the rhythms of the feminine voice and the role of the feminine in human nature were essential to him for the full range of life's experiences and adventures.

Such views do not necessarily make Joyce an ardent feminist. He did not take positions on feminist issues of his era; rather, he explored the feminine to increase the range of resources for the artist. Joyce was of the generation of Sigmund Freud and Krafft-Ebing, who felt less constraint than many of today's feminist critics would warrant in imagining the feminine from a male perspective. For Joyce the feminine is part of the story of the body, of human sexuality, of the bonds between man -776- and woman, parent and child, of the natural processes of life itself and of the processes of life that art imitates. That is why he minted for his fiction virtually every word, expression, motion made by his wife, Nora Barnacle, and displayed them in his key women characters, Gretta Conroy in 'The Dead,' Molly Bloom in Ulysses, and Anna Livia Plurabelle in Finnegans Wake. It was almost as if Nora Barnacle offered Joyce his body language.

If Joyce's intent is to represent in fiction the full, rounded, masculine/ feminine lives of his characters, why does he so artfully (and some would say artificially) design Ulysses to include elaborate parallels to the plot and events of the Homeric Odyssey? Though there are exceptions-the story 'A Painful Case' in Dubliners or Portrait of the Artist-Joyce's works do not usually gain their epic dimension by the depiction of actions that evolve over long periods of time. Most of Joyce's narratives extend no more than a day and a night. In fact, Ulysses has been called, with a certain aptness, a day in the life of a Victorian novel. Considered solely in terms of its Irish subjects and locale, Joyce's work is consistent with the realist agenda of nineteenth-century fiction where characters of some