Sexual comedy in James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’

Readers, struggling to understand James Joyce’s complex techniques, dazzling style and profound meaning in ‘Ulysses’, often fail to see the pervasive comedy that enlivens this difficult novel.  Yet the drunken, blasphemous, excremental and sexual humor, in high and low prose, seduces the reader and reveals surprising aspects of Joyce’s quirky mind.  The comedy increases as the novel shifts focus from the sombre Stephen Dedalus to the two main characters: the humiliated Leopold Bloom and his sexually liberated and mollycoddled wife Molly.  Joyce’s comic obsessions include witty puns, crude jokes, slapstick scenes, ribald fantasies and lubricious recollections.

Three of the greatest writers in English—Shakespeare, Swift and Joyce—loved puns that challenge readers to recognize their elusive and clever wordplay.  Joyce even fools around with letters of the alphabet.  “A.E.I.O.U.” states the debt to A.E., pseudonym of the Irish writer George Russell.  Joyce mistranslates “I.N.R.I.,” the Latin abbreviation of “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews,” as “Iron Nails Ran In” during the Crucifixion.  He offers five anagrams for the name of Leopold Bloom, including “Ellpodbomool” and “Old Ollebo, M.P.”  (My rival anagram is “Boldploom Olé.”)

“Ham and his descendants mustered and bred there” refers to Noah’s son Ham, ham with mustard on bread and soldiers called up for inspection. “Who made those allegations? . . . I’m the alligator” introduces an incongruous saurian responding to accusations of wrongdoing.  “Lawn Tennyson” indicates the grass sport of the gentleman poet.  “Beau Mount and Lecher” alludes to the Jacobean playwrights Beaumont and Fletcher, the sexual scenes in their plays and a beautiful ride while having sex with a woman.  The blasphemous “Come forth, Lazarus!  And he came fifth and lost the job” mocks, in a gambling metaphor, Christ’s miraculous resurrection of the dead in John 11:43.  Like Buck Mulligan’s parody of the Mass in the opening lines of Ulysses, the ballad of joking Jesus degrades the Holy Spirit to an avian, alludes to His father’s carpentry and to the site of the Crucifixion:

“I’m the queerest young fellow that ever you heard. / My mother’s a jew, my father’s a bird. / With Joseph the joiner I cannot agree. / So here’s to disciples and Calvary.” 

Several potty-mouthed double entendres refer to urination.  “Chamber music”, the title of Joyce’s book of poems, is both classical music played in a small space and the “music” made while pissing in a chamber pot.  (A dying man’s last request is to tell his son that the missing boot can be found “under the commode”.)  The “meeting of the waters”, placed on a sign over a public urinal, alludes to a popular Irish poem by Tom Moore. “Night office” is both a nocturnal priestly prayer and the obligation to pee at night.  The puzzling postcard “U.p: up,” sent as a cruel joke, suggests that Breen has a permanent erection and pees up, not down.  “Freeman’s Urinal and Weekly Arsewipe” degrades the name of the newspaper and, after reading, suggests its practical use in the toilet.  Joyce employs a Latinate style to describe Stephen and Bloom’s discreet yet comradely piss: “in penumbra urinated, their sides contiguous, their organs of micturition reciprocally rendered invisible.”

Most of the comic puns concern sex, including pregnancy, birth and the profusion of babies in Irish-Catholic families.  A woman with nine children endures, like a convict, “hard labour” and is, like a productive hen, “a good layer”.  One proud papa presents his wife with “hardy annuals”: both yearly flowers and yearly infants.  Joyce writes in a lively simile that the Irish weather “is as uncertain as a child’s bottom.”

“Always liked to let herself out” suggests release from a tight corset and renting herself out for sex with men.  A “brief exposure” is both a camera snapshot and a quick revelation of nudity.  “Getting it up” is arranging a concert and having an erection.  “He surprised me in the rere of the premises” means using the back room to penetrate her from the rear.  The town “Clapham” and surname “Cockburn” hint at venereal disease to punish fornicators.  “Toby Tostoff (a ruined Pole)” has a damaged penis from excessive “tossing off” (self-abuse).  Molly’s favourite writer is the popular and salacious “Paul de Kock.  Nice name he has.” He’s the author of The Girl with the Three Pairs of Stays, and Bloom buys a copy of The Sweets of Sin to excite her.  Joyce is not the only great writer to invoke de Kock. In Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot (1869), a supposedly innocent girl emphasises its corrupting content and confesses: “I had read a couple of Paul de Kock’s novels two years since on purpose, so as to know all about everything.  No sooner did mama hear me say this than she nearly fainted!”

Some comedy is inspired by the clash of high and low styles, Homeric catalogues of ludicrous names, drunken confusion, and absurd parodies of executions and cannibalism.  Joyce loves to describe ordinary events in repetitive, musical-rondo style.  Bloom refuses a simple invitation: “Very gratefully, with grateful appreciation, with sincere appreciative gratitude, in appreciatively grateful sincerity of regret, he declined”—the last two words emphasising the superfluity of the previous ones.  Joyce slyly introduces sexual nuances into his formal prose, and by contrasting “suitable areas,” “prison garb” and “permitted her ardour”: “she kissed passionately all the various suitable areas of his person which the decencies of prison garb permitted her ardour to reach.”

Joyce liked to exhibit his pyrotechnical style with suggestive and thematic lists of the Twelve Worst Books and multilingual allusions to the foreign names.  The thematic titles include: “Care of the Baby (infantilic)—Bloom and Molly’s son Rudy died at 11 days old; Canvassser’s Vade Mecum (journalic)—Bloom sells newspaper ads; Loveletters of Mother Assistant (erotic)—Bloom corresponds secretly and seductively with Martha Clifford; Songs that Reached Our Heart (melodic)—Molly is a professional singer; Pennywise’s Way to Wealth (parsimonic)—Bloom is accused of being a cheapskate.  The ridiculous surnames include Italian “Bacibaci” (Kisses, kisses), Hungarian “Kisazony” (kiss-ass zone), “Ali Baba Backsheesh” (Arabian Nights with bribery and corruption), Russian Borus Hupinkoff (whooping cough), German Hurhausdirektorpresident (chief of brothel).

More elaborately, “strict t.t.” does not mean an absolute teetotaler but quite the opposite: “Not taking anything between drinks.”  When the befuddled Alf spots Paddy Dignam on Capel Street, Joe says, “Don’t you know he’s dead?”  Alf insists “He’s no more dead than you are,” and Joe finally nails him with the amusing,  “Maybe so.  They took the liberty of burying him this morning anyhow”—adding the offhand but conclusive last word.  In another preposterous misidentification, two far-gone drunks came out one foggy morning to visit the grave of their friend.  “One of the drunks spelt out the name: Terence Mulcahy.  The other drunk was blinking up at a statue of Our Saviour the widow had got put up. . . . After blinking at the sacred figure, Not a bloody bit like the man, says he, That’s not Mulcahy, says he, whoever done it.”  In a grotesque religious confusion, the guilty Earl of Kildare apologises on oath for setting fire to Cashel Cathedral: “I’m bloody sorry I did it, says he, but I declare to God I thought the archbishop was inside”—or he wouldn’t have committed arson.

The Cyclops chapter parodies a newspaper account of a homicidal African sultan visiting the cotton magnates of Manchester.  After a post-luncheon speech, he “drank a lovingcup of firstshot usquebaugh to the toast of Black and White from the skull of his immediate predecessor in the dynasty,” a vessel he’d specially brought with him for the ceremony.  This report of savage display and symbolic cannibalism is comically undercut by the first syllable of lovingcup, the brand of a fine Scotch whisky, and the contrasting skin colors of the African and English guests.

When Bloom instinctively opposes capital punishment for humane reasons, the callously indifferent Alf Bergen jokes about the execution: “There’s one thing it hasn’t a deterrent effect on, says Alf. . . . The poor bugger’s tool that’s being hanged. . . . I heard that from the head warder that was in Kilmainham [jail] when they hanged Joe Brady, the invincible.  He told me when they cut him down after the drop it was standing up in their faces like a poker.”  Punning on the executioner’s “drop” and a drop of whisky to soften the blow, Alf contrasts the fatal trapdoor with Joe Brady’s invincible erection.  Joyce also subtly connects the “cockstand” to the tool of Blazes Boylan (Molly’s lover) and to the stiff name of his horse Sceptre.  In the Circe chapter, when the Irish rebel, the Croppy Boy, is executed, he forcefully fires back at his enemy: “A violent erection of the hanged sends gouts of sperm spouting through his deathclothes on to the cobblestones.”

Bloom, a Jew born in Ireland but of Hungarian descent and the son of a suicide,  is a sexually deprived husband, an unworthy consort of a beautiful wife who cuckolds him.  He’s a gentle vulnerable victim, and a major theme in Ulysses is “When in doubt persecute Bloom.”  He’s attacked by the Irish drinkers in Barney Kiernan’s pub and, forced to define a nation, feebly responds, “A nation is the same people living in the same place.  By God, then, says Ned, laughing, if that’s so I’m a nation for I’m living in the same place for the past five years.  So of course everyone had the laugh at Bloom.”

The drinkers report that Bloom was also rather confused when Molly was expecting their first child.  Joyce once again emphasises Bloom’s foreign difference from the Irish Catholics as J.J. remarks “every male that’s born they think it may be their Messiah.  And every jew is in a tall state of excitement, I believe, till he knows if he’s a father or a mother”—rather than if the child will be a boy or a girl.  The great tragedy of Bloom’s life is that his son Rudy lived for only 11 days.  Fearing another death, Bloom has not had sexual relations with the volumptuous Molly for 11 years.  His self-imposed continence gives her the liberty to have sex with the hot-blooded Blazes Boylan, though she actually prefers the gentle Bloom.  The comedy about him is most effective when laced with sadness.

The conflict in the pub reaches a violent climax when Bloom, goaded by the anti-Semites, truthfully but offensively exclaims: “Your God was a jew.  Christ was a jew like me.”  The infuriated one-eyed citizen shouts, “I’ll brain that bloody jewman for using the holy name.”  He grabs a biscuit tin made by the Jewish firm of Jacob and flings it at Bloom, imitating the one-eyed Cyclops who hurled rocks at Ulysses as he escaped from the cave.  Joyce describes the mock-epic assault with the tin box, an ineffective weapon against the timid victim, as if it were an earthquake: “The catastrophe was terrific and instantaneous in its effect.  The observatory of Dunsink [in Dublin] registered in all eleven shocks, all of the fifth grade of Mercalli’s scale, and there is no record extant of a similar seismic disturbance in our island.”  As Joyce combines the cruel and the comic, the drinkers are paralyzed with laughter.

Joyce again mixes the humorous and the tragic in his poignant portrayal of Bloom’s encounter on the beach with Gerty MacDowell.  Molly declares “hes mad on the subject of drawers” and Gerty reveals that he “saw all the secrets of my bottom drawer,” which puns on her “bottom” and her “drawers”—her underwear.  At first sight Gerty gets the reassuring but false impression that Bloom “had enormous control over himself.”  But he’s duped by the flirtatious young Gerty, who leans backward, opens her legs and permits him to see her knickers.  Wildly excited by her boldness, he moves from sexual voyeurism to embarrassment, humiliation and shame: “she let him and she saw that he saw and then [the Roman candle]  went so high it went out of sight a moment and she was trembling in every limb from being bent so far back that he had a full view high up above her knee where no-one ever not even on the swing or wading and she wasn’t ashamed and he wasn’t either to look in that immodest way.”  As Bloom masturbates and has an orgasm Joyce describes his release, like Zeus seducing Danae in a shower of gold, in incandescent pulsating prose: “a rocket sprang and then the Roman candle burst and it was like a sigh of O! and everyone cried O! O! in raptures and it gushed out of it a stream of rain gold hair threads and they shed and ah! they were all greeny dewy stars falling with golden, O so lovely, O, soft, sweet, soft!”

Both funny and sad, Gerty mistakes Bloom for her ideal lover.  Bloom, compensating for his sexual deprivation with Molly and obsessed with Gerty’s frilly underwear, loses sexual control and is horrified when she limps away and he realizes that he’s taken advantage of a crippled girl.  Bloom’s ludicrous excuse and diagnosis, pronounced by legal and medical authorities, is that “he is of Mongolism extraction and irresponsible for his actions.  Not all there, in fact. . . . Bloom is bisexually abnormal.  He has recently escaped from Dr. Eustace’s private asylum for demented gentlemen.  Born out of bedlock hereditary epilepsy is present, the consequence of unbridled lust.”

Bloom’s sexual obsessions are tragic-comically dramatized when he fantasizes in the Circe chapter about Molly having sex with Blazes:

Boylan

(tosses him sixpence)  Here, to buy yourself a gin and splash.  (he hangs his hat smartly on a peg of Bloom’s antlered head)  Show me in.  I have a little private business with your wife, you understand?

Bloom

Thank you, sir.  Yes, sir.  Madam Tweedy is in her bath, sir.

Marion [Molly]

He ought to feel himself highly honoured.  (she plops splashing out of the water)  Raoul darling, come and dry me.  I’m in my pelt.  Only my  new hat and a carriage sponge.

Boylan

(a merry twinkle in his eye)  Topping!

Boylan treats Bloom like the butler and he relishes the role.  Gin and tonic anticipates Molly splashing in her tub.  The antlered hat rack refers to Bloom’s cuckold’s horns (an old joke in Shakespeare).  “Private business” is business with her privates.  Tweedy is Molly’s maiden name.  Raoul is the hero in one of her cheap titillating novels.  “Pelt” is her animal-like bare skin.  Boylan generously tells Bloom, who’s more excited by watching Boylan penetrate Molly than having sex with her himself, “You can apply your eye to the keyhole and play with yourself [as he did with Gerty] while I just go through her a few times.”

Bloom is obsessed with breasts as well as with undies.  He notices that, like Molly “of the bountiful bosoms,” a well-endowed woman “has in front well to the fore two protuberances of very respectable dimensions, inclined to fall in the noonday soupplate.”  “Inclined,” both likely and drooping, is a nice touch.  Molly’s breasts and all the rest of her more than compensate for her “deficient mental development.”  She adds with her fingers and “in calculating the addenda of bills, she frequently had recourse to digital aid. . . . In disoccupied moments she had more than once covered a sheet of paper with signs and hieroglyphics which she stated were Greek and Irish and Hebrew characters”—an allusion to the dominant Homeric structure and Hebrew theme: “Jewgreek is greekjew.”

Joyce transformed the earthy colloquial speech of his wife Nora, the model for Molly, into high art.  Molly was born in Gibraltar, the daughter of a British officer Major Tweedy and his sexy Spanish wife Lunita Laredo.  Her stream-of-consciousness recollection of confessing to a priest mingles her innocent comments and maladroit answers with his persistent and libidinous inquisition: “I hate that confession when I used to go to Father Corrigan he touched me father and what harm if he did where and I said on the canal bank like a fool but whereabouts on your person my child on the leg behind high up was it yes rather high up was it where you sit down yes O Lord couldnt he say bottom right out and have done with it.”

She’s obsessed with men’s “middleleg” and euphemistically “with 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.”  To prevent sexual arousal, Molly and Bloom sleep strangely head to foot and she observes: “look at the way hes sleeping at the foot of the bed how can he without a hard bolster its well he doesnt kick or he might knock out all my teeth.”

The novel ends lyrically as Molly fondly remembers Bloom’s courtship and lovemaking on Howth Hill: “yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.”  Ghosts, by Joyce’s greatly admired Henrik Ibsen, also repetitively ends: “The sun.  The sun,” and his Doll’s House ends (serendipitously) with “Nora!  Nora!”

Sigmund Freud asked exactly the same query that Joyce tried to solve in Ulysses: “The great question which has never been answered and which I have not yet been able to answer is ‘What does a woman want?’ ”  William Blake’s poem gave the most persuasive answer:

What is it men in women do require

The lineaments of Gratified Desire

What is it women do in men require

The lineaments of Gratified Desire.

 Jeffrey Meyers will publish James Salter: Pilot, Screenwriter, Novelist on February 7, 2024 and Parallel Lives: From Freud and Hitler to Arbus and Plath in August or September 2024, both with Louisiana State University Press.

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