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all the discontinuities toward the visionary from the imagistic, the sec–
tions move from social encounter to the only consummation, devoutly
wished into dream. Then a rich, problematic two-hundred-word passage
about which Ellmann is strangely silent, in his introduction, notes and
comment in the biography as well; it is almost as if these mingled
glimpses of various scenes, various cities, and various erotic roles defied
a certain kind of exposition. For example:
A soft crumpled peagreen cover drapes the lounge. A narrow
Parisian room. The hairdresser lay here but now. I kissed her stock–
ing and the hem of her rustblack dusty skirt. It is the other. She.
Gogarty came yesterday to be introduced. Ulysses is the reason.
Symbol of the intellectual conscience. . . .
Gogarty in fact, almost as the fully conceived Mulligan in myth, presides
over the mechanism of satiric degradation : the luxury of erotic dreaming
is paid for by the stings of the lamia. In one sense, the whole story
constitutes the struggle of the imagination to free itself from the con–
ventions of sexual fantasy, both of the soft-fabric-sliding-down-along–
welcoming-limbs variety, with its dark promises and sacramental flavor,
and of the punitive disenchantment of narrow Parisian rooms. Being free
of the lady is being redeemed from the tyranny of certain kinds of
picture.
. . . Why are we left here? The hairdresser lay here but now, clutch–
ing head between her knobby knees. ... Intellectual symbol of my
race. Listen! The plunging gloom has fallen. Listen!
As the passage draws to a close, through melodramatically ominous
images ("She coils towards me along the crumpled lounge"), the demon
figure sheds her guise of tawdrily stylized naturalism ("the hairdresser")
revealing the true form of her menace:
-Jim, love!-
Soft sucking lips kiss my left armpit: a coiling kiss on myriad veins.
I burn! I crumple like a burning leaf! From my right armpit a fang
of flame leaps out. A starry snake has kissed me: a cold nightsnake.
I am lost!
-Nora!-
And
with
this final cry, the meaning of "the other. She" at the beginning
unfolds more fully. Who is "the other"
in
such a situation: the wife, or
the being envisioned in, the condition ascribed to, the passive girl? After
