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GEORGE STADE
and self-regard. But the remarkable, and original, quality of the passage
in
Ulysses
is its lack of emphasis, the absence of either sermonizing heat or
satirical exaggeration, of either shame or shamelessness. There's a smile,
but it is tolerant. Bloom does what he does because had he lived in the
world rather than in Joyce's words that is what he would have done,
because although no one had done it before in fiction, many of us have
done something like it in life.
And Bloom does it as he does other things, as he loves his daughter,
sorrows over his dead son, performs acts of charity, writes doggerel,
ponders the structure of the cosmos. He does it, that is to say, naturally,
because it is in his nature, because it is as natural for humans to produce
toe-jam and smell it as it is to produce children and love them, produce
poems and admire them, produce cosmologies and crouch under them.
And Joyce has Bloom do it because to deny toe-jam is to move toward
a denial of the source of love, poetry, and grand ideas - the human
body. That denial would make love, poetry, and thought unnatural or
supernatural, which amounts to the same thing, would make them the
products of extraordinary efforts of the spirit, rather than of ordinary
flesh. The censored body, in sum, is as alienated from its products as in
the Marxist scheme a worker is alienated from the products of his labor.
Such, I take it, was part of Trilling's meaning, for any concrete in–
stance has more potential meaning in it than is actual in the commen–
taries that bury it. Trilling, let's say, cited Bloom's toe-jam as a kind of
synedoche, a part for the whole. As there, so elsewhere in the novel, so
in all those passages in which characters pick their noses, probe their
navels, pass menstrual blood, vomit, urinate, defecate, expectorate, eruc–
tate, ejaculate, and flatulate. Take, for example, the first of them, the
episode in which Stephen Dedalus, Joyce's portrait of himself as a young
man, walks along Sandymount Strand.
After trying to fix the watery flux of experience in words, Stephen
watches a dog lift his leg. "The simple pleasures of the poor," he thinks.
And then, out of his old obsessions and immediate sensations, a poem
comes to him, a vampirish love poem. "Here. Put a pin in the chap,
will
you?" he thinks, and he leans out over a table of rock to write it down.
But soon the "greengoldenly" flow of the seawater moves his "poor
dogsbody," as Buck Mulligan calls it, to the simple pleasures of the
poor. In the following passage from Stephen's stream of consciousness,
sea water, water of another kidney, and watery words flow together:
Better get this job over quick. Listen: a fourworded wavespeech:
seesoo, hrss, rsseiss oos.... In cups of rock it slops: flop, clap, slop;
bounded in barrels. And, spent, its speech ceases. It flows purling,
