GEORGE STADE
277
widely flowing, floating foampool, flower unfurling.
But Stephen's fit of creativity has not yet run its course. He searches
in his pockets for a handkerchief as a minute before he had searched them
for paper on which to write his poem - only to remember that earlier in
that day, Buck Mulligan had taken it to wipe his razor. "The bard's
noserag!" Mulligan had said: "A new colour for our Irish poets: snot–
green." And turning to Dublin Bay, he describes the sea as "a great sweet
mother" "the snotgreen, the scrotumtightening sea," his improvement on
Homer's epithet, "the winedark sea." So now, Stephen Dedalus, Irish
poet, all at sea, produces Irish art: "He laid the dry snot picked from his
nostril on a ledge of rock, carefully," Joyce writes, and we can hope that
the ledge is the same on on which Stephen wrote his poem, another
bodily product, and like the urine, another emission of his substance.
The effect of such passages, as they accumulate, is multiple. On the
one hand, Irish culture is naturalized: it's the color of the sea and
Stephen's snot. On the other hand, the sea is acculturated: it's the color
of Irish art, and it stands to Ireland as the Mediterranean stood to an–
cient Greece. Likewise, Stephen's snot is at once acculturated and natu–
ralized: it's the color of Irish art and the sea. But for Joyce, the body
comes first: art, words , culture, and our conception of the sea come out
of the body. In this respect, Joyce is unlike our hegemonic Foucaultisti–
cal, Lacanite, and Derridadist culture critics, for whom the body is con–
structed by culture and its discourses. When Frank Budgeon protested
against Joyce's corporeal emphasis - "But the minds, the thoughts of the
characters," he said - Joyce replied "if they had no body they would
have no mind." To uncensor the body, therefore, is to demystify culture,
a job that more than ever needs doing.
The equation between words and Irish culture, on the one hand,
and the body's by-products, on the other, is developed throughout the
novel - in the next episode, for example, the first given over to Leopold
Bloom. As Bloom sits at stool, he reads a story entitled "Matcham's
Masterstroke," the "prize tidbit" of this issue of
Tidbits
magazine. Finish–
ing both with satisfaction, Bloom wipes himself with "Matcham's
Masterstroke." And later in the day, Bloom walks out of the Ormond
Bar, inside which Dublin layabouts are singing lugubriously, and feels gas
burbling inside him, generated, he supposes, from a glass of burgundy he
had drunk. He passes a shop window on display in which is a portrait of
the Irish hero Robert Emmet and his famous last words: "When my
country takes her place among the nations of the earth then and not till
then, let my epitaph be written. I have done." As Bloom reads the
words, he makes some music of his own:
