278
GEORGE STADE
When
my
country takes her place
among.lPrrprr.lMust be the bur.lEffi
00.
Rrpr.l
Nations oj the earth .
No-one behind ...
Then and/not till
then.
Tram kran kran kran. Good oppor./Coming. Krandlkrankran.
I'm sure its the burgund.lYes. One, two.
Let
my
ep itaph be.
Kraaaaaa.l
Written. I have
.lPprrpffrrppff.!
Done.
And the chapter ends.
Leopold Bloom, we might say, belongs to the logo-cloacal school
ofliterary criticism, of which Stephen Dedalus is the most subtle theorist
In the library scene, you will remember, Stephen argues that Shake–
speare's plays flow from and refer back to his bodily experience. "As we,
or mother Dana, weave and unweave our bodies, Stephen said, from day
to day, their molecules shuttle to and fro, so does the artist weave and
unweave his image". His listeners are unsympathetic. They want to be–
lieve that the great poets, in the words of A. E. , "Bring our minds into
contact with the eternal wisdom, Plato's world of ideas." But Stephen
holds to the here and now, and in the process is forced to recognize an–
other equivalence: as Shakespeare's plays are to Shakespeare, so Stephen's
theories are to Stephen. At one point Stephen says to himself "I think
you're getting on very nicely. Just mix up a mixture of theolological–
philolological.
Mingo, minxi, mictum, mingere,"
thus conjugating the
Latin verb for "to urinate," thus conjoining the processes by which we
make water, plays, philology, theology, and novels like
Ulysses.
At first glance, such passages, and there are many of them, devalue
art: it's just another secretion. At second glance, such passages revalue
excretions: they are equated with art. But in a third glance, such passages
normalize or naturalize both, for to Joyce the natural was the nonn.
Above all, such passages restore, or even resurrect, the body to
consciousness. When Stephen Dedalus, at the end of
Portrait,
announced
that he was setting out to forge the uncreated conscience of his race, he
spoke for Joyce; and that conscience, as created in Ulysses included the
uncensored body.
Even aside from the official censors, not everyone was grateful to
Joyce for bringing snot, naval fluff, toe-jam, and the like to conscious–
ness. The reaction to
Ulysses
of Francis Talbot, S.
J.
was typical of many:
Many of the words were scummy, scrofulous, putrid, like excrement
of the mind. The words are listed in the dictionary, but never in the
writings or on the tongue of anyone except the insane, or the lowest
human dregs. The critics said how brave. The sexual neurotics said
how lovely. The normal person said I'm sick.
