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torn from her rotting liver by fits of loud groaning vomiting." Stephen
thereby sets in motion a sequence of associations that exfoliates through–
out the novel. Snot, urine, vomit; nature, art, the human body; the Irish
sea and the Mediterranean; Ireland and Ancient Greece; England and
Ancient Rome; Bloom and Odysseus; Bloom's navel fluff and the
om–
phalos;
Stephen's mother, other ghosts, his vocation, his need to cut the
apron-strings; a thousand particulars, all become part of the reflexive, self–
contained organization of cross-references that in
Ulysses
transmute the
detritus of experience and the human body into art.
These cross-references, episode by episode, finally constitute the
whole uncensored human body that the novel, in effect, becomes. Each
episode, after the first three, is associated with a different part of the
body, the Calypso episode with the kidney, the Lestrygonian with the
esophagus, the Eumaeus with the nerves, and so on. "Among other
things," Joyce told Frank Budgeon, "my book is an epic of the human
body." And to Carlo Linati Joyce wrote that his intention was "to al–
low each adventure (that is, every hour, every organ, every art being in–
terconnected and interrelated in the somatic scheme of the whole) to
condition and even create its own technique." Those stylistic innova–
tions, then, through a recital of which I had tried to impress Lionel
Trilling, those too were conditioned, or even created, by the human
body.
By the last episode, which Joyce called the
clou
of the novel, Molly
Bloom's notorious soliloquy, the somatic scheme has been fleshed out
entirely. "Though probably more obscene than any preceding episode it
seems to me perfectly sane," Joyce wrote to Frank Budgeon; "Ich bin
der Fleisch der stets bejaht," I am the flesh that always affirms. The phrase
in German is Joyce's revision of Mephistopheles' self-defining announce–
ment in
Faust:
"I am the spirit that denies." Joyce , characteristically,
aligns himself with the flesh, which affirms, rather than the spirit, which
denies. No reader of
Ulysses
will forget the fleshly rhythms and panting
yeses of Molly's last words: "I put my arms around him yes and could feel
my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said
yes I will yes." To his French translator James Joyce wrote "the book
must end with the word yes. It must end with the most positive word in
the human language." In another letter Joyce explicitly associated
Molly's yeses with that part of the female body out of which all human
bodies come.
Molly's "yes" is the novel's last word, but Molly's climax is not the
novel's. The novel's climax, I believe, occurs earlier, not long after
Bloom communes with his toe-jam, and Joyce had a tough time writing
it. He could not at first figure out an appropriate parallel to the fero-
