GEORGE STADE
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cious climax of the
Odyssey,
in which Odysseus and his mates kill over one
hundred suitors and a dozen or so servants. Joyce disliked violence as he
disliked other megalomaniacal displays of militant heroism. His solution
was to have Bloom run his mind over Molly's suitors and then to accept
them, and her adultery, with "equanimity," that shining word.
"Equanimity?" asks the questioner. And the answer comes:
As natural as any and every natural act of a nature expressed or under–
stood executed in natured natures by natural creatures in accordance
with his, her and their natured natures, of dissimilar similarity.
In that acceptance, in that equanimity, Joyce tells us, Bloom was "a
conscious reactor against the void of incertitude."
The human body, that is, like everything else, is founded on the void.
To endorse it as a standard of value is to make an ultimately absurd leap
into faith. But at least that standard provides you with a philosophic
equanimity, an acceptance of life, the ability to enjoy it. It provides you
with a ground, a shaky ground, but a ground, from which to judge the
denials of spirit, the oppressions of an alienating culture, the insane dis–
tortions of disembodied intellect, all of which are mercilessly explodes in
Ulysses.
And that is why I honor James Joyce and Lionel Trilling: they
make the absurd leap into a faith that value, sanity, a sense of proportion,
renewal in literature and life, emerge from and return to the uncensored
human body, including its snot, navel fluff, and toe-jam.
