As it seems others have experienced, it has been difficult to draw overarching conclusions from the consolidation of my obsession of native and foreign regarding its status or role within Ulysses as a whole. While reading the novel, I have considered my obsession according to numerous possible interpretations of the definition of the terms ‘native’ and ‘foreign’ and the corresponding nature of the distinction between them. These interpretations have ranged anywhere from literal and apparent, as in instances where the opposition between Irish nationalism and British imperialism/occupation structures the action, to interpretations more figurative and obscure, according to which I have focused on the success and failure of bodies in either preserving or conflating that distinction, as well as the motivation for either. Though this liberal and flexible study of native and foreign over the course of the text has been rewarding, it has also made consolidation a challenge.

Native and foreign function within the text as a primary means of identification and definition. In certain contexts/instances they work collaboratively to perform this function, and in others, where they manifest as starkly opposed and fundamentally incompatible, they are defined against one another. The distinction/opposition is often of immediate and central pertinence within the action, particularly in what have been characterized as the “social” episodes. While native and foreign do not shape the narrative as directly within the more introverted episodes, the representation of native and foreign elements, and the navigation of the distinction/opposition between them remain critical to the characterization that occurs within them. Joyce thereby represents the consequences of the centrality of this distinction/opposition at the intimate, interior, individual level, as well as on a broader, more collective scale.

In the more social scenes, the distinction/opposition between native and foreign is implicated both in the formation of bonds and the discernment and acceptation of difference. Within these scenes, strength and quality of character is both asserted and judged in terms that distinctively refer to this distinction/opposition. The hierarchies configured within the respective social contexts of the novel to a major degree stem from this system of identification. Alignment with the ‘native’ reliably corresponds to superior status and greater interconnectivity, while association with the ‘foreign’ produces the inverse. For the distinction/opposition to authoritatively function to configure social status and resulting condition relies on the reinforcement of the notion that these categories are inherent and fixed. In instances where explanation according to these categories is contradicted, it is not the validity of strict distinction/opposition that is questioned, but rather the nature and inherent worth of the hybrid identities which are anomalies to the rule.

Native and foreign are elements that are implicated within both Bloom and Stephen’s characterization, as well as their respective and relational evolution over the course of the text. Through them, Joyce asserts native and foreign as inevitably subject and inclined to change, thereby demonstrating the precariousness of identities founded on the notion of an essence that permanently fixes this distinction/opposition. Though Joyce reveals the falseness of the notion of an inherent distinction/opposition between native and foreign from both sides, the fiction of the native functions differently from that of the foreign. In developing my short paper, I would like to focus more specifically on the relationship between authority/power and this distinction/opposition.

Last week, not realizing that we had to write an actual summary post for today, I wrote the following:

“Numbers in Ulysses as a whole seem to interpolate three different poles. There are numbers as the language of science (thirtytwo feet per second per second et al.), numbers in a mystical numerological/Pythagorean/religious sense (“darkness shining in brightness which brightness could not comprehend,” the eight beatitudes, the trinity), and then there are the myriad mundane numbers: the prices, debts, and denominations of coins, the odds of the horse-race, the hours of the clock and the many dates recalled, and so on.”

We might say that the first two poles, the mathematical and the mystical, are both attempts to create order from chaos. In the Aristotelian and Platonic worldviews that so preoccupy Stephen, numbers are regarded as unmoving and static, in contrast with the physical world of becoming. For both scientists and numerologists, numbers control our destiny, through laws either physical or divine.

Like almost every other source of stable meaning in Ulysses, numbers in the mystical or scientific sense are drowned out in a deluge of mundane details, puns, and errors. The vast majority of numbers in the text are monetary amounts, grounding number in the very down-to-earth world of commerce and the satisfaction of human desires.

Also interesting is the prevalence of mathematical error. From Stephen’s inattentive view of Sargent’s algebra homework to the many errors and half-truths in Ithaca to Blooms semi-coherent musings about the mathematical basis of music in Sirens.

Ultimately, mathematical meaning clearly breaks down over the course of Ulysses, much like language itself. Beyond that, and a multitude of semi-interesting specific examples of numbers in the text, I don’t have a lot, but I’m hoping to use some of the articles in the Ashplant bibliography to develop and actual argument.

Tooth

Forms 

toothless, toothache, toothsome, gaptoothed, toothed, buckteeth

Related Terms

shell, dentist, chew, milk

Explication

Teeth are mentioned many times over the course of Ulysses. Most notably, Buck Mulligan frequently refers to Stephen as “toothless Kinch.” Stephen also muses on his poor dental hygiene in Episode III: “My teeth are very bad. Why, I wonder. Feel. That one is going too. Shells. Ought I go to a dentist, I wonder, with that money?” (U 3.495-6)

Throughout the text, teeth serve as symbols of power and carnality. In Episode II, Stephen refers to stone lions as “toothless terrors” (U 2.429-30) When Bloom is disgusted by the meat-eating men in Laestrygonians, he observes how one man has “no teeth to chewchewchew it” (U 8.660). The ever-virile Blazes Boylan keeps a red rose “between his smiling teeth” (U 10.335).

Teeth are also frequently associated with animals throughout the text. In Episode 5 Bloom encounters a horse’s “gently champing teeth,” (U 5.214) and in Episode 4 he contemplates his cat’s “milkwhite teeth” (U 4.34).

Teeth also serve as indicators of health and hygiene (In Episode I, Buck Mulligan describes Ireland as a “country full of rotten teeth and rotten guts”).

Definitions and Examples

I. tooth, n (OED 1.a) “In plural, the hard processes within the mouth, attached (usually in sockets) in a row to each jaw in most vertebrates except birds (but also in some extinct birds), having points, edges, or grinding surfaces, and serving primarily for biting, tearing, or trituration of solid food, and secondarily as weapons of attack or defence, and for other purposes; in singular, each of these individually.”

“Blazes Boylan looked in her blouse with more favour, the stalk of the red flower between his smiling teeth.” (U 10.335)

II. (OED 2.b) “Referring to biting or gnawing; hence denoting a hurtful, hostile, destructive, or devouring agency or quality.”

“Every fellow for his own, tooth and nail.” (U 8.701)

III. (OED 3.a) “As an artificial structure, in an implement, machine, etc.; e.g. one of the pointed projections of a comb, saw, file, rake, harrow, fork, etc.; a prong, tine; one of the series of projections on the edge of a wheel, pinion, etc., which engage with corresponding ones on another; a cog.”

“He is prematurely bald from selfabuse, perversely idealistic in consequence, a reformed rake, and has metal teeth.” (U 15.1781-2)

“Eeltraps, lobsterpots, fishingrods, hatchet, steelyard, grindstone, clodcrusher, swatheturner, carriagesack, telescope ladder, 10 tooth rake, washing clogs, haytedder, tumbling rake, billhook, paintpot, brush, hoe and so on.” (U 17.1564)

Related Topics

Bodies
Medicine
Science
Animals
Gender/masculinity

As I’ve considered the theme of haunting in Ulysses over the semester, most of my observations have fallen into two categories: people and things. I’ve posted about smells, echoes, and metempsychosis as evocative of haunting; about Stephen and Bloom as subjects of haunting, and about Stephen’s mother, Rudy, Parnell, and again Bloom as ghostly figures. With a short paper in mind, the idea that emerges most strongly is to make the case that Leopold Bloom is symbolically represented as a ghost.

I am sort of surprised that there isn’t more identification between Bloom and ghostliness out there, because in my reading of Ulysses he struck me as the most ghostly character. In my paper, I’ll argue that Bloom’s symbolic death occurred when Rudy died (this ties into themes of hereditary confusion throughout the book and Bloom’s fixation on producing a child.) He haunts those around him: Molly, who is trying to move on to a new partner; Stephen, who doesn’t ask for Bloom’s company but is content to be haunted by an entity less horrifying than his mother. Perhaps the reason that Bloom takes such pleasure in eating (kidney, sandwich, Molly’s chewed up food) and excreting is because he is grasping for things that make him feel living. I would argue that the disgust he feels while watching the men in the pub devour food is similar to his thoughts about the obese rat in the graveyard devouring bodies – here, thoughts of food and death collide in a disturbing way for Bloom. Another aspect I’d like to explore (but could end up bringing too much to the table for a short specific paper) is Bloom’s loss of identity throughout his life. I think that the ways in which his name changes – both last and first – contribute to my sense of his ghostliness.

But what about the figures who haunt Bloom? Rudy is the most readily identifiable one, particularly in his appearance at the end of Circe—the climax of Bloom’s halluci-fantasy. The life and times of C.S. Parnell also seem to haunt Bloom (see my 11/1 post.) I think that proposing the idea that Bloom is not only a haunter but a hauntee will make my argument more complete and nuanced. It will also help tie my thoughts to the broader theme in Ulysses of cycles and the blurred distinctions between beginnings and endings.

Performance in Ulysses seems most closely tied to identity and the power or disenfranchisement that identity provides. People create themselves or else are created: the balance of power seems to lie in who does the naming. Gerty’s performance of sexuality for Bloom gives her (in her mind) the disembodied romance she’s wanted, but when Bloom sees her lame leg she loses her sexual power and becomes pathetic in his eyes, “left on the shelf” for her “defect” (368). Buck Mulligan’s ease with his performative selves lend him a kind of ominous power as he traverses the same social circles in which Stephen and Bloom struggle; Stephen’s nervousness about his inability to “dress the character” mimic Bloom’s eager-to-please shapeshifting in ‘Circe,’ where he changes at each demand for a new stereotype: as Jew, as woman, as infant, and so on.

If the characters perform identity for one another to the extent that it’s difficult to discern actual identities, authenticity might come from the narrative forms themselves: book 4, in entering Bloom’s head, shows a scope of self-understanding that’s far more complex and comprehensive than the trope-selves he performs in ‘Circe’; the panorama of individuals in ‘Wandering Rocks’ are understood through thoughts more than through titles (or the titles are reflected in their thoughts: see “the superior” John Conmee, who smiles often, recalling he “had cleaned his teeth…with arecanut paste” (219)). Likewise the contrast between the glib romanticism for the first half of ‘Nausicaa’ and Bloom’s brutal fragmented consciousness in the second half show far more about the characters understandings of themselves and the world than they profess to understand aloud. In short, the forms narrative takes in Ulysses attempt to understand and unpack, even as the expressions and performances of the characters within attempt to confound.

I’m beginning to center my thinking about blackness in Ulysses in a manner that moves beyond solely examining the presence of American racism by looking more into what this racism means in an Irish context. While I’m still very interested in the spread of an American brand of anti-black racism globally, there is much to be said about the way this racism functions in Ireland and within the context of Ulysses.

Most of the source material for the instances where American racism functions in an Irish context occur in the Cyclops episode. Barbara Temple Thurston writes about an instance in Cyclops where There is an instance where Bloom insults the Citizen narrator with a phrase from a Kipling poem, calling him a “whiteeyed kaffir”. Temple Thurston writes that this reference extends the extent of Irish discrimination to include South Africa, going beyond an American conception of racism and providing evidence that Irish people have their own racist expressions. With this in mind and after coming across this evidence, I think that I have a much better shot at moving away from my concerns about getting stuck analyzing American racism and using Ulysses as a source. I feel much more comfortable making a claim about the interaction of American racism in Ireland with Ireland’s own racist conceptions, especially since the overlap of the two happens so prominently in Cyclops.

To assess beginnings and endings throughout the novel is to bring to light two distinct functions—the first is form, the second more based on topics. In terms of form, beginnings and endings often shape the ways in which we read the novel, and how clear (or not) certain episodes are. On the topics side of the subject, the themes within this category that seemed to reoccur quite frequently were life and death. Under the umbrella theme of life can be found subgenres such as birth, parentage, and origins, while discussions of death focus largely on relationships to the deceased and impacts of such deaths.

With regards to the form, beginnings and endings can be considered as both how each episode opens and closes, but also periodically how the episode is structured. In thinking about Ulysses, it is clear that each portion varies in some way, often very distinctly, from all the others. For example, Episode 15 (“Circe”) noticeably uses a theatrical form, a structure that allows for readers to understand when one speaker’s moment begins and subsequently ends. Such a form stands in contrast to less distinguishable portions such as episodes focused on inner thoughts of characters—Stephen in “Proteus” (Episode 3), where one thought often blurs into the next. Keeping track of beginnings and endings, with a focus on form and structure, allows for an understanding of the novel through different perspectives (narration). As such, beginnings and endings can function as indicators of speech (“Circe”), episode tone (i.e. “Sirens”), and clarity—or lack thereof (“Ithica”).

In assessing the obsession of beginnings and endings with a more thematic focus, the novel brings forth complications with regards to the topics of birth/life and death. While each can be broken down further into subcategories, it seems important to point them out as the most substantially recurring examples of beginnings and endings. Within the subject of births, Ulysses seems to focus largely on both origins and the actual concept of birth. From Molly: “My wife is, so to speak, Spanish, half that is. Point of fact she could actually claim Spanish nationality if she wanted, having been born in (technically Spain, I.e. Gibraltar” (16.876-79), to the fleetingly relevant character D.B. Murphy from, “Fort Camden and Fort Carlisle. That’s where I hails from” (16.418-20), it is apparent that Joyce puts a focus on the places or backgrounds people are from (i.e. Bloom’s complicated history with Judaism).

Ulysses often complicates readers’ understanding of the usually straightforward concept of birth. Not only does Joyce portray a moment in which Bloom is/could be pregnant: “He is about to have a baby” (15.1818), but also offers ponderings of the birth process through Stephen’s wondering, “One of her sisterhood lugged me squealing into life. Creation from nothing” (3.35). It is not uncommon for Joyce to cause readers to question what they know to be true, however his complications of such an established act truly epitomizes the misperceptions and confusions throughout the novel. Another very similar topic that Joyce makes sure to maintain as confusing is parentage. For example, the complication of a well known lineage: “”Moses begat Noah begat Noah begat Eunuch[…]” (15. 1855). While this is only one instance in which such confusion is brought to light, this theme seems to pop up quite often, and with more pertinence to the novel’s characters themselves.

Oppositely, death functions as the biggest reoccurring theme relevant to endings. Not only is Dignam’s death a constant topic of conversation, but the idea itself is often called upon to reference time or situations. While death is an important and contentious topic to Stephen (consider his mother): “He kills his mother but he can’t wear grey trousers” (1.122), it is also a significant subject in Bloom’s life when we consider Rudy: “When we left Lombard street west something changed. Could never like it again after Rudy” (8.609-610). Characters in Ulysses seemed to be riddled with images and hauntings from deaths, inherently endings of lives, throughout the novel—in ways that shape its course.

In his article “Molly’s Flow,” Attridge argues that “Penelope” epitomizes Joyce’s ability to make readers aware of Ulysses’ textuality because reading the atypical syntax of Molly’s episode forces us to be critically aware of our relationship with the text of Ulysses itself. In my own tracing of the progression of the narration and narrative voice in Ulysses, however, it seems like a common theme all throughout Joyce’s text is this ability to make us as readers aware of the fact that we are reading a physical text as opposed to actually experiencing the events of the novel. While I think Attridge is right to claim that the lack of punctuation in “Penelope” does not cause the narration to “flow” like so many scholars claim it does, I wonder if it is too much of a stretch to claim that “the term [flow] would be more accurately used of earlier parts of Ulysses” (547). My own observations regarding the narrative structure, while certainly defining a “flow” at certain points, seem to point to the fact that Joyce (or the narrator? Or the arranger?) is constantly at work to disrupt any sort of discernable narrative flow in order to make us as readers question the nature of the structural ground of Ulysses.

Beginning with Proteus, Episode Three, we see the narrative “flow” of Stephen’s interior monologue interrupted by third-person narration regarding his physical environment – each time Stephen’s conscience seems to almost entirely consume the narration, we are brought back to reality by a harsh transition to “real time” with a more classic, third person narration such as, “wet sand slapped his boots” (37), “the dog’s bark ran towards him, stopped, ran back” (38), or “he lay back at full stretch over the sharp rocks” (41). The sensory details of these third-person passages remind us as readers of the physical realities Stephen is experiencing separately from what he is experiencing in his mind (idea taken from my blog post). While Stephen’s monologues themselves may establish a sort of “flow,” it seems that Joyce intentionally breaks that “flow” in order to keep us as readers from being too consumed by any one form of narration. From the beginning of the novel, Joyce can be seen toying with his readers in an attempt to bridge the divide between what is happening in the novel itself and what our experiences are as readers.

Just like Joyce abruptly transitions between narrative styles in episode three, in episode eight he similarly uses narrative style to craft a “then vs. now” dichotomy between Bloom as he sees himself now and Bloom as he existed during the peak of his relationship with Molly (see blog post). Bloom sits and relives a love scene between himself and Molly in his mind and he explicitly defines “Me. And me now” (144), his “downcast eyes” at present contrasting with his “ravished” “wild” state in his memory. By leading us as readers back and forth between these extreme states of being, each characterized by different narrative styles, it seems to me that the narrator creates flow only to eventually disrupt it and place it under our critical eye as readers. It is breaks and transitions in narration like these that bring us into close contact with the characters of the novel and urge us to think about how and what we really can know about them.

Like Henry Staten says in his discussion of Ulysses’ “decomposing form,” Onomatopoeia seen early on in Ulysses “undermines the illusory transparency of language, extravagantly calling attention to the textuality of its text” (382). The “textuality” of Ulysses is a concept that often comes up in scholarship regarding the novel, and, though it may seem only tangentially related to the role of narration, actually serves as a vehicle for narrative voice to become apparent to us as readers. John Somer terms the mechanism behind this narrative style establishment “the arranger” (65) and explains that “the arranger uses narrative devices that divert readers from their experiences of the narrative to their experience of reading the text … it draws readers into such an intense engagement with the novel’s fictive reality that they ironically experience their own pleasure in reading the passage” (74). The passage from “Hades” that Somer cites as evidence of this theory occurs in Episode Six, well before the final “Penelope,” furthering my notion that a key aspect of the experience of reading Ulysses is that reading it makes us as readers aware of our own reading process.

Stephen Daedalus may not have much, being young, poor, indebted, and dispossessed of his lodgings, but he fervently believes that he maintains a degree of purity in his artistic endeavors that must be protected and maintained, no matter the consequences. At the beginning of the novel, Stephen clearly sets out to distance himself from a nationalistic mode of art-making, likening Irish art to the cracked looking-glass of a servant, something that is tarnished in itself but also devalued through its place in a larger system of power relations. While Stephen clearly understands Irish art as that of a colonized people, he has no interest in resistance or improvement, rejecting Buck Mulligan’s proposal that they intellectually “Hellenize” Ireland. While talking to Bloom in Eumaeus, Stephen defines his work as existing outside of a nationalist discourse of Irishness; Irishness is subordinate to him, rather than the other way around. While this speaks, in part, to Stephen’s fierce independence and unwillingness to participate or to be led, it also leads to Stephen’s predilection for the abstract, as Irish nationalism ultimately leads to questions of the material conditions of British occupation. Simply put, Stephen wishes his art to exist outside the world, removed from material experience. His meeting with other intellectuals at the National Library in episode IX highlights this in terms of both space and ideas, as the group retreats to an inner chamber of the library to discuss thoroughly opaque and esoteric topics. However, Stephen’s attempts to isolate art from the world are frustrated at every turn by Leopold Bloom. Bloom provides a handy demonstration of the materiality of art by wiping himself with a short story in Episode IV. Bloom provides constant examples of how art is embedded, both materially and commercially, in the world at large. Like the Titbit story Bloom wipes himself with, many of his own artistic endeavors are tied to money, such as the verses he sent in to a contest as child. Moreover, Bloom’s own art is advertising, and he displays plenty of energy and creativity in his mental practice of it throughout the day. While Stephen refuses all of Bloom’s offers to put his intellectual gifts to profitable use, Stephen is perhaps not quite vindicated in this choice; art seems to be irrepressibly material, and besides, Stephen has debts to pay.

What is perhaps most interesting to me about sexuality in Ulysses is how often sexual gratification – especially for Bloom – takes forms other than conventional “sexual intercourse,” most often the form of voyeurism but also, for example, in Bloom’s strange complicity in his wife’s adultery, in his obsession with the sending of erotic letters and photographs, and in the fantasy of being shamed for his own lusts. Bloom, therefore, is a kind of icon of sexual perversion for whom acts of distance and interpretation – watching, permitting, reading – carry such sexual charge that he no longer engages in “proper” masculine sexuality.

One of the most evident manifestations of Bloom’s sexuality in Ulysses is in his desire to watch sexually attractive women, complete with a deep frustration when he is denied the ability to do so. Early on, we see him irritated when the women in front of him in line at the butcher’s is gone by the time he leaves (denying him the pleasure of following her as she walks away) and later when a passing trolley prevents him from watching another woman. The culmination of these acts of voyeurism comes in “Nausicaa,” essentially an extended sex scene that takes place entirely through mutual observation as Bloom masturbates while watching Gerty, and although Gerty seems to subvert Bloom’s power over her by gazing back at him, this doesn’t prevent him from judging her harshly when he notices her lame leg – figuring her attractive only as a “curiousity like a nun or a negress or a girl with glasses”(13.775-6). Also telling is the moment in “Circe” when, rather than having sex with any of the prostitutes in Bella Cohen’s brothel, Bloom is guided by Rudolph Virag in his assessment of each prostitute’s physical attributes. The power of voyeurism, in these cases, is so strong as to take the place of any other sexual contact.

The prominence of letter-writing and reading in Bloom’s sexual life – as well as his focus on the erotic novels he gives to Molly – indicates that Bloom also perceives reading/writing as a sexual outlet. He continually defers the act of actually meeting with Martha Clifford, and although there is an element of mockery to his reading of his letters, it is clear from her response – we never see the text of what Bloom sends her – that he continues to send her sexually explicit letters. Later, he considers Martha – along with Gerty – an example of his continued desirability to women. In “Circe,” Bloom also imagines two high society women shaming him for sending erotic letters/photographs and expecting them to reciprocate. There is also the case of Sweets of Sin, the erotic novel Bloom picks up for Molly, its plot of infidelity echoing through Bloom’s head to an extent that one must question whether it’s Molly’s reading pleasure or his own that he has in mind.

Sweets of Sin brings us to consider Bloom’s attitude towards his wife’s adultery: an avoidance of the topic that verges dangerously on facilitation of the act, a taboo source of potential eroticism that originates in Bloom’s own passivity. “Penelope” reveals that it is Bloom who has not made any sexual advances towards Molly for years, and although Bloom frets about Molly’s affair with Boylan all day, he does nothing to interfere. The revelation that Molly believes Milly was sent away to avoid her witnessing Molly’s adultery also suggests that Bloom may have facilitated the affair by removing the one person who could have prevented it.

What becomes clear in “Circe,” however, is that Bloom also sexually fantasizes about being punished for his own perversion. After Bloom’s shaming by the high society ladies, we see Bella Cohen transform into Bello and punish a feminized, piglike Bloom in a highly eroticized fashion, sitting on Bloom’s face and demanding promises of obedience. This is perhaps Bloom’s only sexual fantasy in which he actually touches the other party, and even then it is in the form of his own domination. This masochism, however, only takes place with fantasized persons whom Bloom barely knows, another withdrawal from sexual intimacy.

Far from functioning as a form of subversive “queering” of sexuality, however, what these unconventional sexual acts seem to share in common is a kind of abstracting of women into temporary erotic assemblages: bodies glimpsed from far away, words on a page, unseen adulteries, fantasized embodiments of sexual shame. With the exception of Molly, Bloom seems to treat them more as tantalizing ideas than as people, deliberately distancing or subordinating himself from physical touch. Molly, meanwhile, is physically present only at the novel’s beginning and end, otherwise existing only in Bloom’s anxieties. I don’t quite know what to make of this yet, though – that’s a matter for the shorter paper.