Baron, Scarlett. “Flaubert, Joyce: Vision, Photography, Cinema.” Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 54, no. 4, 2008, pp. 689-714, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/257623/pdf. Accessed 21 Nov 2016.

Noting the shortsightedness (so to speak) of previous analyses of Joyce’s work in comparison with cinema, Baron examines Ulysses as well as Joyce’s other texts through comparison with the work of Flaubert, noting a shared fixation on the technologies and techniques of vision that originates prior to the invention and popularization of film. Cautioning against a present-day tendency to assume the predominance of film as a technology of visualization, Baron begins by looking towards “modernism’s literary heritage in the field of visual representation”(690) in order to more fully understand the significance of “cinematographic” narration in Joyce’s work.

In the first of the article’s three sections, “Vision,” Baron begins by discussing the significance of vision in Flaubert’s writing. Using both Flaubert’s letters and quotes from his fiction, she identifies “an aspiration to observe surfaces intensely, so as to see what lies within: the essence of the object”(691). She then, meticulously citing various moments within Ulysses as well as Stephen Hero, argues that Joyce’s narratives contain a similar form of vision, “a vision that has taken as its object a specific, circumscribed object”(693). By locating the origins of this kind of myopic gaze in the earlier literature of Flaubert, Baron diverges from previous attempts to attribute this viewpoint to the “zoom-in” of film.

Baron switches tactics for the article’s second section, “Photography,” in which she provides evidence not just for Flaubert and Joyce’s preoccupations with the developing technology of the photograph but for both authors’ ultimate dismissal of its artistic merit. After citing Flaubert’s letters, in which he clearly articulates his contempt for the “mechanical process”(695) of the photograph compared to the vividness of the original, Baron points out that Joyce – whether or not he was aware of Flaubert’s views on photography – held a similar view that the photograph, however useful it might be, was “not a work of art”(695). Baron suggests that, for both of these authors (although especially Joyce), the issue in question was the stasis inherent in the photograph, using as evidence numerous moments in Ulysses in which the presence of photography seems to pause or interrupt the motion of a scene. References to the mutoscope – a kind of early motion picture device – as well as to screens in Ulysses function as a kind of history of the image that moves towards Baron’s final topic: cinema.

In this last and longest section of the article, Baron argues that many of the narrative techniques popularized by Flaubert (such as the fade-to-black, or the misdirecting image cut), due to their focus on the visual, lent themselves naturally to the techniques of early cinema. Rather than just representing an investment of the narration/camera in a focal character, however, Baron suggests this perspective can also create “estrangement of the narrator from his character”(704) important to both Flaubert and Joyce’s narrative styles. Therefore, Baron concludes that Joyce’s conscious and repeated use of cinematographic techniques in the narrative of Ulysses does not necessarily stem from the influence of cinema alone, but from a preoccupation with techniques of seeing – and with potential alienation from these techniques – that originates with his literary predecessors.

Forms

organ, organisation, organise, organiser, streetorgan, mouthorgan, organgrinder, organism, organic, organtoned, stillorgan

Related Terms

Flesh, Host

Explication

In Ulysses, the word organ takes on many different meanings, from musical, to scientific, to sexual, with the ambiguity between these meanings highlighting the blurring between the bodily and the artistic/spiritual in the novel. Most often, an organ in Ulysses is a musical instrument, typically associated with the church but also, as a mouthorgan or streetorgan, smaller devices whose notes play across the streets of Dublin. While often mentioned, these instruments are usually heard in passing – as in the “two shrill voices, a mouthorgan” that echo through the hallways of the telegraph – or reduced to the object of Bloom’s thoughts, as with the “Who has the organ here I wonder?(5.395) in “Lotus Eaters”. Indeed, Bloom thinks about church organs several times: “saint Werburgh’s lovely old organ“(6.609-610), the “organ in Gardiner street”(11.1197), “the pealing anthem of the organ“(13.282).

An organ is also, however, a specialized structure of flesh: the very first sentence about Leopold Bloom in Ulysses characterizes him as someone who “ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls”(4.1). This is also the book’s first use of the word organ, here in its most fleshly sense as “a part of an animal or plant body that serves a particular physiological function”(OED). Far from musical or holy, this reference instead suggests Bloom’s perhaps unusual frankness about the physicality of the body. The dissonance between these two definitions of the word – the physical and the musical – suggests that any unity might lie in the more abstract meaning of an organ.

At various points in Ulysses, we see this definition of the organ abstracted to refer to other forms of arrangement and assembly. As each organ in a body serves its function, the Telegraph operates as a “GREAT DAILY ORGAN“(7.84) and The Irish Independent is “for the old woman of prince’s street […] the subsidized organ“(12.218-219), furthering a metaphor of a kind of body politic in which the periodical serves the function of a voicebox. Yet more abstractly, any kind of arranging can be referred to as organising, which in Ulysses most often refers to Boylan, the “organiser” of Molly’s concert tour.

This notion of Boylan as one who “organises” Molly highlights how the interplay of the divine/spiritual and the biological as two ways of structuring bodies within Ulysses also carries a sexual charge, wherein even the talk of organs and organizing in all its definitions discussed above hints at another, hidden organ: the penis. When Simon Dedalus, for example, declares that Ben Dollard will “burst the tympanum of her ear […] with an organ like yours”(11.536-537) he refers not only to Dollard’s baritone voice breaking eardrums but to a deflowering, as emphasized by Father Cowley’s added joke: “not to mention another membrane”(11.540). Similarly, Bloom’s reference to Boylan as Molly’s organiser hints at his awareness of the sexual infidelity occurring. The obsession in Ulysses with organs, therefore, is indicative of Bloom’s fixation not just on religion or guts, but also on the shame and anxieties about sexuality that are perhaps most visible in “Circe”.

Definitions and Examples

I. Organ, n. (OED n.1 2a) A musical instrument (usually large) consisting of a number of pipes, supplied with compressed air, sounded by keys, which on being pressed down let air into the pipes by opening valves.

“Not going to be any music. Pity. Who has the organ here I wonder? Old Glynn he knew how to make that instrument talk, the vibrato: fifty pounds a year they say he had in Gardiner street”(5.394-397)

II. Organ, n. (OED n.1 3a) With distinguishing word. Any of various instruments resembling an organ in sound or construction. See also barrel organ n., hand organ n., mouth organ n. 1b.

“The noise of two shrill voices, a mouthorgan, echoed in the bare hallway from the newsboys squatted on the doorsteps”(7.425-426)

III. Organ, n. (OED n.1 5c)  A periodical which serves as the mouthpiece of a particular political party, cause, movement, etc.

“HOW A GREAT DAILY ORGAN IS TURNED OUT”(7.84)

IV. Organ, n. (OED n.1 7a) A part of an animal or plant body that serves a particular physiological function

“Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls”(4.1-2)

V. Organ, n. (OED n.1 8) The human organs of speech; the human voice.

“Sure, you’d burst the tympanum of her ear, man, Mr Dedalus said through smoke aroma, with an organ like yours”(11.536-537)

VI. Organ, n. (OED n.1 10)  The penis.

“The distinguished scientist Herr Professor Luitpold Blumenduft tendered medical evidence to the effect that the instantaneous fracture of the cervical vertebrae and consequent scission of the spinal cord would, according to the best approved tradition of medical science, be calculated to inevitably produce in the human subject a violent ganglionic stimulus of the nerve centres of the genital apparatus, thereby causing the elastic pores of the corpora cavernosa to rapidly dilate in such a way as to instantaneously facilitate the flow of blood to that part of the human anatomy known as the penis or male organ resulting in the phenomenon which has been denominated by the faculty a morbid upwards and outwards philoprogenitive erection in articulo mortis per diminutionem capitis”(12.468-478)

VII. Organise, v. (OED v. 2d-e) To make arrangements or preparations for.

“—My wife? says Bloom. She’s singing, yes. I think it will be a success too. He’s an excellent man to organise. Excellent”(12.994-995)

VIII. Organisation, n. (OED n. 4a) An organized body of people with a particular purpose.

“How long since your last mass? Glorious and immaculate virgin. Joseph, her spouse. Peter and Paul. More interesting if you understood what it was all about. Wonderful organisation certainly, goes like clockwork. Confession. Everyone wants to”(5.421-425)

IX. Organism, n. (OED n. 3a) An individual animal, plant, or single-celled life form.

“His project, as he went on to expound, was to withdraw from the round of idle pleasures such as form the chief business of sir Fopling Popinjay and sir Milksop Quidnunc in town and to devote himself to the noblest task for which our bodily organism has been framed”(14.650-654)

Related Topics

Bodies, Music, Medicine, Science, Politics & Media

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.

Forms

organ, organisation, organise, organiser, streetorgan, mouthorgan, organgrinder, organism, organic, organtoned, stillorgan

Related Terms

Flesh, Host

Explication

In Ulysses, the word organ takes on many different meanings, from musical, to scientific, to sexual, with the ambiguity between these meanings highlighting the blurring between the bodily and the artistic/spiritual in the novel. Most often, an organ in Ulysses is a musical instrument, typically associated with the church but also, as a mouthorgan or streetorgan, smaller devices whose notes play across the streets of Dublin. While often mentioned, these instruments are usually heard in passing – as in the “two shrill voices, a mouthorgan” that echo through the hallways of the telegraph – or reduced to the object of Bloom’s thoughts, as with the “Who has the organ here I wonder?(5.395) in “Lotus Eaters”. Indeed, Bloom thinks about church organs several times: “saint Werburgh’s lovely old organ“, the “organ in Gardiner street”, “the pealing anthem of the organ“.

An organ is also, however, a specialized structure of flesh: the very first sentence about Leopold Bloom in Ulysses characterizes him as someone who “ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls”(4.1). This is also the book’s first use of the word organ, here in its most fleshly sense as “a part of an animal or plant body that serves a particular physiological function”(OED). Far from musical or holy, this reference instead suggests Bloom’s perhaps unusual frankness about the physicality of the body. The dissonance between these two definitions of the word – the physical and the musical – suggests that any unity might lie in the more abstract meaning of an organ.

At various points in Ulysses, we see this definition of the organ abstracted to refer to other forms of arrangement and assembly. As each organ in a body serves its function, the Telegraph operates as a “GREAT DAILY ORGAN“(7.84) and The Irish Independent is “for the old woman of prince’s street […] the subsidized organ“(12.218-219), furthering a metaphor of a kind of body politic in which the periodical serves the function of a voicebox. Yet more abstractly, any kind of arranging can be referred to as organising, which in Ulysses most often refers to Boylan, the “organiser” of Molly’s concert tour.

This notion of Boylan as one who “organises” Molly highlights how the interplay of the divine/spiritual and the biological as two ways of structuring bodies within Ulysses also carries a sexual charge, wherein even the talk of organs and organizing in all its definitions discussed above hints at another, hidden organ: the penis. When Simon Dedalus, for example, declares that Ben Dollard will “burst the tympanum of her ear […] with an organ like yours”(11.536-537) he refers not only to Dollard’s baritone voice breaking eardrums but to a deflowering, as emphasized by Father Cowley’s added joke: “not to mention another membrane”(11.540). Similarly, Bloom’s reference to Boylan as Molly’s organiser hints at his awareness of the sexual infidelity occurring. The obsession in Ulysses with organs, therefore, is indicative of Bloom’s fixation not just on religion or guts, but also on the shame and anxieties about sexuality that are perhaps most visible in “Circe”.

Definitions and Examples

I. Organ, n. (OED n.1 2a) A musical instrument (usually large) consisting of a number of pipes, supplied with compressed air, sounded by keys, which on being pressed down let air into the pipes by opening valves.

“Not going to be any music. Pity. Who has the organ here I wonder? Old Glynn he knew how to make that instrument talk, the vibrato: fifty pounds a year they say he had in Gardiner street”(5.394-397)

II. Organ, n. (OED n.1 3a) With distinguishing word. Any of various instruments resembling an organ in sound or construction. See also barrel organ n., hand organ n., mouth organ n. 1b.

“The noise of two shrill voices, a mouthorgan, echoed in the bare hallway from the newsboys squatted on the doorsteps”(7.425-426)

III. Organ, n. (OED n.1 5c)  A periodical which serves as the mouthpiece of a particular political party, cause, movement, etc.

“HOW A GREAT DAILY ORGAN IS TURNED OUT”(7.84)

IV. Organ, n. (OED n.1 7a) A part of an animal or plant body that serves a particular physiological function

“Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls”(4.1-2)

V. Organ, n. (OED n.1 8) The human organs of speech; the human voice.

“Sure, you’d burst the tympanum of her ear, man, Mr Dedalus said through smoke aroma, with an organ like yours”(11.536-537)

VI. Organ, n. (OED n.1 10)  The penis.

“The distinguished scientist Herr Professor Luitpold Blumenduft tendered medical evidence to the effect that the instantaneous fracture of the cervical vertebrae and consequent scission of the spinal cord would, according to the best approved tradition of medical science, be calculated to inevitably produce in the human subject a violent ganglionic stimulus of the nerve centres of the genital apparatus, thereby causing the elastic pores of the corpora cavernosa to rapidly dilate in such a way as to instantaneously facilitate the flow of blood to that part of the human anatomy known as the penis or male organ resulting in the phenomenon which has been denominated by the faculty a morbid upwards and outwards philoprogenitive erection in articulo mortis per diminutionem capitis”(12.468-478)

VII. Organise, v. (OED v. 2d-e) To make arrangements or preparations for.

“—My wife? says Bloom. She’s singing, yes. I think it will be a success too. He’s an excellent man to organise. Excellent”(12.994-995)

VIII. Organisation, n. (OED n. 4a) An organized body of people with a particular purpose.

“How long since your last mass? Glorious and immaculate virgin. Joseph, her spouse. Peter and Paul. More interesting if you understood what it was all about. Wonderful organisation certainly, goes like clockwork. Confession. Everyone wants to”(5.421-425)

IX. Organism, n. (OED n. 3a) An individual animal, plant, or single-celled life form.

“His project, as he went on to expound, was to withdraw from the round of idle pleasures such as form the chief business of sir Fopling Popinjay and sir Milksop Quidnunc in town and to devote himself to the noblest task for which our bodily organism has been framed”(14.650-654)

Related Topics

Bodies, Music, Medicine, Science, Politics & Media

With the shift in “Penelope” away from Bloom’s familiar perspective and into Molly’s voice, one of the things I noticed most clearly was the different portrayal of sexuality. Bloom, even in his sexual fantasies, doesn’t actually have sex – when he thinks about sex at all, it’s to reminisce on how long it’s been since he last had “complete” intercourse with Molly, or to gain erotic pleasure from the act of looking at women’s bodies without even the prospect of actually touching them. Molly, by contrast, spends considerable time frankly considering the bodily realities of sexuality, whether it be Boylan’s “big red brute of a thing”(18.144), Bloom’s “tremendous amount of spunk”(18.154) compared to Boylan, or how she suspects Boylan’s “poking and rooting and ploughing he had up in me”(18.1106) has brought on her period.

In a way, Molly’s sexuality brings attention by contrast to the perverseness of Bloom’s own mode of sexuality, in which the desire to touch women sexually has been supplanted by the desire to observe and assess their bodies and garments. Early in the episode, Molly comments derisively on Bloom’s underwear fetishism: “of course hes mad on the subject of drawers thats plain to be seen”(18.289). She relates a story in which he begs her to cut off a piece of her undergarments for him to carry with him, and another anecdote in which he begs for a peek under her petticoat. Notably, this seems to take the place of any other sexual initiative – it is in this episode that we realize that the lack of sexual intercourse between Bloom and Molly may in fact be Bloom’s fault, as Molly comes up with a scheme to confront Bloom once and for all about her adultery and see if it will get him to finally make a sexual advance.

The way that photography is talked about in this episode particularly exemplifies the way in which the sexual image or object supersedes sex itself for Bloom. We learn, for example, that after losing a job he suggested to Molly that she pose for nude photos for money (18.560-561) and that there are certain “Photo Bits” that Bloom keeps by the outhouse and which Molly must prevent him from selling (18.601-604). Perhaps most curiously, Molly wonders whether Milly’s sending away – to study photography, her status as “photo girl” thus carrying the dual meaning of photographer and photographed – was related to her impending infidelity with Boylan: “on account of me and Boylan thats why he did it”(18.1108-1110). Sending her away not only prevents Milly from incidentally witnessing the affair, of course, but also facilitates its happening by removing the only other person in the house during the day who might get in the way of such meetings.

While there’s certainly a lot to discuss regarding sexuality and gender in terms of the scene in which Bello/a dominates a feminized Bloom, I’d like to focus on the use of animal imagery in that scene.

Most consistent is Bloom’s transformation into some kind of hog within this sequence. Bloom “sinks on all fours, grunting, snuffling, rooting at [Bello’s] feet”(15.2851-2852) after a shout of “Truffles!” in reference to the act of a hog rooting for truffles in the earth. Throughout the scene, Bloom squeals, bleats, and crawls under a table. Aside from the most obvious meaning of this animality as the ultimate form of subhuman subjugation, there also seems to be a reference here to the pig’s feet that Bloom carries in his pocket earlier in the episode, and even to the pork kidney that he eats in Episode 4. The reference is at the same time a nod to Bloom’s perceived lapse in Judaism – in not keeping Kosher – and to the “piggishness” of his unrestrained gustatory and, especially, sexual appetites.

Bello, however, is also given animal characteristics within this fantasy. Even before Bloom’s newfound piggishness is introduced, Bello’s foot is transformed into a “plump buskined hoof”(15.2810) which speaks to Bloom directly, and later he develops “purple gills”(15.2857). These references seem harder to pin down, given their vagueness of species, although they might be expressions more of a fleshly monstrosity than any particular animal. Despite this, however, it is only parts of Bello’s body that become inhuman in this way, as opposed to Bloom, who seems wholly transformed in shape and behavior.

We could talk about the role of sex in the first half of “Circe” for an entire class and still barely scratch the surface, given how central it is in the episode, so for this post I’d like to talk about one specific aspect of how sexuality manifests in this section of Ulysses. Particularly through Bloom’s thoughts and hallucinations, we see in this episode a fixation on sexual guilt, sinfulness, and virginity.

In contrast to Bloom’s comparatively brazen act of masturbation in “Nausicaa,” the action of “Circe” is so broken up by Bloom’s hallucinatory bursts of sexual guilt that at times many pages pass between lines of dialogue or basic actions as we descend into Bloom’s thoughts of persecution. Despite Bloom’s own ambiguous religious status, the only redemption from the punishment/pleasure of these fantasies comes in his “stump speech” hallucination, when he imagines himself declared leader by a variety of bishops who declare “God save Leopold the First!”(15.1472-1473). While I’m not entirely sure how to articulate the religious aspect of Bloom’s sense of shame, I hope to mention it in my full blog post. Perhaps the most explicit merging of religion and sex comes later in the episode, when Zoe mentions a priest who purchased her services at some point in the past, and tried “to do his bit of business with his coat buttoned up”(15.2541-2542) to hide his priest’s collar.

In particular, the theme of (female) virginity comes up several times in this section. Nagging at Bloom as he enters the red light district is “The Bawd” who offers him “ten shillings a maidenhead. Fresh thing was never touched. Fifteen”(15.359), evoking a memory of the similarly youthful Gerty MacDowell, who seems to accuse Bloom of taking her virginity, torn between saying “You did that. I hate you.”(15.375-376) one second and “I love you for doing that to me”(15.385) the next. Later, we see, in a vulgar retelling of Christ’s birth, an echo of an earlier joke about Ben Dollard’s voice bursting an eardrum: “Panther, the Roman centurion, polluted her with his genitories. [..] Messiah! He burst her tympanum”(15.2599-2602).

Forms

organ, organisation, organise, organiser, streetorgan, mouthorgan, organgrinder, organism, organic, organtoned, stillorgan

Related Terms

Flesh, Host

Explication

In Ulysses, the word organ takes on many different meanings, from musical, to scientific, to sexual, with the ambiguity between these meanings highlighting the blurring between the bodily and the artistic/spiritual in the novel. The very first sentence about Leopold Bloom in Ulysses characterizes him as someone who “ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls”(4.1). This is also the book’s first occurrence of the word organ, here in its most fleshly sense as “a part of an animal or plant body that serves a particular physiological function”(OED).

Definitions and Examples

I. Organ, n. (OED n.1 2a) A musical instrument (usually large) consisting of a number of pipes, supplied with compressed air, sounded by keys, which on being pressed down let air into the pipes by opening valves.

“Not going to be any music. Pity. Who has the organ here I wonder? Old Glynn he knew how to make that instrument talk, the vibrato: fifty pounds a year they say he had in Gardiner street”(5.394-397)

II. Organ, n. (OED n.1 3a) With distinguishing word. Any of various instruments resembling an organ in sound or construction. See also barrel organ n., hand organ n., mouth organ n. 1b.

“The noise of two shrill voices, a mouthorgan, echoed in the bare hallway from the newsboys squatted on the doorsteps”(7.425-426)

III. Organ, n. (OED n.1 5c)  A periodical which serves as the mouthpiece of a particular political party, cause, movement, etc.

“HOW A GREAT DAILY ORGAN IS TURNED OUT”(7.84)

IV. Organ, n. (OED n.1 7a) A part of an animal or plant body that serves a particular physiological function

“Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls”(4.1-2)

V. Organ, n. (OED n.1 8) The human organs of speech; the human voice.

“Sure, you’d burst the tympanum of her ear, man, Mr Dedalus said through smoke aroma, with an organ like yours”(11.536-537)

VI. Organ, n. (OED n.1 10)  The penis.

“The distinguished scientist Herr Professor Luitpold Blumenduft tendered medical evidence to the effect that the instantaneous fracture of the cervical vertebrae and consequent scission of the spinal cord would, according to the best approved tradition of medical science, be calculated to inevitably produce in the human subject a violent ganglionic stimulus of the nerve centres of the genital apparatus, thereby causing the elastic pores of the corpora cavernosa to rapidly dilate in such a way as to instantaneously facilitate the flow of blood to that part of the human anatomy known as the penis or male organ resulting in the phenomenon which has been denominated by the faculty a morbid upwards and outwards philoprogenitive erection in articulo mortis per diminutionem capitis”(12.468-478)

VII. Organise, v. (OED v. 2d-e) To make arrangements or preparations for.

“—My wife? says Bloom. She’s singing, yes. I think it will be a success too. He’s an excellent man to organise. Excellent”(12.994-995)

VIII. Organisation, n. (OED n. 4a) An organized body of people with a particular purpose.

“How long since your last mass? Glorious and immaculate virgin. Joseph, her spouse. Peter and Paul. More interesting if you understood what it was all about. Wonderful organisation certainly, goes like clockwork. Confession. Everyone wants to”(5.421-425)

IX. Organism, n. (OED n. 3a) An individual animal, plant, or single-celled life form.

“His project, as he went on to expound, was to withdraw from the round of idle pleasures such as form the chief business of sir Fopling Popinjay and sir Milksop Quidnunc in town and to devote himself to the noblest task for which our bodily organism has been framed”(14.650-654)

X. Organic, adj. (OED adj. 2b) Having the characteristics of a living organism

Related Topics

Bodies, Music, Medicine, Science, Politics & Media

These last two episodes – “Nausicaa” most obviously, though it is far from the only example in the book – provide a lot of excellent examples to talk about the ways in which Ulysses connects sexuality and womanhood with male spectatorship.

“Nausicaa,” as an episode, centers around a sex scene that takes place entirely through the relationship of watcher/watched, in which both parties’ gratification is inextricably linked to their roles in that particular dyad. Throughout the first half of the episode, for example, we see Gerty drawing sexual gratification from moments when she is less closely under the observation of Cissy and Edy and focuses instead on Bloom’s gaze. Take, for example, this passage:

“She could almost see the swift answering flash of admiration in his eyes that set her tingling in every nerve. She put on her had so that she could see from underneath the brim and swung her buckled shoe faster for her breath caught as she caught the expression in his eyes. He was eyeing her as a snake eyes its prey”(13.513-517).

The repetition of “eye” and “see” in this passage, and throughout the episode as Gerty increasingly performs a sort of not-quite-striptease for Bloom, creates a version of female sexuality that is created through the act of being on display, that can only be brought into existence through the voyeur’s gaze. Curiously, the episode seems to stress that it is not just the presence of this masculine voyeur but the absence of feminine oversight that produces this sexuality: the episode’s moment of extended orgasm begins at the moment when Gerty realizes that Cissy and Edy have gone on without her, that “at last they were left alone without the others to pry and pass remarks”(13.692-693).

In the second half of the episode, as Bloom’s perspective enters the narrative, we see the flipside of this equation. Shortly after Bloom’s perspective first appears – with Gerty’s moment of orgasm forming a kind of dividing line through the episode – he thinks the following: “No. She’s lame! O! […] Jilted beauty. A defect is ten times worse in a woman. But makes them polite. Glad I didn’t know it when she was on show”(13.771-776). The masculine eye serves a regulatory function here, judging Gerty for her perceived disability and implicitly for its concealment even when she was “on show”. Later, he thinks about Gerty’s observation of him, briefly inverting the voyeur-object relationship: “Fine eyes she had, clear. It’s the white of the eye brings that out not so much the pupil. Did she know what I? Course”(13.906-908). Bloom’s realization that Gerty most likely saw and noticed him masturbating occurs only after the deed is done, however – a perhaps significant detail.

“Nausicaa,” however, is far from the only episode of Ulysses in which we see the connection between observation and sexuality. The moment between Miss Kennedy and Miss Douce at the start of Episode 11, for example (which we already discussed in class), or the way that men talk about women when they are vs. aren’t in the room in “Oxen of the Sun” , all seem to illustrate different aspects of an interrelationship between spectatorship, (homo)sociality, and sexuality at play throughout Ulysses.

As someone who wrote about the allusions to Oscar Wilde in the Telemachiad for my first blog post, I would like to explore the resurgence of the Wilde references (which were absent in episodes 4-8) in “Scylla and Charybdis,” which also alludes to homosexuality much more directly than previous episodes, particularly as an accusation directed at Bloom. It appears that the pattern of these references is that of a kind of recurrent anxiety, something that intrudes into characters’ thoughts or speech regularly but vanishes just as quickly, nagging and yet marginal.

What is particularly interesting is that while it isn’t particularly unusual to see Oscar Wilde’s work being referenced among a group of Irish artists in this time period (he was hardly an obscure figure!), what is interesting is that a book like Ulysses, so fixated on sexuality and death, would allude to his imprisonment and (in 1900, only 4 years before the novel is set) early death only subtly, even as the same episode probes the life of William Shakespeare for sexual secrets. Mr. Best’s effusive but vague praise of The Portrait of Mr. W.H. – the primary Wilde reference of the chapter – makes no note of Wilde’s biography, but we do see the jarring reference to “love that dare not speak it’s name” from Episode 3 joined by two more repetitions here, at 9.659 and 9.852. Each time, the thought is gone as soon as it arises – in the former instance, the suggestion that Shakespeare “as an Englishman […] loved a lord”(9.660-661) seems to merit no serious consideration, and the latter instance is as but one in a list of aberrations, the “incests and bestialities”(9.851) overshadowing the monstrous nature of paternity. The use of the phrase “love that dare not speak its name” ties these allusions to Wilde – the first repetition in Episode 3 did so directly, as “Wilde’s love that dare not speak its name”, but the way that Ulysses shies away from these connections as soon as it makes them strikes me as peculiar.

I’d also like to bring up another aspect of Stephen’s thoughts that we see in Episode 9 as well as in Episode 3: the regular, brief irruption of memories of his friend Cranly into seemingly otherwise unrelated lines of thought. We have, for example, the “Smile. Smile Cranly’s smile”(9.21) wedged between a tease and a raunchy lyric, and the cryptic memory of “Cranly, I his mute orderly, following battles from afar”(9.136). Although these flashes of memory are not particularly unusual in their content, what is unusual is the refusal of Stephen to pursue them. As much as it may seem a reach, I would like to suggest that this represents anxiety about the friendship’s potentially homoerotic implications, based upon these cryptic lines from Episode 3, which insinuate much and confirm very little: “Staunch friend, a brother soul: Wilde’s love that dare not speak its name. His arm: Cranly’s arm.”(3.450-451).

The only places in this part of Ulysses where the text does not seem to shy away from the concept of homosexuality are the two moments in which Mulligan, glimpsing Bloom, suggests mockingly to Stephen that Bloom is “Greeker than the Greeks”(9.614) and that Stephen ought to watch out. Here, the taunt becomes intermingled not only with antisemitism – Mulligan openly calls Bloom a “sheeny” and asks “What’s his name? Ikey Moses?”(9.607) – but with the theme of Bloom’s sexual incompetence more broadly. The insult against his heterosexuality becomes one of many attacks on Bloom’s masculinity within the novel. I’m curious to look into what other scholars have written on how Joyce deals with (or rather, avoids dealing with) the concept of homosexuality within Ulysses, and how heterosexuality factors in to the novel’s concept of masculinity.