Notes Regarding S&M as Metaphor or...?

Over the past weeks my thoughts have kept returning to this question of sexual deviancy, restlessly, in such a way as that usually means I haven’t got it figured out yet, that I’ve missed something. Rather than press this subject in class (where no one else seems particularly interested) I’ll take advantage of this platform to think out loud with it.
The other day, while taking a walk, my thoughts stumbled into pondering the mythology of the goddess (this was near the equinox). I found I kept having to chide myself for persisting in perverting an otherwise poignant, and far-reaching, concept—that of rebirth, and of personal rebirths embodied in the processes of the Earth at work personified in the Other, as wife or mother, and of the phenomenally expansive healing and challenging power of the feminine temperament or psyche, of submission only in the sense of keeping oneself open to the transformational potential of being in love; submit to nurture, which is to submit to growth, which is to partake within oneself of the processes of rebirth, the defining characteristics of the Mother-Goddess principal. (By coming at it from this direction, I think it’s possible to avoid the easiness of the New Age.) In Ulysses we haven’t reached the chapter where this question of extreme sexual deviancy continually comes to mind—“Circe,” Episode 15, but here, as everywhere, it is essential to note that this is but one aspect coloring an otherwise phantasmagoric many-faced Monster always trotting just out of reach.
Perhaps Joyce is being literal only insofar as he is being playful, a playfulness which renders it the more devastating when considered as metaphor: part of what immobilizes Bloom, and this hearkens back to the sacrament of marriage mentioned in class, is that he gives himself over to what might, tentatively, be called the wrong way to worship (though I am unsure of my terms here and worship probably isn’t what I mean). I am reminded of a conversation had with a minister friend some years ago, in which he pointed out how—for a Christian, at least—foot worship was an example of misdirected prayer, that that energy if refocused in contemplation of Christ led to greater self-actualization (as a Christian) via right ways of worship. I am not a Christian, but I think this can be applied, in a humanistic attitude, to the right and wrong ways of realizing our human potential, to the refocusing of our attentions, and questioning us that we attend to what end?

Lestrygonians

“How can you own water really? It’s always flowing in a stream, never the same, which in the stream of life we trace. Because life is a stream,” (126).
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“Trams passed one another, ingoing, outgoing, clanging. Useless words. Things go on same, day after day: squads of police marching out, back: trams in, out,” (134)
Notice the movement from particular to universal and back. And then, “One born every second somewhere. Other dying (remember the telegram?) every second…Cityful passing away, other cityful coming, passing away too: other coming on, passing on,” (134-5).
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“With ha quiet relief his eyes took note…rest of the year sober as a judge,” (137). Joyce blurs entirely the distinction between first person and narration. This conversion mirrors that of particulars and universals above.
So…
Does this chapter’s stylistic structure follow the structure of flowing water; stream of consciousness; plus content consists in the same; particular/universal deal all flowing the same body.
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“Stuck on the pane two flies buzzed, stuck,” (144). A couple in love reduced to flies stuck on the pane. “No-one is anything…” Again, moving weirdly, transformationally, from particular sort to universal to flies to men to planets, nations; everything reduced to the common motion: eat fuck die—water; connected all.

Proteus

“When one reads these strange pages of one long gone one feels that one is at one with one who once……” (ln. 145-7). This is the dialectic, the Immortal Soul participated in; it’s a part of the fantasy of who we are, of how we conceive ourselves and ourselves to come; hence, the danger in Episode 2 of false histories. “The grainy sand had gone from under his feet. His boots trod again a damp crackling mast, etc.” (ln. 148). And then the sensuous, zooming in and out from history immediate to the immediacy of the visceral moment.

“The foot that beat the ground in tripudium, foot I dislove. But you were delighted when Esther Osvalt’s shoe went on you: girl I knew in Paris,” (ln. 448-50). Ha! Ay, there’s a little Bloom in you yet, boy! Bwa-hahahaha!

“Unfallen Adam rode and not rutted,” (ln. 386); “A side eye at my Hamlet hat…trekking to evening lands,” (ln. 390-3): Is there something between the idea of an unfallen Adam and Odysseus? And Hamlet? An unfallen Adam, perhaps, would be like an Odysseus without an odyssey. Perhaps? A shot in the dark, maybe pushing it a little wide of mark.

Nestor

Chapter 2 is a crushing beginning. In Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, we left Stephen on the precipice of a long and thrilling journey, following a long and tedious tour of his pubescence, warring for identity in the totalitarian enclaves of his Jesuit education, grasping at self-realization in the mythology of his own making, self-actualization in artistry as a vital, vindicating, and viable life path. Now, however, whatever appeared gained in Portrait seems lost in Ulysses—or, at least (at best), in limbo. We find Stephen stuck back where he began, circling the drain. What happened to the “wild heart of life”?
“History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake,” (28). It’s creepy, actually. Stephen’s instructing history; meanwhile, faced by representations of his own tortured school days, perpetually teasing out the echoes of his past.
Joyce sets “Nestor,” and all of Ulysses for that matter, where personal history, national history, and the history of Western Civilization intersect—in the ambiguity of the future’s possibilities.
In a way, I think this is the process by which Joyce is exercising himself of his own history, wiping out the manchild through the work of art as the cathartic process of becoming. Stephen touches upon ministering such self-creative possibilities in the triumphant (though apparently halting) epiphanic climax of Portrait.
Ireland creates itself in its national story as it tells that story to itself; as do we in ours.
Stephen’s like a whipped dog.


(If you've gotten this far, I apologize. I promise to try and make the next few a bit more cohesive.)

Notes on Telemachus

“Out here in the dark with a man I don’t know raving and moaning to himself about shooting a black panther. You saved men from drowning. I’m not a hero, however. If he stays on here I am off,” (4).
This idea of the hero interests me. I feel like Bloom could’ve said the same, at times. “The black panther was himself the ghost of his own father,” (337). The artist’s becoming; he is his own ghost; Telemachus searching for Odysseus, Stephen searching for himself as the mature artist, which is here Bloom to be and in passing, re-passing, and is Joyce; for if Shakespeare played the part of the ghost in the first stagings of Hamlet, then Joyce is the ghost in Ulysses. Bloom’s dead son : Stephen’s dead mother. It’s a book of inversions, where everything tidily collides. Joyce is the ghost of Stephen’s mother, who bore this incarnation from his cerebral womb of himself and his growths; “No, mother! Let me be and let me live,” (9), and so be it; this book releases you.
Ireland the world away, but in a book of inversions the hero’s never left home, his own interiors.

What keeps Ireland stunted?