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“my precious One everything
connected with your glorious Body”:
Molly Bloom’s Grotesque Body
「心肝寶貝兒所有事都與妳的玉體習習相關」:
論莫莉的怪誕身體
周幸君，中興大學外文系©版權所有
Abstract
In terms of Bakhtin’s
concept of the grotesque, this paper explores Molly Bloom’s
bisexual writing in her body. Characterized by openness and
nonconformity, the Bakhtinian grotesque body serves to achieve
regeneration and prevent closure, physically, culturally, and
textually. It is a manifestation of dialogism, incorporating
heteroglossia into itself, mediating between conflicts, and
transforming conflicts into creative power. As the embodiment of
“the principle of sexuality,” Molly shows great interest in the
human body, and her thoughts and actions tend toward the
grotesque. By discursive assimilation and reaccentuation, Molly
turns the authoritative discourse into the internally persuasive
discourse, and in so doing transforms canonical, stifling
ideology into something new and liberating. She is essentially
an androgyny, and reveals in her text an inclination toward
novelization: she transcribes the external body, via her sexual
body, into the textual body which is “Penelope.” This process of
novelization helps Molly to achieve colonial resistance and
postcolonial reconstruction. Bisexually written by a
marginalized female inside and outside colonial authority, her
text stages incorporation and regeneration as a way through to a
potential reconstruction of the postcolonial nation in the act
of becoming.
Key words: James Joyce,
Mikhail Bakhtin, Molly Bloom, grotesque body, bisexual writing
As the character having
the last word of Ulysses, Molly Bloom plays a pivotal and
necessary part in the performance on 16 June 1904. The
“Penelope” episode, according to Joyce, “is the clou of the
book,” “being written through [Molly’s] thoughts and body Poldy
being then asleep” (Selected Letters 285, 274). Joyce
leaves the last word to Molly and assigns her the clou of
the novel because, as Daniel R. Schwarz suggests, the
presentation of her perspective is crucial in terms of the
novel’s thematic significance:
For Molly is the necessary
ingredient . . . necessary for [Joyce] to complete the novel
that is at once the story of how he moved beyond the limitations
of his younger self, represented by Stephen; the anatomy of
modern Ireland with its unlikely Jewish hero, Bloom; the
discovery of the essential patterns which unite the major epochs
of European civilization; and the epic of the body, epitomized
by Molly. (258)
To put it in Bakhtinian
words, Molly acts as an answerable author, who responds to the
solipsistic Stephen Dedalus’s dilemma over father’s law and
mother’s love, to the sociocultural outsider Leopold Bloom’s
attempt to construct a habitable home in hostile Dublin, to the
imperial patterns of domination and subjection characteristic of
European civilization, and to the asceticism and misogyny of
Christian tradition that exalts the spiritual and debases the
physical. In this respect, Molly is complementary to Stephen and
Bloom, her answerability completing the trialogue of Ulysses
which is simultaneously the novelized epic of the body, of the
Irish and the Jewish people, and of the postcolonial nation in
the act of becoming. Her writing is therefore a text of national
manifestation for/of the uncreated new Ireland. Borrowing
Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the grotesque, this paper attempts
to investigate Molly’s sexual/textual body, and examine its
connection with Joyce’s conceptualization of nationalism. Due to
its Bakhtinian approach and limited length, this paper will
sidestep issues such as the theorization of nationalism and
postcolonialism, the historical context of Ireland, and the
relevancy of Bakhtin to postcolonial discourses.1
As the embodiment of what
Schwarz calls “the principle of sexuality” (264), Molly is
fascinated by the human body: her thoughts are generally related
to the body, both male and female, and are easily turned to
sexuality:
I suppose thats what a
woman is supposed to be there for or He wouldnt have made us the
way He did so attractive to men then if he wants to kiss my
bottom Ill drag open my drawers and bulge it right out in his
face as large as life he can stick his tongue 7 miles up my hole
as hes there my brown part. (U 18.1518-22)
This passage echoes
Bakhtin’s discussion of grotesque realism in Rabelais’s work,
well-known for its celebration of the body which eats, drinks,
digests, defecates, and copulates in exaggerated and bizarre
ways. As the book elaborates on concepts of the body, Bakhtin’s
Rabelais and His World is “a study of the semantics of
the body, the different meanings of the body’s limbs, apertures,
and functions” (Clark and Holquist 299). Naturally, the
“material bodily principle” (RW 18) plays a predominant role in
Bakhtin’s analysis of Rabelais, a principle that fits in well
with Joyce’s epic of the body.2
Carol Shloss points out that Molly is concerned with “a sense of
being that is firmly rooted in the body” (107). This attitude
fully echoes Rabelais’s. Interestingly, Molly, as well as Bloom,
knows about Rabelais: “cant be true a thing like that like some
of those books he brings me the works of Master Francois
Somebody supposed to be a priest about a child born out of her
ear because her bumgut fell out a nice word for any priest to
write” (U 18.487-90). In spite of her dismissal of
Rabelais’s text as a “pretending” that “anybody can see its not
true” (U 18.491-92), Molly’s fascination with the body is
essentially Rabelaisian. If Bloom serves as an example of the
grotesque celebrating the grotesque, Molly countersigns Bloom’s
gesture and affirms this celebration. Together, Bloom and Molly
exemplify Joyce’s new Irish couple, the spokespersons of Joyce’s
new Ireland.3
In Katerina Clark and
Michael Holquist’s paraphrase, Bakhtin identifies “two subtexts”
in Rabelais: carnival and grotesque realism, the former a social
institution, the latter a literary mode. Rabelais and His
World is therefore “a study of how the social and the
literary interact” (299). Indeed, carnival and grotesque realism
are closely related to each other in Bakhtin’s critique of
Rabelais. But for convenience of discussion, I will place my
attention mainly to grotesque realism, since my focus falls on
the body rather than the festival, and the highlight of
grotesque realism is the grotesque body. Convexities and
orifices—the bowels, the genital organs, the anus, the mouth,
etc.—are prominent in the grotesque body, which is dominated by
movements of devouring and discharging, celebrating what Julia
Kristeva calls the abject. It is an unconventional body, the
exaltation of which signifies an act of nonconformity.
Nonconformity, in fact, typifies Rabelaisian grotesque realism
and characterizes Molly as a new female figure. Her
contradictions—e.g., aspiring after colonial display yet
despising war, asserting her femininity yet resenting
housework—could be considered an act of nonconformity: she
consumes but refuses to succumb to any ready-made ideology,
whether patriarchal, imperial, or commercial. As Joseph
Heininger observes, both Gerty and Molly participate in the
“advertising rituals of English commodity culture,” but while
Gerty is obviously defined and contained by them, Molly is not;
and whilst Gerty internalizes the “inculturated attitudes of
female timidity and shame,” Molly explicitly rejects them (169).
Molly’s interest in the body and sexuality, above all, speaks
for her nonconformity that is the essence of the grotesque body.
The grotesque body, as
Bakhtin has it, is based on the principle of degradation, “the
lowering of all that is high, spiritual, ideal, abstract” (Rabelais
and His World 19). It is fundamentally “a transfer to the
material level, to the sphere of earth and body in their
indissoluble unity” (RW 19-20). The Bakhtinian grotesque
body has thus a double implication: the physical body of the
human being and the external body of the earth. Bakhtin argues
for the affinity between fleshly and earthly bodies:
“Degradation here means coming down to earth, the contact with
earth as an element that swallows up and gives birth at the same
time.” To degrade, therefore, is “to bury, to sow, and to kill
simultaneously, in order to bring forth something more and
better” (RW 21). Bloom’s speculation about the function
of corpses in “Hades” echoes Bakhtinian degradation. On the
other hand, to degrade also “means to concern oneself with the
lower stratum of the body, the life of the belly and the
reproductive organs,” and thus “relates to acts of defecation
and copulation, conception, pregnancy, and birth” (RW
21). Accordingly, the purpose of degradation is regeneration. To
put it in a nutshell, with its ambivalent signification,
degradation “has not only a destructive, negative aspect, but
also a regenerating one” (RW 21). It is worthy of note
that Bakhtin refers the material body to “the collective
ancestral body of all the people” rather than “the isolated
biological individual” or “the private, egotistic ‘economic
man’” (RW 19). Bakhtin’s preference for the collective
body with a “cosmic” and an “all-people’s character” (RW 19) is
perhaps politically oriented.4
It might be an overstatement to argue for Bakhtin’s hostile
elimination of individuality, however. Bakhtin’s “collective
ancestral body,” it should be clarified, emphasizes the
communication between bodies rather than collective fusion,
aiming to turn modern egoistic isolation into dialogic contact.
Furthermore, the collective ancestral body is reminiscent of
organic memory, a form of interior dialogue with the past via
bodies.5
Merged with “the people’s vivid awareness of historic
immortality,” the grotesque ancestral body is “interwoven not
only with the cosmic but also with the social, utopian, and
historic theme, and above all with the theme of the change of
epochs and the renewal of culture” (RW 324-25). The
grotesque body, in short, is physical, cosmic, and historical at
the same time, just as Molly’s body is.
As Bakhtin declares, the
grotesque body is open to the world and the future, and aims at
regeneration. Its significance rests on the communication
between bodies, or more specifically, between the human body and
the world, the interactions of which rely on bodily apertures
and convexities—this explains why Rabelaisian images are
exaggerated to an uncanny extent in certain bodily parts.
Bakhtin elaborates on this point:
[T]he grotesque body is
not separated from the rest of the world. It is not a closed,
completed unit; it is unfinished, outgrows itself, transgresses
its own limits. The stress is laid on those parts of the body
that are open to the outside world, that is, the parts through
which the world enters the body or emerges from it, or through
which the body itself goes out to meet the world. This means
that the emphasis is on the apertures or the convexities, or on
various ramifications and offshoots: the open mouth, the genital
organs, the breasts, the phallus, the potbelly, the nose. The
body discloses its essence as a principle of growth which
exceeds its own limits only in copulation, pregnancy,
childbirth, the throes of death, eating, drinking, or
defecation. This is the ever unfinished, ever creating body, the
link in the chain of genetic development, or more correctly
speaking, two links shown at the point where they enter into
each other. (RW 26)
In other words, the
openings and protrusions of the human body function as a bridge
connecting the physical body and the world—or a medium between
self and other. Within bodily convexities and orifices, “the
confines between bodies and between the body and the world are
overcome,” and “an interchange and an interorientation” take
place (RW 317). In the act of eating and drinking, the
world is absorbed into the body and becomes a part of the human
being, whilst defecation and death return the body to earth and
make it a part of the earthly body. Meanwhile, copulation
engenders new life, just as defecation, birth, and death do.
This is an endless cycle, forever renewing itself, “as a field
which has been sown and in which new shoots are preparing to
sprout” (RW 27). To read the abject and obscene in
Ulysses in this light, the motif of renewal—as opposed to
Joycean paralysis—dominates the text: Joyce’s new Irish couple
serve to renew, ideologically at least, the status quo of
paralytic Ireland that abhors the abject and obscene which is
substantially related to the generation of new potential.
Significantly, the
grotesque open body is intrinsically androgynous. Bakhtin does
state that “woman is essentially related to the material bodily
lower stratum” and “is the principle that gives birth” (RW
240). He affirms the female, however, in order to argue against
the ascetic tradition of medieval Christianity so hostile to
women (RW 239-41). Despite his positive attitude toward the
female, Bakhtin, in his analysis of the Rabelaisian world,
focuses on male figures, Gargantua and Pantagruel, both
possessing generating power: Gargantua’s urine “giv[es] birth to
the river Rhone and to seven hundred ships,” and Pantagruel’s
produces “all the warm medicinal springs of France and Italy” (RW
150). Accordingly, it would be problematic to maintain that the
grotesque body “is predominantly gendered as female” (Dentith
83). Open and unlimited, the creatively grotesque body is rather
androgynous: the lengthy quotation above, as Sue Vice notes,
lists “together male and female attributes and activities”
(171). The collective ancestral body, therefore, inclines to
androgyny: traits of both sexes interact in the body, ensuring
the potential for contact and regeneration. As a womanly man and
a manly woman, Bloom and Molly personify the open grotesque body
with an inclination toward renewal and future. For this reason
Molly’s affirmative response to Bloom may act as new guidance to
the construction of a new Ireland.
The sexual body is not
merely analogous to the earthly body; it is also correlative to
the textual body. As Vice remarks, language plays a central role
in grotesque realism (176). Rabelais’s work, after all, is a
written text, in which grotesque realism is transmitted
through language. This fact enables Bakhtin to literally detail
the process of the word’s birth from the body, as when Harlequin
helps a stutterer “deliver the word” (RW 308-9). Aware
that the body celebrated in carnival has been socially
restricted, a fact signaled by restraints on speech (RW
109, 320), Bakhtin comments that grotesque realism, as a
carnivalesque spirit, has to “enter the world of great
literature” in order to achieve “growth and flowering” (RW
96): “with their relation to changing time and their
ambivalence,” grotesque images must “become the means for the
artistic and ideological expression of a mighty awareness of
history and of historic change” (RW 25). In other words,
the sexual body has to transcribe the external body into the
textual body, so that regeneration may be achieved. Molly’s
interior dialogue in “Penelope,” in this respect, is a textual
body conceived by the sexual body’s transcription of—or dialogue
with—the external body.
As Bakhtin incessantly
emphasizes in Rabelais and His World, it is important to
embrace the grotesque as a spirit, despite the decline of the
carnival as a festival. Characterized by openness and
nonconformity, the grotesque body serves to achieve renewal and
prevent closure, physically, culturally, and textually. Simon
Dentith has it that “the grotesque body may be a way of mapping
not only the social and religious hierarchies of medieval and
Renaissance culture, but of mapping gender hierarchies also and
valuations that run through them” (84). A manifestation of
dialogism, the grotesque body incorporates heteroglossia into
itself and mediates between conflicts; it did so in the
Renaissance, and it will probably function likewise in modern
times. To apply this concept to the context of Ireland in 1904
seems appropriate. As Clark and Holquist observe, “The body is a
common metaphor for the state, and xenophobic societies which
are trying to control the behavior of their citizens and keep
them from outside contacts often stress the idea of keeping the
body pure,” and “the carnival tries to overcome this sort of
thing through its celebration of the bodily” (311-12). When
writing about the body/state, Bakhtin probably has Stalinist
Russia in mind, an oppressive state forbidding dialogue with the
outside world. But this may also help to explain Joyce’s
negative attitude toward the concept of a pure Ireland, which
would simply turn into a reproduction of imperial oppression
rather than a new state of liberation—as it is known that more
blood was shed after the independence campaigns. By
proposing the dialogic body of openness, Bakhtin attempts to
introduce a different state, free from xenophobia and
oppression, as Joyce endeavors to compose a new nation of
genuine freedom by writing about the new Irish couple of
hybridity. Interestingly, Bakhtin isolates three “political
villains” that threatened “the cultural climate” at Rabelais’s
time: the bourgeoisie, the Holy Roman Empire, and the Roman
Catholic Church (Clark and Holquist 314-15). These villains
coincide with Joyce’s: the paralyzed Irish bourgeoisie, the
coercive British Empire, and the oppressive Roman Catholic
Church. Whether Rabelais’s or Joyce’s, all these political
forces reinforce a state of closure: communally, culturally, and
sexually. Bakhtin thus insists that only the grotesque body,
understood metaphorically as a spirit, may ideologically break
through the closure and imbue it with potential for change and
new life.
As it is clear in
“Penelope,” Molly’s thoughts and actions tend toward the
grotesque: she is fascinated by sexuality and interested in
bodily convexities and orifices, and she breaks wind and
menstruates in the course of her interior dialogue. More
importantly, she shows an inclination toward novelization: to
turn the outward body, via her fleshly body, into the textual
body which is “Penelope,” by assimilating the grotesque.
Throughout the episode, Molly reveals a longing for textual
communication: “the days like years not a letter from a living
soul except the odd few I posted to myself with bits of paper in
them so bored” (U 18.698-99); “no visitors or post ever
except his cheques or some advertisement” (U 18.715-16);
“I hope hell write me a longer letter the next time if its a
thing he really likes me” (U 18.731-32); “Mulveys was the
first . . . an admirer he signed it I nearly jumped out of my
skin” (U 18.748-62); “I liked him when he sat down to
write the thing out” (U 18.1172-73). Textual
communication for her is associated with sexual contact: “then
writing every morning a letter sometimes twice a day I liked the
way he made love then he knew the way to take a woman . . . then
I wrote the night he kissed my heart at Dolphins barn I couldnt
describe it simply it makes you feel like nothing on earth” (U
18.327-31); “his mad crazy letters my Precious one everything
connected with your glorious Body” (U 18.1176-77).
Meanwhile, the written text serves as a means for bodily
communication, bridging the gap between bodies: “I lent him [a
book] afterwards with Mulveys photo in it so as he see I wasnt
without” (U 18.655-56); “he made me the present of Lord
Byrons poems and the three pairs of gloves so that finished” (U
18.185-86). Many of the male writings Bloom brings her, Molly
muses, fail to interpret woman fairly, whether Rabelais,
pseudo-Aristotle, Daniel Defoe, or popular fictions like Ruby
and Fair Tyrants (U 18.487-92, 1238-43, 657-59,
492-96): “they all write about some woman in their poetry well I
suppose he wont find many like me” (U 18.1333-34).
Molly’s fascination for textuality may resemble Gerty’s
attraction to public romance, and hence she risks falling into
the trap of male representation of the female, as Gerty has.
Critical and resistant, however, Molly is capable of avoiding
the romanticization as evidenced by Gerty, and of creating her
own textuality.
And yet, implicitly at
least, Molly finds herself under the double-bind of sexuality
and textuality, which stimulates her intention to novelize the
external world through her internal body by means of the
grotesque. On the one hand, she is regarded as a sexual object
in the male gaze of, say, Boylan and other male Dubliners, who
align her with sexuality, a mere vehicle for their physical
desire. On the other hand, she is aware that woman as
textualized in male writing can hardly avoid the stereotypical
roles of procreative mother, as in Rabelais and
pseudo-Aristotle, of femme fatale, as in Defoe and
Fair Tyrants, and of helpless victim, as in Ruby. To
put it another way, Molly is torn between the double-bind of
sexuality, imposed by Boylan, and textuality, imposed by
Bloom—since it is Bloom who brings Molly the texts. Bloom, who
fails to make contact with Molly sexually, tries to communicate
with her textually. By bringing her the texts, he does not mean
to impose stereotypes on her, but means to educate her, in the
positive sense of the word: he attempts to convey to her the
message that she, different from conventionally textualized
women, has control over her own body. Undeniably, Bloom runs the
risk of patronizing Molly in his attempt to educate her; but the
sense of patronization is reduced to the minimum as a result of
his treatment of her as an equal human subject. In spite of
Bloom’s intention to make contact with Molly textually, she
finds the communication unsatisfactory, in terms of the
inadequacy of the male texts and Bloom’s insufficiency as a
communicator. As Jeri Johnson notes, Molly “casually dismiss[es]
the traditional male impulse to ‘write women’ into their texts,”
“pronounces Bloom’s proffered reading matter inadequate,” and
suspects “men’s notions of how to write (or write for)
women” (972). While male writings prove to be inadequate in
their representations of women, the way Bloom communicates,
according to Molly, is likewise unsatisfactory: “if I asked him
hed say its from the Greek leave us as wise as we were” (U
18.241-42); “he never can explain a thing simply the way a
body can understand” (U 18.566-67, emphases added).
The insufficiency of male
writings and Bloom’s textual communication propels Molly to
write a text of her own and with her methodology, in the style
of the grotesque. Written through her body, the text merges
sexuality and textuality instead of polarizing them; it is
therefore a text “a body can understand.” As the carnival
mediates between high and low cultures, Molly mediates between
hierarchies of all kinds in her bodily text, bringing taboo into
the authoritative discourse associated with the patriarchal
ideology that characterizes colonialism and nationalism, as
Joyce brings the low (the bodily) into the high (the epic). As
Clair Wills comments: “It is only by bringing the excluded and
carnivalesque into the official realm in a single text that the
concept of public discourse may be altered” (132). Speaking and
degrading male discourse in/via her body, Molly provides a new
textual communication radically distinct from male
representations, a text which is Cixousian-bisexual in nature.
This bisexuality in her text helps Molly eschew the trap of male
representation of the female that typifies the first half of “Nausicaa.”
An advocate of bisexual
writing, H?l?ne Cixous links sexuality to textuality, proposes
“the free play of the signifier,” and endeavors to break open
“the prison-house of patriarchal language” (Moi 107). According
to Cixous, human beings are inherently bisexual, a principle
analogous to writing as such. Men, however, tend to reject the
bisexuality in themselves on account of their fear of the Other
and of castration. As a consequence, bisexual writing is
“overwhelmingly likely to be women’s writing” (Moi 110). For
Cixous, bisexual writing “strive[s] in the direction of
difference, struggle[s] to undermine the dominant
phallogocentric logic, split[s] open the closure of the binary
opposition and revel[s] in the pleasures of open-ended
textuality” (Moi 108).6
To read “Penelope” in this light, Molly’s writing is undoubtedly
bisexual, challenging patriarchal ideology in its search for
freedom, both sexual and textual.
Rather overtly, Molly
shows a tendency toward bisexuality in her interior dialogue,
despite the fact that she is regarded as the reification of
female sexuality under the male gaze: “I could scout it out
straight whistling like a man almost easy” (U
18.1141-42); “I wouldnt mind being a man and get up on a lovely
woman” (U 18.1146-47); “I wished I was one myself for a
change just to try with that thing they have swelling up on you
so hard and at the same time so soft when you touch it” (U
18.1381-83). She is intrinsically a manly woman, the female
counterpart to Bloom the womanly man. Androgynous in sexuality,
Molly reveals in her writing a similar bisexual tendency through
the appropriation of masculine discourse: “Ill let him know if
thats what he wanted that his wife is fucked yes and damn well
fucked too” (U 18.1510-11). Her appropriation of
masculine discourse allows her to speak in a man’s voice and
occupy a male subject position, though only temporarily: she is
able to oscillate between supposedly opposing discourses of the
masculine and the feminine, making them one in her bodily text.
This gesture of bisexual writing transgresses not only gender
boundaries but also bodily spaces as allocated by patriarchy, a
gesture Molly has made, both physically and textually, in the
men’s toilet: “a pity a couple of the Camerons werent there to
see me squatting in the men’s place meadero I tried to draw a
picture of it before I tore it up like a sausage or something” (U
18.556-58). Her drawing of the phallus may suggest her
incorporation of phallocentrism, but by tearing up the drawing
Molly undermines phallocentric ideology. More remarkably, she
feels it “a pity” that her transgressing behavior was not seen
by “a couple of the Camerons,” the soldiers representative of
canonical patriarchy and martial colonialism, who are “always
trying to show it to you . . . as if it was 1 of the 7 wonders
of the world” (U 18.549-52). Sexually, culturally, and
textually, Molly seeks to break open the prison-house of
patriarchal ideology; her oscillation between poles of ideology
speaks for her resistance to the domination of any authority.
But she is more than an ever-oscillating skeptical figure
passively and incessantly denying and criticizing. In fact,
Molly transcends the skeptical oscillation and achieves real
Bakhtinian dialogue by revising masculine discourse and
redefining phallocentric ideology:
my uncle John has a thing
long I heard those cornerboys saying passing the corner of
Marrowbone lane my aunt Mary has a thing hairy because it was
dark and they knew a girl was passing it didnt make me blush why
should it either its only nature and he puts his thing
long into my aunt Marys hairy etcetera and turns out to be you
put the handle in a sweepingbrush. (U 18.1383-88,
emphases added)
Incorporation of and
resistance to phallocentrism are transcended by a deeper
understanding of sexuality as “only nature.” This transcendence
empowers Molly to liberate herself—potentially—from the confines
of patriarchy. Her bisexual writing, which reaccentuates and
transcends binary oppositions, can thus be read as her attempt
to achieve sexual/textual freedom.
In the course of reading
male texts and writing her bisexual text, Molly assimilates and
reaccentuates authoritative discourses and turns them into her
own internally persuasive discourse; and while weaving and
unweaving her textile/text, she gradually affirms Bloom and
rejects Boylan. The adultery, in this respect, plays a crucial
part in her writing: it is in fact the catalyst which motivates
her writing. As an act of sexual transgression, adultery allows
Molly to make contact with Boylan sexually, which enables her to
meditate on what Boylan symbolizes and what she yearns for: she
aspires after both sexual and textual communication. While
Boylan satisfies her sexually, he fails textually. Through the
process of her dialogic contemplation—a process of struggle
between Boylan and Bloom—Molly finally registers Bloom’s offer
of freedom and apprehends his intention of inviting Stephen into
the family. With the trigger of the adultery, she reconsiders
her relationship with Bloom and “write[s] the answer in bed” (U
18.739-40). The bed in the context occupies a double position
because it was purchased in Gibraltar and removed to Ireland,
and thus functions as the connection between the two colonies.
Writing her meditative answer in the suggestive bed with Bloom
sleeping beside her, Molly does not merely assimilate and
reaccentuate; through assimilation and reaccentuation, she also
comprehends the significance of Bloom as her true counterpart,
and hence enters, or suggests the possibility of entering, into
literally genuine dialogue with Bloom. As she remarks at the
near end of the episode: “Ill just give him one more chance” (U
18.1497-98). The indication of the chance she will give Bloom
both implies her registration of the sexual freedom he offers
her, and signifies her final affirmation of the kind of freedom
Bloom stands for and her willingness to be reunited with him.
Clark and Holquist have it that Bakhtin’s “examination of
Rabelaisian license is a dialogic meditation on freedom” (298).
This observation is applicable to Molly’s exploration of bodily
license and Joyce’s survey of Molly’s sexual/textual license.
Implicit in her interior dialogue is a sense of confinement:
from clothes (U 18.251-52, 513-14), in the house (U
18.996), and in Gibraltar (U 18.913-15). In the course of
writing her text, Molly, unconsciously at least, speculates
about new forms of family and nation which will turn restraint
into liberation, achieved through an open, dialogic, and
grotesque body manifested in both sexuality and textuality.
Bakhtin repeatedly stresses the “creative, constructive” nature
of the body as “the most nearly perfect form of the organization
of matter” and “the key to all matter” (RW 366). If “all
features of carnival serve to bring people together in a
community” (Clark and Holquist 302), the community, in the
context of Ulysses, refers to Molly’s grotesque body as
collective ancestral communication. This body is ambivalent:
both affirmative and resistant. Affirmative, Molly’s body
incorporates divergent voices from the outside world, which are
given equal status and are heard without partiality. Resistant,
it brings down the high and official, challenges authority, and
rejects the closure of binary oppositions. Such a feature of
ambivalence displays Molly’s body as creative and regenerative,
not only because dialogic assimilation itself, as a result of
the process of incorporation and reaccentuation, signifies
creation and regeneration, but also because, due to its
openendedness, the bisexual body is capable of constructively
accepting differences and turning passive resistance into active
creation, as demonstrated in Molly’s redefinition of “uncle
Johns long thing and aunt Marys hairy thing.” Ewa Ziarek
explores the relation between the female body and modern
technology, and remarks that the oppositions between technology
and organicism, between the public and the private, suggest “a
promise that the organic female body might be a site of
resistance to the mechanization of public life” (265). In her
body as sexuality and textuality, Molly, like Bloom, resists the
collectivization of public discourse, but it is rather a
bisexually grotesque body than an organic female body—the latter
would simply fall into the binary trap that Molly endeavors to
undermine. It requires a bisexually grotesque body, capable of
affirmation, rejection, and construction, to break open and
mediate between the closures of binary oppositions. As “the key
to all matter,” Molly’s body dialogically assimilates divergent
ideologies, high and low, official and unofficial, positive and
negative; it both passively resists and actively constructs,
composing a text which, prospectively, leads up to
sexual/cultural liberation. This also explains why Joyce makes
Molly the clou of the book: she is the agent for Joyce’s
new nationalism, her searching for sexual/textual freedom
pointing a way to national/cultural liberation.
The reason Molly
represents the agent who promisingly provides Ireland with the
potential for liberation may be attributed to her special status
as both inside and outside, a status initiating the Bakhtinian
excess of seeing essential to the rethinking of colonial
relationships and the construction of a postcolonial new nation.
Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism is particularly useful here on
account of its emphases on “the hybrid element in colonial
discourse” and the role of the Other in self-construction,
helping one to analyze “the complexities of a colonized psyche”
captured “in that median category between the inside/outside,
between competing belief systems” (Bazargan 128). As the
dialogue between self and other forms the basis for the
construction of the self, dialogic assimilation likewise
grounds, ideologically, the construction of the new nation.
Molly is especially apt for this role because she is placed in
an “ambiguous third zone,” one that “vacillates between the
inside and the outside” (Bazargan 122). In her discussion of
Molly’s relation to colonialism, Susan Bazargan elaborates on
Molly’s ambiguous inside/outside position:
The identity of the
colonized, then, in its barest outlines, is shaped by dualistic
forces engendering a divided existence. Molly’s case is made
even more complicated by the fact that she has lived both in
Gibraltar . . . and in Ireland, and has thus internalized
structures of thought and discourse associated with both the
colonizer and the colonized. Reflecting such spatial
dislocations and discrepancies is Molly’s splintered, internally
dialogic language. (121)
As the daughter of a
British officer in Gibraltar, Molly inevitably absorbs “the
dogmas of authority” (Shaffer 146) or Bakhtinian authoritative
discourse, and reveals in her interior dialogue a colonial
aspiration: “if they saw a real officers funeral thatd be
something reversed arms muffled drums the poor horse walking
behind in black” (U 18.1262-64). In association with the
empire, Molly is proud of being a British “soldiers daughter” (U
18.881-82) and of witnessing imperial display in Gibraltar. In
Ireland, however, Molly’s position changes from the
sub-oppressor to the oppressed, from the colonizer to the
colonized, and from the superior to the inferior. This double
position as both inside and outside colonial power allows Molly
to acquire from both sides the advantage of an excess of seeing.
Put together, the excesses make possible the construction of a
tentative wholeness, whether visually or socioculturally.7
To author the self, Bakhtin insists, one needs to assimilate and
reaccentuate language as given, or authoritative discourse, for
the creation of one’s own innerly persuasive discourse. To
construct the new Irish nation, similarly, one has to assimilate
and reaccentuate dominant ideology for the formulation of new
ideology, not to eliminate it altogether, as Molly turns the
obscenity of sexual intercourse—from the patriarchal point of
view—into something as natural as “you put the handle in a
sweepingbrush” (U 18.1388). In a subject position
comprising both colonizer and colonized, Molly can thus sway
between the inside and the outside, see through both sides, and
write a nation incorporative and comprehensive in nature. Also,
her indeterminate rather than Celtic blood, as Schwarz suggests,
“makes her, for Joyce, an appropriate image for the Ireland that
he imagines would be based on internationalist principles and
would acknowledge the variety of the Irish people” (264). This
image justifies Molly’s role as the clou of the book
writing the new postcolonial nation within/through her body.
Significantly, Molly’s
capacity to provide the excess of seeing does not solely lie in
her ambiguous position inside/outside colonial manipulation; her
status as doubly marginalized female in the colony also
bequeaths to her the advantage of seeing through the hypocrisy
of politics dominated by patriarchal ideology. As Shloss notes,
“history has generally bestowed [the political-cultural double
alienation] upon women under colonial rule, where gender has
established yet another mode of dispossession from the political
and cultural arena” (112). To put it another way, the female
colonized fall victim to the double marginalization, destined to
encounter oppression and exploitation by the ruler and by the
male colonized, as witness “Counterparts,” where Ada Farringtion
suffers intimidation from the colonial system and from her
bullied/bullying husband. Unconventional and resistant, Molly
differs from Ada Farrington, who, a paralytic escapist, resorts
to the church for comfort. Notwithstanding this, they share
identical double marginalization which places them at the very
bottom of the social hierarchy, with perhaps only children under
them. This position, however, allows Molly to stand both inside
and outside patriarchal society, since she lives in it and
is excluded from it, and to acquire the advantage of the excess
of seeing. It is true that all the female colonized occupy the
same double position, but Molly distinguishes herself from the
other willingly submissive, oppressed, and paralyzed women in
her refusal to succumb to authority: “but were to be always
chained up theyre not going to be chaining me up no” (U
18.1390-91). Without this awareness of resistance, the status of
double marginalization would provide the female colonized with
nothing. Moreover, Molly’s Gibraltar experience also makes her
different from Ada Farrington and the like, for she, as the
daughter of a British officer, a sub-oppressor, had witnessed
imperial manipulation of power in the colony, and is thus better
informed about colonial ideology. As a consequence, she can see
through the fact that as a marginalized Jew, Bloom is unlikely
to be incorporated into the political arena of Irish
nationalism—a reproduction of British imperialism and
patriarchal ideology—in spite of his enthusiasm: “all the Doyles
said he was going to stand for a member of Parliament O wasnt I
the born fool to believe all his blather about home rule and the
land league” (U 18.1186-88). Conscious of their common
marginalization, she realizes the exclusive nature of
patriarchal ideology, which simply disfranchises the Other of
any political voice.
Occupying the position
inside/outside colonial system and patriarchal society, Molly
dialogizes authoritative discourse, breaks open the closures of
binary oppositions, composes in her body a bisexual text
distinct from masculine writing, and speaks for Joyce’s new
nationalism or cosmopolitanism. Schwarz asserts that “Molly
represents hope for Ireland” (263). This may sound like an
overstatement, but Molly does offer a different way of thinking
and writing the nation. Whether or not “her libidinous
self-renewing energy puts aside the problems of Ireland’s twin
occupation by England and the Roman Catholic Church by implying
that she will survive and transcend them” (Schwarz 263), it is
nevertheless true that Molly survives and transcends
oppressions, and meanwhile resists and revises ready-made
ideologies. The inside/outside position bestows upon Molly the
advantage of seeing from both sides, which accounts in part for
her infamous contradictions—which are in effect more the process
of dialogic construction than the display of inconsistency. The
oscillation between inside and outside is inevitably a bitter
struggle: it is not easy to turn away from the inside position
to be an outsider—this may also account for the contradictions.
But her awareness of the manipulative nature of
colonialism—contradictory to her own temperament—helps her
refuse the colonial incorporation, as she says no to imperial
Boylan, finally and determinedly. Colonialism may be imbricated
in Molly’s writing, but, as Bazargan points out, she makes it
and its “gender-based ramifications” to a considerable extent “a
subject of scrutiny” and of “even mockery,” and it is “the
hybridity, the dialogism, in her language” that empowers Molly
as an agent of colonial resistance (125). Due to the hybridity
in her language, attributed to her hybrid origin and sexuality,
Molly’s text therefore belongs to bisexual writing, written by
an androgynous author who merges sexuality with textuality in
her body. Molly’s history may be “that of the survival of the
modern ego in exile,” but she is not a tragic or sentimental
figure as Bazargan sees her, “suffering from colonial angst, in
perpetual displacement and transition, tracing, writing/seeing
itself (and been seen) in and through the pane/pain of history”
(133). In fact, her sexual/textual writing transforms the
passively suffering modern ego in exile into an actively
constructing author trying to see through the pain of history,
to find a remedy for the nightmarish past, and to renew the
sentimental image of the poor old woman which speaks for
colonial Ireland. Throughout her text, Bakhtinian subversive
laughter replaces tragic sentimentalism, however painful the
nightmare of history may be. It is this laughter of comic
destruction and regeneration that gives vitality to the
stagnancy of paralysis imposed by authority. In this respect,
Molly does represent hope for Joyce’s uncreated new Ireland,
revealed through her affirmative response to Bloom in the
process of her grotesque-bodily writing.
Bibliography
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Holquist and Vadim Liapunov. Austin: U of Texas P, 1990.
---. Rabelais and His World. Trans. Hélène
Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1984.
Bazargan, Susan. “Mapping Gibraltar: Colonialism, Time, and
Narrative in ‘Penelope.’” Pearce 119-38.
Booker, M. Keith. Joyce, Bakhtin, and the Literary Tradition:
Toward a Comparative Cultural Poetics. Ann Arbor: U of
Michigan P, 1997.
Brown, Barry A. et al., eds. Bakhtin and the Nation.
Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2000.
Cixous, Hélène.
“The Laugh of the Medusa.” New French Feminisms. Eds.
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Johnson, Jeri, ed. Ulysses: The 1922 Text. Oxford: Oxford
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Richard Ellmann. London: Faber and Faber, 1975.
---. Ulysses: The Corrected Text. Eds. Hans Walter Gabler,
Wolfhard Steppe, and Claus Melchior. New York: Vintage, 1986.
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Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries. Lincoln: U of
Nerbaska P, 1994
Pearce, Richard, ed. Molly Blooms: A Polylogue on “Penelope”
and Cultural Studies. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1994.
Schwarz, Daniel R. Reading Joyce’s Ulysses. London:
Macmillan, 1987.
Shaffer, Brian W. “Negotiating Self and Culture: Narcissism,
Competing Discourses, and Ideological Becoming in ‘Penelope.’”
Pearce 139-51.
Shloss, Carol. “Molly’s Resistance to the Union: Marriage and
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Vice, Sue. Introducing Bakhtin. Manchester: Manchester
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Wills, Clair. “Upsetting the Public: Carnival, Hysteria and
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Note:
-
For Bakhtin’s applicability to nationalist and
postcolonial discourses, see Barry A. Brown et al., eds,
Bakhtin and the Nation (Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2000).【back】
-
For a comparison between Rabelais and Joyce in terms of
Bakhtinian concepts, see M. Keith Booker, Joyce, Bakhtin, and
Literary Tradition (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
1997), pp. 45-80.【back】
-
For discussion of Bloom’s being grotesque and his
celebration of the grotesque, see Sue Vice, Introducing
Bakhtin (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1997), pp. 156-57. As
this paper focuses on Molly, discussions concerning Bloom will
largely be absent, despite his great significance in relation to
Molly.【back】
-
For details, see Clark and Holquist, Mikhail Bakhtin
(Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1984), pp. 295-320.【back】
-
For details, see Laura Otis, Organic Memory
(Lincoln: University of Nerbaska Press, 1994).【back】
-
For details of Cixous’s argument of bisexual writing, see
“The Laugh of the Medusa,” New French Feminisms, edited
by Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron (Brighton: Harvester,
1980), pp. 245-64.【back】
-
By “the excess of seeing,” Bakhtin refers to the
“concrete, actually experienced horizons” (AA 22) seen by one
person but not by the other. Each person has his/her excess of
seeing as well as lack of seeing: I cannot see my own head,
face, back, or the world behind me, which are only accessible to
the other person’s excess of seeing. To make the vision whole,
the two excesses must be put together. For details, see Bakhtin,
Art and Answerability (Austin: University of Texas Press,
1990).【back】
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