Smut

Some further thoughts on Ulysses in celebration of Banned Book Week, September 22-28.

Thanks to Patrick Hastings’s excellent guide, I have finished “Nausicaa.” The sexually explicit content of this episode and the concluding “Penelope” episode got the novel banned in the United States and elsewhere in 1921 until it was finally released from contraband prison more than a decade later.

In too many American states, we are seeing a revitalized effort to ban books, particularly in school libraries. My own books wouldn’t pass the test in Florida. I don’t think Ulysses will find a home in most school libraries anytime soon, mostly because it is difficult enough for a grown-ass adult to read, let alone a kid in high school. But it’s too short a political walk from banning books in schools to banning books for all readers. The good news is that banning books only makes them more fascinating and incentivizes dedicated readers to locate them and read them and pass them along to others.

Exhibit A: John Cleland’s Fanny Hill: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, a book that has been banned off and on since publication in 1748. A crumpled mass market paperback edition made the rounds at my all-girls school. A classmate passed the book to me out of view of our teacher, who was busy at the chalkboard, diagramming a sentence from Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre or copying out notable dates from the Civil War. I confess I cannot recall if I was thirteen or fourteen, but somewhere in there. A page of the paperback was folded over and I read it, and, well, wow.

“Pass it on,” whispered my classmate. And I did.

This reading prompted me to do a deep dive of my parents’ bookshelves, where I found Theophile Gauthier’s Mademoiselle de Maupin and Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller. The point being—Moms of Liberty can eliminate sex education classes and banish all the books about straight and gay kids having sex from their school libraries, but whether or not they want their kids to learn about sex they will learn about it. It is a biological imperative.

“Nausicaa,” written in a florid style that echoes the romance novels of Joyce’s era, presents a quandary for a modern reader. Joyce wrote his novel—before our age of political correctness—about a repressed man, in a repressed culture, who hasn’t had sex with his wife Molly since the death of their infant son ten years earlier. After a long and exhausting day, anticipating Molly’s tryst with her concert booking manager, Leopold Bloom takes an evening walk on the Dublin strand, rather than return home to face the uncertainty of his future.

There on the beach, he sees a group of young women, some in charge of toddlers and a baby. One woman, named Gerty MacDowell, is especially lovely and unencumbered with childcare. Lost in her own world of love fantasy, she notices Bloom noticing her and chooses to reveal herself in a way that would have been shocking in 1904. She sees that Bloom is riveted by her face, then her stockinged ankles and gartered calves. Bloom masturbates as discreetly as he can manage. We can agree that his behavior is gross, but by today’s standards, the language is positively coy. Notably, he does not grab her pussy or any other part of her body. She shows him her body, he looks, his dick reacts accordingly, and there are—in two senses—an explosion of fireworks.

Wiser scholars than I have pondered over this episode. Is it smut? Is Gerty being exploited? Is Leopold Bloom a disgusting sex pervert?

There is twenty-something Gerty, who displays her body for the pleasure of a man. She is captivated by her own beauty and the power it gives her. She longs for a kind of wild and perfect romance that cannot exist—either in 1904 Dublin or ours—one in which every day will be filled with joy, and loving embraces, and kisses. She has been preparing herself for this future. She is annoyed by the naughty little boys her friends are looking after, though she hopes to have her own children someday. We who have parented or cared for any toddlers know that Gerty’s children are sure to be just as annoying, at least some of the time.

And then there is Bloom, a man in his late thirties, who is turned on by her display, though he has mixed feelings afterward as he struggles to clean himself up—sex being a messy business, especially when you are formally dressed in a mourning suit, buttoned waistcoat, and dress shirt. He chastises himself for his moral failing. After all, he has a daughter not so much younger than Gerty. And, like many men, he tries to pass the blame for his own choices onto the young woman. He understands that what he has allowed himself to do is unacceptable in the public sphere, but since no one else saw besides Gerty, he hopes there is no permanent harm done. If there’s one theme to take away from Ulysses, it is that there is no black and white in this life, only the gray middle and muddle. A man like Leopold Bloom does his best, most of the time. But daily existence among other humans is hard; we will all inevitably falter and regret some of our choices.

For a young woman in New York City or anywhere, it is impossible to escape male grossness. Men expose themselves on the subway, on the street. At its worst, it is genuinely threatening.

But Joyce is writing about a different sort of encounter, one in which there is a mutual understanding and a whole lot of gray confusion. Having been thwarted in her pursuit of a certain young man, Gerty decides to reassure herself by pleasing another man. Leopold, still struggling with the loss of his son and the collapsed sexual state of his marriage, receives something from Gerty, a kind of gift. Joyce understands how confined women and men were in Catholic Ireland. In my reading, I see the encounter as imbalanced and imperfect but something mutual.

Today, a woman like Gerty might meet a man—at a bar, on a dating app, at a party—and decide to have sex with him just because she wants to and he wants to. And that should be her right. We live in bodies that want to have sex. If we had been made for procreation alone, sex would not be as fun as it can be when two people come together in mutual attraction.

In Ulysses, what happens between Gerty MacDowell and Leopold Bloom involves some kind of unspoken consent. For the reader there is unease. Of course, in 1904, there were zero notions about “consent” as we now define it. Women lived in prisonlike marriages, with no recourse, no escape from or control over fertility, violence, or despair, few opportunities for education and the self-actualization we strive for now. Women like Gerty were demeaned and no doubt assaulted with the same regularity as women are now.

Bloom muses on this unspoken understanding: “Did me good just the same. …When she leaned back felt an ache at the butt of my tongue. Your head it simply swirls. …Might have made a worse fool of myself however. …Still it was a kind of language between us. …”

The censors of 1921 did not approve of this kind of explicitly-expressed female sexual agency, not to mention a mean masturbating in a public place. J.D.Vance does not approve. The people who want to ban sexy books like Fanny Hill or books for tweens and teens about LGBTQ life do not approve. Donald Trump, who needs the votes of book banners, pretends he does not approve. The conservative majority of our current Supreme Court has sent millions of American women to pre-Roe existence, when the free expression of sexuality could cost you your freedom and imperil your health. Religious leaders force women to hide under layers of clothing or within the confines of other restrictive customs, but inevitably, some will escape.

As did James Joyce and his wife Nora, who left Ireland for the continent, never to return. His fictional characters Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom, his wife Molly, and Gerty MacDowell are left behind to make their way through the muddled gray areas of their Dublin.

For more on banned books: bannedbooksweek.org

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