"PENELOPE" WITHOUT THE BODY

Author(s): MAUD ELLMANN

Source: European Joyce Studies , 2006, Vol. 17, JOYCE, "PENELOPE" AND THE BODY
(2006), pp. 97-108
Published by: Brill

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/44871275

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 "PENELOPE" WITHOUT THE BODY

MAUD ELLMANN

Why should those lovers that no lovers miss

Dream , until God burn Nature with a kiss ?
W.B. Yeats , "The Man who Dreamed of Faery land"

Abstract : This essay challenges the critical consensus that

"Penelope" identifies woman with the body. Pointing out that
"Penelope" is more concerned with letters than with flesh, it
argues that Molly's discourse represents a form of
disembodiment, in which her flesh is rewoven into words. The
final kiss melts away any commonsense conception of the body
as gendered, individuated, self-contained, transuming both
body and language into a "posthuman" topography of
intensities.

"I am the flesh that always affirms." This statement, translated from Joyce's
shaky German in a famous letter to Frank Budgen, has often been taken as
the final verdict on "Penelope": " Ich bin der [sic] Fleisch der stets bejaht ."
As many commentators have pointed out, the German phrase recalls and
reverses Mephistopheles's assertion in Goethe's Faust , "I am the spirit that
always denies" ("Ich bin der Geist der stets beneinF). Assuming that Molly
Bloom represents the flesh that always says yes, critics have understood her
to be speaking on behalf of the entire female sex, epitomising what Joyce
calls "perfectly sane full amoral fertilisable untrustworthy engaging shrewd
limited prudent indifferent Weib" [woman]. 1
By associating the feminine with flesh [Fleisch], the masculine with spirit
[Geist], Joyce seems to be endorsing one of the oldest and weariest clichés of
Western thought. But it is strange that he mixes up his German genders,
rendering " Fleisch " as masculine rather than neuter. If this is an error, it may
also be a portal to discovery, disclosing Joyce's own uncertainty about the
gender of the flesh. Furthermore, his letter to Budgen attributes greater
importance both to affirmation and to flesh than "Penelope" itself bears out.

1. Letter from Joyce to Frank Budgen, 16 August 1921, in Richard Ellmann (ed),
Selected Letters (New York: Viking Press, 1975), p. 285. Hereafter SL.

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98 Ellmann

It is true that Molly's rhapsody begins and ends with yeses, but thes
separated by a sea of no's - not to mention O's, which are even
insistent. And far from saying yes to flesh, her monologue revolves
the theme of disembodiment, particularly in the form of shedding skin
This paper therefore argues that Joyce's comments on "Penelope" h
sent his critics on a wild goose chase for the flesh, obscuring the epi
preoccupation with the word, precisely as an agency of disenfleshment
as "Sirens" needs to be released from music, and "Aeolus" from w
order to dislodge the critical consensus on these episodes, so "Pen
needs to be released from flesh in order for its words to be perceive
As we shall see, these words lead us away from any common
conception of the body - gendered, individuated, self-contained -
undiscovered country of intensities, scorched by the flightpaths of d
Rather than affirming nature and the flesh, Molly burns them with a kis
Nonetheless, Joyce's letter to Budgen has encouraged critics to
Molly as woman ["Wíe/è"] rather than a woman, while equating wom
the body - not a body. Both these abstractions, woman and body, pre
the insight that women might be different from each other, in body
spirit, rather than merely different from men. Molly herself shows
awareness of differences between women, as did Nora Joyce, who dis
the proposition that Molly was created in her image with the verdict
was much fatter."2 Some women are fatter than others, but by assigni
organ "fat" to the "Penelope" episode in the Linati scheme of 1921, J
absorbs these variations into undifferentiated blubber. No wonder
cries, "O Jamesy let me up out of this pooh!" ( U 18.1 128-9). And no w
she appeared to Joyce in a dream, hurling a child's coffin at her own c
with the words: "And I have done with you, too, Mr Joyce" (JJ II 54
clear that Molly refuses to be coffined in Joyce's conception of the fem
Joyce once said that "Ithaca" was the true ending of the book b
"Penelope" had no beginning, middle, or end.3 This suggests that
chapter represents a postscript or appendix rather than a termina
emerges after Ithaca's enormous full stop, which Joyce instructed the p
to enlarge, as if to exaggerate the termination to absurdity. As appen
"Penelope" provides a supplement to the atonement or at-one-ment of
male heroes in Ithaca, where they are united as Stoom and Blephe
spooneristic parody of fusion. But "Penelope" is a dangerous suppleme
that it undermines the sense of an ending; an opening rather than a clo

2. Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (New York: Oxford University Press, 19

743. Hereafter J J IL
3. Letter from Joyce to Harriet Shaw Weaver, 7 October 1921, in James
Letters , vol. I, ed. Stuart Gilbert, revised by Richard Ellmann (New York:
1966), p. 172. Hereafter L I.

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 Without the Body 99

opens up a chink in the armour of the patriarchal plot. Joyce described Molly
as "indifferent," and her monologue remains aloof to the action of the novel,
in it but not of it, indifferent both to the teleology of plot and to the dialectic
of polarity and symmetry between the heroes ( SL 285).4 In fact, "Penelope"
could be seen as the cemetery of symmetry, to borrow one of Bloom's
inspired puns (U 7.168-70).
In an obvious sense, the contrast between "Ithaca" and "Penelope"
epitomises the age-old dichotomy between the Man of Reason and the
Woman of Nature. Since the beginnings of Greek philosophical thought,
femaleness has been conflated with everything that Reason has transcended,
dominated, or simply left behind: the forces of nature, the instincts of the
body, the death-dealing power of the earth-goddesses. Joyce identified
Molly Bloom with Gea-Tellus, a fusion of the Greek and Roman earth-
goddesses, and declared that her soliloquy revolves around the female body,
"its four cardinal points being breasts, arse, womb, and cunt" ( U 17.2313; SL
285). Such pronouncements obscure the obvious fact that "Penelope," like
every chapter of Ulysses , is entirely composed of written words, disembodied
from their source of utterance. In the "Scylla and Charybdis" episode,
Stephen speaks of Mother Dana weaving and unweaving our bodies - an
allusion to the Celtic mother-goddess, but also to the Dublin literary journal
Dana , edited by W.K. Magee, which rejected the first version of "A Portrait
of the Artist" in 1904, forcing Joyce to re-weave his own self-portrait ( U
9.376-8). Similarly Molly Bloom unweaves her flesh to weave new portraits
of herself in words.
The late literary theorist and film critic James Snead, in his Cambridge
PhD thesis on Joyce and Faulkner, proposed that "Penelope" is "about
orthography."5 Since the word "ortho" derives from the Greek word for
"straight" or "upright," whereas Molly remains prone throughout her
monologue, it might be more appropriate to term her stream-of-consciousness
"proneography." But Snead is right that "Penelope" emphasises the
materiality of writing more insistently, perhaps, than any other chapter of
Ulysses. Vicki Mahaffey has pointed out that Molly is "a woman of letters in
all senses of the word: obsessed with letter writing as a form of lovemaking,
liberal with letters in her mental orthography, and literal in her approach to
foreign words."6 In Molly's hilarious account of a visit to the gynaecologist,
who asks her if she suffers from emissions ("where do those old fellows get
all the words they have omissions," she scoffs), she takes a fancy to the

4. Jean-Michel Rabate discusses Molly's indifference in Joyce upon the Void

(London: Macmillan, 1991), pp. 43-68.
5. James Snead, "Hiatus and Reversal: Aspects of Repetition in Absalom !
Absalom ! and Ulysses ", Cambridge PhD thesis (1979).
6. Vicki Mahaffey, Reauthorizing Joyce (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1988), p. 175.

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100 Ellmann

doctor when he writes out a prescription: "still I liked him when he ben
down to write the thing out frowning so severe his nose intelligent. . (
18.11 72-3). Noses are significant to Molly; confronted with her lover B
Boylan's "tremendous big red brute of a thing," she wonders that "his no
not so big" ( U 18.145-6). But it is the doctor's writing that takes her f
before she even notices his nose. Of all the emissions that she malaprop
"omissions," it is clear that ink turns her on as much as spunk.
Joyce originally conceived of "Penelope" as a series of letters written
Molly, and she evidently gains as much pleasure from writing and rece
love-letters as from any of her masquerades of femininity. Boylan's let
like his nose, are much too short to gratify her appetites, despite his big
brutish charms: "I wish somebody would write me a loveletter his w
much and I told him he could write what he liked yours ever Hugh Boyla
." ( U 18.735-6). Anyone who signs a loveletter like that is unlikely to sat
a woman whose husband's "mad crazy letters . . . had me always at mys
and 5 times a day. . ." ( U 18.1176-9). Ruminating on her girlhood
Gibraltar, Molly recalls that the days went by "like years not a letter fr
living soul," and finally drove her into sending herself junk mail: "the
few I posted to myself with bits of paper in them" (U 18.698-9).
epistolary masturbation mirrors her pleasure in soliloquising, in which
frigs herself with words, caressed in thought. As well as remembering lo
letters, Molly thinks about books that she has read or rejected, some of w
were written by women - a possibility rarely acknowledged in Ulysses.
of these is Molly Bawn by Margaret Wolfe Hungerford, which Molly sp
because it has a Molly in it, objecting to Moll Flanders for the same rea
"Molly bawn she gave me by Mrs Hungerford on account of the name I
like books with a Molly in them like that one he brought me about the
from Flanders. . ." ( U 18. 656-8). This objection exemplifies Molly
resistance to containment in a book.
Of course it could be argued that every chapter of Ulysses is about
orthography, in one way or another, and that "Penelope" is no exception to
this rule of self-reflexiveness. But Molly's "female monologue" (which was
the "technic" Joyce assigned to "Penelope" in the Linati scheme) is one of his
few innovations to have spawned further writing which is more than merely
imitative, inspiring such works as Samuel Beckett's The Unnameable, or
Nastassja Kinski 's closing monologue in Wim Wenders 's movie Paris, Texas
(1984), not to mention the whole school of écriture feminine. Most of
Joyce's other experiments are one-offs: nobody could write another "Ithaca"
without being accused of plagiarism or pastiche, and James Stephens had the
good sense to turn down Joyce's bizarre invitation to take over the
composition of Finnegans Wake. So "Penelope" is unusual in Joyce's work
for opening up new possibilities for future writers.

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 W ithout the Body 1 0 1

The Linati scheme designates the time of "Penelope" as the mathematical

symbol of infinity, the lemiscate or recumbent 8, which reminded Joyce of
female buttocks. Eights also feature in Molly's birthday on 8 September
1870, as well as in the chapter's eight unfinished sentences, which Joyce
associated with the eight legs of a spider, weaving and unweaving its own
web: "fly = 6 legs, spider = 8."7 In Christian numerology, as Diane Tolomeo
has pointed out, eight is the number of new beginnings. Yet "Penelope" has
achieved an infinity its author never bargained for. Beckett writes in The
Unnameable , "One starts speaking as if it were possible to stop at will. . . .
The search for the means to put an end to things, an end to speech, is what
enables the discourse to continue."9 The ending of Ulysses also started
something that Joyce could not stop: its literary reverberations exceed the
confines of the proper name, eluding the control of what he calls the law of
"copriright."10 The most cannibalistic of writers, Joyce tries to incorporate
all his literary fathers into the belly of his book, but "Penelope" is one
chapter that gets away.
From this point of view, the "Oxen of the Sun" episode could be seen as
an allegory of Ulysses as a whole. Here Joyce chomps away at the oxen of
the literary past, imitating all the styles of the English language from
medieval hymns to Southern revivalist preaching, yet notably excluding any
female authors - there are no pastiches of Jane Austen or Maria Edgeworth or
George Eliot. On a naturalistic level, the medical students in the maternity
hospital reinforce their homosocial bonds by denigrating women. But
meanwhile offstage, in another room, inaccessible to any of the male
narrators, a baby is born, something new and unforeseeable is set in motion.
Like the mother of this baby, Molly is excluded from the masculine action of
Ulysses : she therefore marks an absence or orifice within the text, but also
generates the novel's teeming afterlife.
One of Freud's more outrageous propositions was that weaving was
women's sole contribution to civilisation, and that it was invented to conceal
their "genital deficiency."11 Apparently Joyce conceived of Molly's
monologue in similar terms, as a spiderweb of words woven and unwoven
round the "hole in the middle" of the female body. This hole is never filled
in, but disseminates itself throughout the chapter in the form of O's, riddling

7. See Philip F. Herring (ed), Joyce 's " Ulysses " Notesheets in the British Museum ,
(Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1972), p. 499.
8. Diane Tolomeo, "The Final Octagon of Ulysses ," JJQ 10 (1973), p. 450.
9. Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable , in Molloy , Malone Dies , The Unnamable
(London: Calder, 1994), pp. 301-2.
10. James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (London: Faber, 1964), p. 185. Hereafter FIT.
11. Sigmund Freud, "Femininity" (1933) in The Complete Psychological Works of
Sigmund Freud , Standard Edition, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press,
1953-1974), vol. 22, p. 132.

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1 02 Ellmann

the discourse like a sieve. As we have seen, Molly herself represents "a hole
in the middle" of the novel, in the sense that she is missing from its centre,
emitting her omission everywhere. "[Wjhats the idea of making us like that
with a big hole in the middle of us," Molly protests ( U 18.151-2). What's th
idea indeed? This certainly confirms Nora Joyce's view that Joyce knew
nothing about women: the idea that we experience our bodies as donuts or
bagels is preposterous (J J II 629). In an obvious sense this so-called "hole"
is a textbook example of castration-phobia, whereby the male projects his
fear of lack or "omission" onto the female body. But one could also argu
that this hole signifies the absence of the female body in Ulysses , the hole
through which the lady vanishes. In other words, it marks the limits o
representation: "In the buginning is the woid," Joyce writes in Finnegans
Wake {FW 378.29).
Feminists have reacted to "Penelope" in opposite ways. Some object to
what they see as Joyce's equation of woman with the body, and his
association of the feminine with holes and leakage. Mary Ellmann writes in
Thinking about Women : "In Molly Bloom's soliloquy . . . thinking and
menstruating are similar and concomitant processes. She can no more govern
the first, by sentence structure or punctuation, than she can the second."12
Despite the appearance of incontinence, however, Molly exercises a good
deal of sphincteral control over her sentence-structure. It is worth
remembering that much of the punctuation was deleted only in the proofs,
after most of her well-formed sentences had been constructed. Champions of
écriture feminine have also overlooked this grammatical propriety,
celebrating Molly's logorrhoea as a means of bursting out of the confines of
male discourse.13 Molly's indifference to formalities of punctuation, her
dissolution of the proper name - at least the masculine proper name - into a
soup of pronouns: such deviations have been praised as a kind of terrorism
against the no-no's of our day, against the oppressive forces of the fixed, the
proper, and the same. For this reason "Penelope" provides the paradigm for
Luce Irigaray 's controversial theory of "two-lipped signification," defined as
a feminine syntax in which "there would no longer be either subject or object,
'oneness' would no longer be privileged, there would no longer be proper
meanings, proper names, 'proper' attributes. . . . Instead, that syntax would
invoke nearness, proximity, but in such an extreme form that it would
preclude any distinction of identities, any establishment of ownership, thus
any form of appropriation."14 This is what Cole Porter, in a different context,

12. Mary Ellmann, Thinking about Women (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World,
1968), pp.74-5.
13. See inter alia Suzette A. Henke, James Joyce and the Politics of Desire (New
York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 127, 130.
14. Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which is Not One , trans. Catherine Porter with Carolyn
Burke (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 134.

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 Without the Body 103

calls "the urge to merge with the splurge." And many feminists have felt the
urge to merge with the splurge of Molly's rhapsody.
Personally I prefer the kind of feminism that resists these oceanic
yearnings. But Molly herself is much less gushy than she seems. Gertrude
Stein declared that she had thrown away punctuation in order to achieve "the
evenness of everybody having a vote."15 Similarly, Molly's unpunctuated
discourse evens out the power relations built into the structure of the
sentence, but as Derek Attridge has pointed out, the rules of grammar are
concealed rather than overthrown.16 Nor is the hierarchy of orthography
abolished: spasms of upper-case letters remind us the difference between
high and low, upright and prone, while the sporadic appearance of the capital
letter O, like an enormous hollowed-out full-stop, provides an alternative
form of punctuation - a loose end rather than a final period. In a chapter so
preoccupied with orifices and "omissions," these O's could be interpreted as
orifices in the prose, portals to new zones of pleasure. In this sense Molly
does indeed have an O-mission - a mission to create more O's and apertures.
These O-zones indicate that we are entering a body with multiple orifices, the
few poor orifices of the human body being insufficient for the
metempsychoses of desire.
Yet despite the freedoms suggested by these O's, Molly obeys the rules of
sentence-structure almost slavishly, which is why it was so easy for the
infamous editor Daniš Rose to restore the punctuation to "Penelope."
Grammatically and orthographically, her stream-of-consciousness is much
more correct than Bloom's or Stephen's, and in spite of the appearance of
free-association, Molly rarely loses her train of thought. Joyce indicated that
"because" was a key word in the chapter, and Molly's monologue preserves
the logic of "because," upholding the law of cause-and-effect - a law that
Irigaray would presumably associate with patriarchy. Nietzsche famously
said, "I fear we have not got rid of God because we still believe in grammar."
Well, Molly Bloom thoroughly believes in both.
Another key word in "Penelope," according to Joyce, is "bottom." But the
first time this word is used it refers to a false bottom, when Molly remembers
her housemaid Mary Driscoll in Ontario Terrace, who took to "padding out
her false bottom" for Bloom's delectation ( U 18.56). These terms "because"
and "bottom" both derive from Bottom's speech in A Midsummer Night's
Dream : "It shall be called Bottom's Dream, because it hath no bottom." In
"Penelope," Joyce also conjures up a dream without a bottom, only a series

15. Gertrude Stein, "A Translantic Interview 1946", in Bonnie Kime Scott (ed), The
Gender of Modernism: A Critical Anthology (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1990), p. 503.
16. Derek Attridge, "Molly's Flow: The Writing of 'Penelope' and the Question of
Women's Language,"' Modern Fiction Studies 35 (1989), pp. 545-546.

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104 Ellmann

of false bottoms, mirages of foundations such as the mother and the body
the earth. What is more, the chapter also has no top: Joyce demateriali
surfaces as well as depths. Zakir Paul has proposed that "Penelope" be se
as the exfoliation of Ulysses , in which the novel sloughs off the necro
layers of tradition, much as a spider sheds its skin.17 It is Molly
introduces the metaphor of exfoliation when she thinks about the skin l
her husband neglected to pick up from the chemist: this is one of m
errands Bloom forgets in the narcotic "Lotus-Eaters" episode. Molly
"O no there was the face lotion I finished the last of yesterday that mad
skin like new ... I thought it was beginning to look coarse or old a bit t
skin underneath is much finer where it peeled off there on my finger after
burn its a pity it isnt all like that. . ." ( U 18.458-9,463-5). Later she reiter
"its so much smoother the skin. . ." ( U 18.581). By the same token
monologue peels off the older coarser epidermis of the novel to rev
smoother skin beneath.
In the Linati scheme, skin is the organ assigned to the "Lotus-
Eaters" episode, in which Bloom's monologue pullulates with images of
skin-disease: eczema, smallpox, dandruff, freckles, warts, bunions, pimples,
barber's itch, and worst of all the unfortunate Lord Ardilaun, who was forced
to change his shirt four times a day because his skin reputedly bred lice and
vermin. These images of skin disease may be interpreted as symptoms of
contemporary fears about degeneration, but they also bring to light the
existential insecurity of skin, its susceptibility to laceration, penetration,
desquamation. In Ulysses , this insecurity is largely projected on to women,
whose outer coverings of clothes and skin are seen as dangerously
detachable. "Queer the number of pins they always have," Bloom thinks as
he withdraws a pin from Martha Clifford's letter. "No roses without thorns."
(U 5.277-8). In Bloom's imagination, the female body is merely "pinned
together" and forever threatening to split apart.
Compare the story "Peeling" by Peter Carey, in which the aging
Beckettian narrator undresses a neighbour in his boarding house, peeling off
layer after layer of her clothing until nothing remains except an earring.
When he pulls at this ornament her voluptuous body unzips, revealing a
young man underneath. But this male body turns out to be a further skin,
which unzips into the body of an adolescent girl. When there are no skins
left to flay, the old man pulls off the girl's limbs and hair, reducing her to the
bald head and torso of a doll. Similarly, Molly remembers peeling off the
clothing of a doll, and she unzips her own body in the course of her
imaginary bacchanalia, exfoliating into a young man, a pubescent girl, and a
ten-year-old child: "in the summer and I in my skin hopping around I used to

17. Zakir Paul made this suggestion in my class on Ulysses given at Northwestern in
Spring 2001.

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 Without the Body 105

love myself then stripped at the washstand dabbing and creaming. .."(£/
18.922-3).
The psychoanalyst Esther Bick, in an influential essay on the experience
of skin in early infancy, postulates that the parts of the personality, in its most
primitive form, are felt to have no binding force among themselves but
depend on an external object for their integration. This object - usually the
mother's nipple, voice, or smell - must be introjected in order for the ego to
experience itself as self-contained. In effect, this introjected object buttons
up the ego. If this buttoning object fails to be internalised, however, the
infant resorts to fantasies of omnipotence that deny the need for passive
submission to an object. These fantasies produce what Bick describes as
"second-skin": a pseudo-independence often leading to the precocious
development of speech or strength, the infant using the sound of its own
voice, or the rigidity of its musculature, to hold the fragments of the
personality together. Without this carapace, the ego leaks into infinite space,
in a collapse of boundaries depicted in the psychoanalytic literature as an
"explosion," "annihilation," or "catastrophe."18 An example may be found in
Frantz Fanon, who describes his discovery of blackness as a "haemorrhage"
in which his body is repainted with his own black blood.19
Molly also uses the sound of her own thoughts to hold the fragments
of her life together, weaving and unweaving a second skin of words. Yet this
sonorous wrapping lacks the buttons that could keep it closed and self-
contained: they have gone "the way of all buttons," to borrow a
"timehonoured adage" from "Eumaeus" ( U 16.37). In "Penelope," Molly
remembers that she sewed a button on the bottom of her daughter Milly's
jacket, and worries that "I oughtnt to have stitched it and it on her it brings a
parting. . ." ( U 18.1031). Here Molly is alluding to the superstition that
sewing or repairing a garment when a person is wearing it will cause a
separation to occur. The idea that stitching brings a parting, that mending
implies rending, seems to capture the ambiguity of exfoliation, in which the
skin reconstitutes itself by peeling off. It is intriguing that the verbs "to skin"
and "to peel" mean the opposite of their respective nouns: to skin is to
remove the skin, to peel is to unpeel. Thus Molly skins herself with words,
and yet those very words provide her with a second skin, finer than the skin
they cauterise.
Molly also speaks of unbuttoning a lover and peeling back the foreskin of
his penis: "it had a kind of eye in it theyre all Buttons men down the middle
on the wrong side of them. ." ( U 18.816-7). In Molly's theory of sexual

18. Esther Bick, "The experience of the skin in early object relations," International
Journal of Psycho-Analysis 49 (1968), pp. 484-6.
19. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks , trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New
York: Grove Press, 1967), pp. 109-14.

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106 Ellmann

difference, women have a hole in the middle of them, whereas men hav
buttons down the middle on the wrong side of them. But a button necess
implies an aperture or O-zone, even if that O is fastened shut, suggesting
men's buttons cannot insulate them from the risk of haemorrhage projec
onto the unbuttoned words and flesh of women.
Molly's abandonment of punctuation demonstrates her contempt for the
buttons of sentence-structure. But she experiments with more imaginative
forms of buttoning. One of these may be found in the clusters of place-
names that punctuate her monologue, like "islands in the unnavigable depth
of our departed time" - as Wordsworth describes the "spots of time" in The
Prelude. Although Molly notoriously avoids proper names, it is usually the
names of men that disappear into the maelstrom of her pronouns, whereas she
differentiates the names of women pretty clearly, and positively revels in the
names of places, especially places where she has been kissed, which is the
only sexual act that really makes her happy: "he kissed my heart at Dolphins
Barn"; "he kissed me under the Moorish wall"; and most famously, "the day
we were lying among the rhododendrons on Howth head . . .my God after
that long kiss I near lost my breath yes he said I was a flower of the
mountain. . ." (U 18.330,1604,1572-7). In all these scenes, the he's could be
anyone or no one, but the capital letters of the place-names tower over
personal identities. Location, location, location.
These place-names function as upholstery buttons in the billowing
folds of Molly's discourse. Some of the names refer to places in Gibraltar,
and they bespeak a kind of orientalism, endowing exotic landscapes east of
Ireland with a sexual exuberance sorely missing from the house at 7 Eccles
Street. When Molly's reverie alights upon these place-names, the past rolls
back into the present, diverting the linearity of narrative into eddies and
whirlpools of repetition. Moreover, the fact that place-names mark the spots
where Molly has been kissed transforms them into sanctuaries of desire.
Throughout her monologue Molly tries to change her shape to suit her lovers'
fantasies, peeling off the skins of mother, virgin, bitch, and whore, although
she complains that "theres nothing for a woman in that" ( U 18.495). Her
notorious narcissism is the product of a painful alienation, condemning her to
see herself only through the eyes of men; this is one reason why she thinks
the penis has "a kind of eye in it". The kiss is the only sexual experience that
heals Molly's alienation by reaching "long and hot down to your soul," and
touching the wellspring of her own desire ( U 18.1 06).
"In kissing do we render or receive?" asks Cressida in
Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida. Bloom and Molly both remember
kissing on the Hill of Howth as the deepest union of their lives, because the
kisser coalesces with the kissed:
High on Ben Howth rhododendrons a nanny goat walking surefooted,
dropping currants. Screened under ferns she laughed warmfolded.

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 Without the Body 107

Wildly I lay on her, kissed her: eyes, her lips, her stretched neck
beating, woman's breasts fìlli in her blouse of nun's veiling, fat nipples
upright. Hot I tongued her. She kissed me. I was kissed. All yielding
she tossed my hair. Kissed, she kissed me ( U 8.91 1-6).
The wonder of the kiss, in Adam Phillips's words, is that it "blurs the
distinction between giving and taking."20 Masturbate as they will, Bloom and
Molly cannot kiss themselves on their own mouths. The kiss demands
another kisser, much as a yes demands an interlocutor: "wherever there is a
yes ," Derrida declares, "the other is hooked up somewhere on the
telephone."21 A yes is necessarily an answer to another, belying the idea of
monologue; but a kiss turns self and other inside-out: "Kissed, she kissed
me."
Phillips argues that kissing is "integral to the individual's ongoing project
of working out what mouths are for."22 The kiss on Howth Head confounds
two functions of the mouth, for Bloom and Molly kiss and eat at the same
time, exchanging the "seedcake warm and chewed" between their tongues as
a substitute for eating one other ( U 8.907). While kissing can be combined
with eating, however, it is virtually impossible to kiss and talk at the same
time. Molly is scarcely lost for words, but the experience of kissing leaves
her almost speechless. At these ecstatic moments, when language is
overpowered by desire, the place-names bubble up into the prose. Actually it
would be more precise to say they spatter down, since many of the references
to Gibraltar were afterthoughts on Joyce's part, added to successive page-
proofs of "Penelope." These place-names "remember" Molly, in every sense,
buttoning her discourse back together at the brink of dissolution in the
oceanic. Iain Sinclair writes in London Orbital : " Why doesn't matter. When
is of no account. We need to be able to track the story back: this is where it
began, that's the station, there is the river."23 For Molly, there was Dolphins
Barn, there was the Moorish wall, there was the hill of Howth: these place-
names anchor her in language and memory at moments when the kiss
threatens to obliterate all boundaries.
Joyce told Harriet Weaver that in "Penelope" he had "tried to depict
the earth which is prehuman and presumably posthuman" (SL 289). This
suggests that the place-names belong to a topography prior or posterior to the
imposition of the human subject. They could be seen as erogenous zones in

20. Adam Phillips, On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 97.
21. Jacques Derrida " Ulysses Gramophone: Hear Say Yes in Joyce," in Bernard
Benstock (ed), James Joyce : The Augmented Ninth (Syracuse: Syracuse University
Press, 1988), p. 35.
22. On Kissing , p. 96.
23. Iain Sinclair, London Orbital: A Walk around the M25 (London: Granta, 2002),
pp. 297-8.

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108 Ellmann

the body of the earth, a "posthuman" body underneath the skin of gend
individuated selves. If the body is the subject of Penelope, this is n
female or a human body but a terra incognita, blazed with kisses.

University of Notre Dame

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