I delivered this presentation last year in a seminar on Joyce. I guess I'll put it here -- I just bought
Acts of Literature and I'm so excited to reread "Ulysses Gramophone" that revisiting this little review is my kind of fun.
Molly Bloom's Gibraltar, Gendered Narration, and Derrida's Yes/Oui
In
his essay “Molly's Gibraltar: The Other Location in Joyce's
Ulysses,”
Richard Brown argues that Gibraltar has a strong “atmospheric
presence” in Ulysses,
and that Molly's memory of it evokes the communicative, potent yes
which
begins the “Penelope” episode and ends the novel. Gibraltar's
unfamiliar geography becomes a site of mythic inheritance and
transformation, ambivalent desire, and authentic pleasure. Marked by
gendered and ethnic alterity, Molly's
memory of Gibraltar provides a different perspective, and a
perspective of difference, than what has been experienced so far in
Ulysses.
To
call Molly's speech in Episode 18 a
monologue is, according to Derrida, “to display a somnabulisitic
carelessness” (53-4). The episode's genre
may
resemble a monologue, but the narrative method is much more involved
as it resists the
one-sidedness of monologue, opening out into an engagement with
otherness and subjectivity. This profusion evokes the fluid
association and coincidence within Joycean narrative, which is vital
to remember when looking at Molly's Gibraltarian origins.
Brown
compares Gibraltar's function in the “Penelope” episode to the
yes-function
that Derrida describes in “Ulysses
Gramophone.” Derrida shows that yes
in
Ulysses
is more than a performative speech-act – it is a state of being in
itself, a state of affirmation and an announcement of the speaker's
existence. At the same time it is an intimate acknowledgement and
asking of the Other, like the “Shema Israel” prayer that appears
in the Aeoleus
episode. Like the prayer, yes
functions as both a question and an answer, a “person-to-person
call” (38), this time not between Israel and God, but between the
speaker and the Other. Such a call reverberates in memory and desire
(44) as an event continually being replayed and transferred through
the text—like the sound from a gramophone, which is experienced in
hearing, memory, and repetition. Thus, Molly's memory of Bloom on
Howth, that “I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he
asked me would I say yes to yes” recalls the doubled question and
affirmation of yes;
it is an echo being transferred between herself and Bloom
(“would I say
yes to
yes”),
affirming
their separateness while asking them, in turn, to connect (as with a
telephone, gramophone, or umbilical cord) and to engage (pun
intended). But this connection is suspended in Ulysses;
whether Molly and Bloom do end up experiencing “complete mental
intercourse” (17.2285) is a question for June 17th.
For Brown, Gibraltar appears in Ulysses
as a place where just such a prolific and sustained relation with the
other can
occur, and where racial and gendered alterities can exist without
facing violence or homogenization. The Gibraltar passages in Episode
18 transform the masculine narratives that the novel has so far
enacted through a narration of female interiority, racial otherness,
and experienced pleasure; this rewriting constitutes an alternative
to, and a critique of, the conventional discourses that the novel
might presuppose, especially concerning Gibraltar's status as a
colonial state.
In
1904 Gibraltar had already been occupied by the British for 200
years. Some critics have suggested that Gibraltar's colonial history
marks the island as another colonial state, like Dublin, and Molly as
an example of “colonized subjectivity” (158) in the manner of
Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha, or Ashis Nandy. Brown seeks to
complicate this characterization, claiming that Joyce's weblike
allusiveness disrupts
any
easy category.
He
argues that Molly's mixed background and difficult-to-define standing
among both Gibraltarian and Dublin society makes her more complex in
terms of ethnicity and social position.
Furthermore,
the source book most used by Joyce on Gibralter, an 1889 study by
Henry Field, emphasizes the integrated ethnic demographic of the
peninsula, where Jews, Christians, Moors, Turks, and so on seem to
exist heterogenuously and harmoniously. Brown suggests that Joyce may
have been interested in Gibraltar as a “multi-ethnic utopia” that
is juxtaposed with the exclusion and racism that, for example, Bloom
encounters in the Cyclops
episode (167). Thus, the imaginative landscape of Gibraltar is a
political “other” to Bloom's experience: instead of being “just
another colonial state” it is an other
colonial
state to Dublin, where racial and political oppression is replaced by
mythical allusiveness and layers of association invoked by memories
of pleasure, belonging, and emotional promise.
Brown
stresses that the question of politics, colonial history, and race in
Gibraltar is affected by the emotional and libidinal energies that
Molly's memories invoke. Molly's complex alignments with the colonial
military garrison exist simultaneously with her position as gendered
and racial other in Dublin. Her exotic Spanish looks sexually excite
Bloom (and other Dublin figures). This eroticized Spanishness seem to
merge with cultural artifacts and backgrounds: popular song and
literature, Orientalist
fantasies about exotic women, and
ethnic and religious alterity within Gibraltar itself begin to create
Molly as an exotic object of desire. But Molly's own memories of her
origins diverge from this erotic fantasy, empowering her to create a
place in “remembered reality” (170) that communicates direct,
authentic, experienced pleasure. This Gibraltar is also strongly
linked to the pleasures of writing and reading (170), a connection
that might challenge dualistic assumptions about Molly's determined
bodiliness at the expense of intellectual sophistication. Brown also
suggests Molly
Bloom as the novel's “boldest traveler,” a female Odysseus figure
exiled from her Mediterranean home.
Most
of all, Molly's Gibraltar “provide[s] a powerful alternative to or
double critique of the conventional discourses” of history and
nation, by evoking a place of gendered, ethnic, and emotional
otherness. This place is at once remembered, experienced, and
recorded textually; it is also a utopia or no-place that blends
memory and subjectivity by encountering otherness directly, and
always in the framework of desire. Gibralter's function in the novel
is, for Brown, part of Joyce's modernism; its mythology,
referentiality and ambivalence exemplify the modernism of Ulysses.
Gibraltar is constructed as a “significant other place and
[liminal] site of meaning” (157) where nationalist discourse and
mainstream narrative can be questioned in a utopian field of memory.
The question “Where?” at the end of the “Ithaca” episode
demonstrates this liminality.
The living Gibraltar, like Derrida's living yes,
must
always point back to itself in all of its capacities, as both
question and reply, self-affirming signature and outward-looking
exchange. The intrusion of its otherness calls the speaker and the
hearer together in a mutual and never-conclusive question of
difference, an unfolding of self and other that is not unlike the
process of translation. Gibraltar in Episode 18 asks us to consider
alternatives to the militaristic, exclusionary, and tortured
narratives that we have seen ever since Mulligan's false Mass on the
Martello tower in Episode 1.
According
to Brown, Molly's voice of ethnic and gendered otherness, expressed
through her memories of Gibraltar, functions as an alternative to
colonial history, and a critique of urban space and masculine
narrative. But Molly's Gibraltar, like her exuberant yes,
also
asks an extended, precarious question about connection, intercourse,
and incorporation with the other. As Derrida writes, “all the risks
crowd together from the first breath of yes”
(68), therefore the question of alterity and otherness in Episode 18
involves risk as well as resistance, the danger
in intimacy and relation as well as their pleasures. Molly's
so-called monologue is never spoken, or experienced, alone (63), and
this way of speaking is an unstable and potentially transformative
state of being. As well as a liminal location of otherness and
utopian resistance to urban alienation, Molly's Gibraltar is also an
expression of her desire to participate in unmediated and fertile
communication with the world around her, and a rewriting of Ulysses
from its liminal outskirts.
--Liz Light 8/5/2014
Works Cited
Brown, Richard. "Molly’s Gibraltar: The Other Location in Joyce’s Ulysses."
A Companion to James Joyce (2008): 157-73.
Derrida, Jacques. "Ulysses Gramophone: Hear Say Yes in Joyce." Acts of Literature.
Joyce, James. Ulysses. Ed. Hans
Walter Gabler with Wolfhard Steppe and Claus Melchior. New York:
Vintage, 1986.
