Richard Brown, Molly Bloom's Gibraltar, and Derrida's Yes in Joyce's Ulysses

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 17^th. 
 

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.

Desire is about wanting more than it is about getting. It is the hunger that highlights the food; the patience that heightens the faith; the arousal that anticipates the sex. The salt of a lover's lips or the sweet juice of grapes is not just pleasurable anymore: with desire, they become exquisite. Desire is the discipline to live on that edge between wanting and satisfaction. It is not for the timid or the fickle. [...]

Yearning itself may even come to be experienced as a pleasure. The Song is concerned with the provocative question of whether the exquisite sensation of wanting another could surpass in any realistic sense the pleasure of actual consummation. The surprising claim that it cann does seem to be the premise of the song, which stays focused on the experience of yearning, not its relief.


-Carey Ellen Walsh, Exquisite Desire: Religion, the Erotic, and the Song of Songs

In the poem's milieu, the late Middle Ages, when man's mood begins to darken into pessimism and deepening melancholy about the transience of earthly life, this tension becomes more pressing, even fraught with panic. Man's ultimate goal, Paradise, appears now more fragile and inaccessible. Art and literature present man diminished, pathetic, even comic--and therefore less worthy of such an attainment. In Pearl, the antagonists of this drama of faith are man and God, so bound by love yet so irreconcilable by nature. The poet aims at a definition of their relationship, existential rather than theoretical, and displays a certain attitude toward this relationship, which weaves in and out of the poem's emotional crises like a pervasive contrapuntal theme. The poem shows man at a moment of profound loss and spiritual confusion. In the dream, where desire battles actuality, the hero gravitates toward an ideal realm, seeking to fathom the mystery of ultimate reality, to reconcile his loss with the universal scheme of things, and to find consolation. His personal desire is gradually transformed and expanded to its anagogic form as the nostalgia for Paradise. He attempts to unite himself with the divine, at least through understanding, so that he can transcend the contradictions of this life. The divine beckons him to itself and ravishes him with its perfection, only to reject him, withdrawing at his searching touch into its awesome mystery. Yet it leaves a profound claim upon his life with its promise of final "cnawing" and immortality.

-Theodore Bogdanos, Pearl: Image of the Ineffable. A Study in Medieval Poetic Symbolism



et quid erat quod me delectabat, nisi amare et amari? sed non tenebatur modus ab animo usque ad animum quatenus est luminosus limes amicitiae, sed exhalabantur nebulae de limosa concupiscentia carnis et scatebra pubertatis, et obnubilabant atque obfuscabant cor meum, ut non discerneretur serenitas dilectionis a caligine libidinis. utrumque in confuso aestuabat et rapiebat inbecillam aetatem per abrupta cupiditatum atque mersabat gurgite flagitiorum. invaluerat super me ira tua, et nesciebam. obsurdueram stridore catenae mortalitatis meae, poena superbiae animae meae, et ibam longius a te et sinebas, et iactabar et effundebar et diffluebam et ebulliebam per fornicationes meas, et tacebas. o tardum gaudium meum! tacebas tunc, et ego ibam porro longe a te in plura et plura sterilia semina dolorum superba deiectione et inquieta lassitudine.

-Saint Augustine of Hippo, Confessions




It’s a depressing thing what’s going on with the person in the song, but it’s essentially about how when things are very awful, if you are looking for some place to turn, you’re not the type of person who can really stand to say, “Well, maybe tomorrow’s better.” Because you know tomorrow’s not better. People are gonna tell you, “You don’t know that! You don’t know about tomorrow!” But sometimes, yes you do. Sometimes you know it for a fact it’s gonna be worse. Maybe if you can go to sleep and never wake up, then you can put some faith in that. If you can’t sleep, then you can see tomorrow like a fucking train coming at you. And if it gets closer and closer, you can make out the paint on its grill as it’s coming up to meet you and you can say, “No, tomorrow’s almost here and I can already tell just as it’s about to kill me. It’s the same as the one that I just tried to abandon.” And you’re not suicidal, you say, “No, I would never do that, I’m Catholic,” but at the same time, you get in one of these moods and I will wager that every person has been in one where you go, “Well you know what wouldn’t be so bad right now would be death.”

-John Darnielle introducing Isaiah 45:23 at The Fillmore in San Francisco, 11/14/09

Unrelated things

"The Tempest allows us to be washed free of images, one of the comedy's many gifts. We are Miranda, who is adjured to "Sit still, and hear the last of our sea-sorrow." If the sea values nothing, and swallows all, it also keeps nothing, and casts us back again. Ariel's best song makes our drowned bones into coral . . . It is a sea fiction, a drenching that at last leaves everyone dry. No one is harmed in the play, and forgiveness is extended to all by Prospero, in response to Ariel's most human moment. Everything dissolves in The Tempest, except the sea. From one perspective, the sea is dissolution itself, but evidently not so in this unique play."
-Harold Bloom, you're a cranky old codger, but you sure have your moments of beauty.

Meanwhile, declining from the noon of day,
The sun obliquely shoots his burning ray;
The hungry judges soon the sentence sign,
And wretches that hang jurymen may dine'
The merchant from the Exchange returns in peace,
And the long labors of the toilet cease.
-Pope

Poetics

"Berryman is a poet so preoccupied with poetic effects as to be totally in their thrall," James Dickey wrote. "His inversions, his personal and often irritatingly cute colloquialisms and deliberate misspellings, his odd references, his basing of lines and whole poems on private allusions, create what must surely be the densest verbal thickets since Empson's."

In his 366th "Dream Song" Berryman himself wrote, "These Songs are not meant to be understood, you understand. / They are only meant to terrify & comfort." "And understood many have not been," Phillips wrote. "Packed with private jokes, topical and literary allusions (Berryman's reading and personal library are legendary), they boggle many minds. When the first 77 Dream Songs...were published, Robert Lowell admitted, 'At first the brain aches and freezes at so much darkness, disorder and oddness. After a while, the repeated situations and their racy jabber become more and more enjoyable, although even now I wouldn't trust myself to paraphrase accurately at least half the sections.'"

(Wikipedia)

On Philological Scholarship

'Alas for the lost lore, the annals and old poets,' wrote Tolkien, referring indeed to Virgil but by analogy to the sources of Beowulf. Gudbrand Vigfusson and F. York Powell, editing the Corpus Poetisum Boreale, the whole poetry of the North, in the 1880s, might look back on past ages and see the 'field of Northern scholarship' as 'a vast plain, filled with dry bones,' up and down which there walked 'a company of men, doing their best to set these bones in order, skull by skull, thigh by thigh, with no hope or thought of the breath that was to shake this plain with the awakening of the immortal dead.' But though philology did come and breathe life into the dry bones of old poems, filling history with the reverberations of forgotten battles and empires, still there was a point beyond which it could not go.

-T.A. Shippey, The Road to Middle-Earth