James Joyce`s Ulysees Is About Memory
James Joyce`s Ulysees Is About Memory
James Joyce`s novel Ulysees (1922) about Ireland`s city of Dublin at the beginning of the 20th century, with its narrative of a day in the life of Mrs Bloom, was vilified by critics of English literature for profane language and vulgarity. Though much of the linguistic pyrotechnics, for which the work was justly famed, derived from Joyce`s own more complete knowledge of the English language and his ability to wield a dictionary to greater effect than any other of his peers amongst the literati of the period. The main objection to the novel was the tired old warhorse of Christian morality, which frowns on the word `fuck` so heavily that it`s given the human race so much brain damage it`s a miracle that it can walk after it`s learned to crawl:
`It lay there now. Now it could bear no more. Dead: an old woman's: the grey sunken cunt of the world.`1
Apart from dialogue, `fuck` only appears once in James Joyce`s Ulysees, in comparison to its ubiquity within a similarly vilified text, D. H. Lawrence`s Lady Chatterley`s Lover (1928), `My soul softly naps in the little Pentecost flame with you, like the peace of fucking.`2 Lawrence is primarily concerned with the sexual adventures of Constance with her gardener, Mellors, which Christianity labels `adultery` as the basis of a literary criticism that ultimately reveals the contradiction inherent in the moralists` world view. Pentecost celebrates the law of God, which Jesus distills as, `Love your neighbor as you love yourself.` (Matt: 22. 39) Mellors and Constance are loving each other as neighbors. Joyce`s vocabulary was immense and much of the language he used in his works was that of an intensely learned individual with a thorough grasp of modernity and the issues facing humans at the outset of a 20th century that was experiencing the upheavals of the First World War (1914-18) and would suffer the convulsions of a Second World War (1939-45) in which the main theme was the extermination of the people of the Christian Bible, the Jews and their successors by the elected German National Socialist Party waging war to enslave Europe and the world. Remembrance Sunday is the traditional day set aside for those who live to recollect those who died during those wars to preserve liberty, and Christian belief in Resurrection is the basis for the importance accorded the Remembrance Service of the Christian church on that day. What Christians haven`t understood is that James Joyce`s learning represents stored memory derived from the will to remember. Without the will to remember allied with the memory storage capacity, `fuck` and `cunt` is all that people can remember. Joyce`s description of Dublin as a `grey sunken cunt` is challenging but not immoral:
`You shall crush the head of the serpent with your foot, although he shall bruise your heel.` (Gen: 3. 15)
In Eden the serpent persuades Eve to `eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil` that is death rather than the `fruit of the tree of life` which is immortality, `You shall be as gods.` (Gen: 3. 5) God expels Eve and Adam with the exhortation that he must labor and she will experience labor pain if they`re to have Redemption from their sin. When Mary gave birth to Jesus uncontaminated by male semen, Jesus was `woman`s seed` and prefigured the Resurrection of `woman`s seed` after he was tortured to death as a `dissident` by the Empire of Rome then occupying Jewish Palestine and he had Resurrection and Ascension to heaven. Eve`s `foot` is often attributed to the Virgin Mary in Catholic iconography in which she`s depicted standing with her foot upon the head of the serpent, because Eve`s `futanarian` human race of woman with her own penis` semen for her own host wombs was suppressed by men after Eden in order to enslave the host womb of the human race in parasitism for death in war. Consequently, Mary`s foot upon the serpent`s head represents woman`s crushing of war beneath her heel. God`s warning to Eve that the serpent will bruise her heel relates to sexual reproduction between women who`re `futanarian` and so have the capacity to produce human brains that aren`t damaged and so her species is able to run her race rather than limp as a brain damaged victim of the `serpent`s seed` into extinction:
` ... my blouse open for his last day transparent kind of shirt he had I could see his chest pink he wanted to touch mine with his for a moment but I wouldn`t lee him he was awfully put out first for fear you never know consumption or leave me with a child embarazada that old servant Ines told me that one drop even if it got into you at all after I tried with the banana but I was afraid it might break and get lost up in me somewhere ... `3
The words that are difficult for an English literature student are `lee`, which derives from Olde English `hlēo` meaning `warm`, and `embrazada`, a Spanish word which doesn`t mean `embarrassed` but `pregnant`. Joyce is describing a woman of his milieu`s difficulty with sexuality. In the late 20th century women lived in fear of contracting HIV/AIDS from men who spread the incurable `killer disease` through mixing blood, shit and semen in each others` anuses. Mrs Bloom`s concern is with consumption, which is a term for cancer, because she`s learned to associate sexual intercourse with men`s diseases. The embarrassing child would be the infant born brainless because she`d accepted men`s semen rather than her own species of women`s. But the absence of depictions of women having sexual intercourse in novels, or virtually any other form of men`s propagandist mass media, indicates why men are embarrassed brainless warmongers.
Embarrassed to be pregnant with a brainless infant, Mrs Bloom is Everywoman who prefers a banana because it`s more Christian. The absence of the memory of `woman`s seed` from the novelistic medium is an indication that men don`t want humans to have enough memory capacity to reject war`s brainlessness, which Remembrance Sunday effectively memorializes. Joyce`s knowledge of English language is indicative of a man with a brain capable of storing memory, and the description of Mrs Bloom is that of a woman struggling to understand, as she has no education, and can`t educate the reader, because of the novelistic conventional morality imposed by Christianity upon the intelligent writer. If women don`t sexually reproduce from their own `woman`s seed` as Christians adhering to the teaching of Jesus, `love your neighbor`, the race will continue to limp to extinction in brain damaged preference for war to health. Human brainpower is capable of developing science and technology to save labor and increase longevity so that women can remember how to deal with their enemy and so liberate the human race from slavery to death in warfare.
Criticizing writers for using the word `fuck` as encouraging `adultery` ignores the fact that `woman`s seed` is adulterated. Joyce`s depiction of Dublin as a `grey sunken cunt` is a description of the absence of `woman`s seed` and human brains in the aftermath of the First World War and before the Second World War in which the `chosen people` of the Bible, the Jews, whose tradition is that women bear Jews and Jews can`t be born without women, which effectively means that women are Jews, were exterminated by the Nazis in pogroms equal to the pogroms mounted against the Jews of Islam. Jesus` teaching was that the Holy Spirit would teach after him and, according to Islamic tradition, angels dictated the Koran (610-30 C. E.) to the Prophet Mohamed, which forms the basis for the Moslem marital framework of four wives. The historical antecedent is Abraham`s wife, Sara, from whose son, Isaac, descended Israel, and whose maid, Hajer, bore to Abraham, Ishmael, the son from whom descended Islam. Because Jesus was `woman`s seed` the Moslem marriage that provides the basis for `futanarian` sexual reproduction between women within the family is in the Judeo-Christian tradition of peoples` taught by the Holy Spirit. Men`s history is that of a brain damaged criminal that doesn`t want the human race to get off the floor and women are the `chosen people`.
Saudi Arabia`s Mecca is the center of the annual `Haj` or pilgrimage by millions of Moslems who revere the memory of Hajer, the second wife of Abraham denied by the Judeo-Christian tradition as a `concubine` and antipathetical towards monogamy. Even though Mormonism, which explicitly advocates polygamy, is accepted in the United States of America as a traditional Christian belief system, Hajer`s Moslems are disapproved of by mainstream Christianity for a polygamous arrangement which fulfils Jesus` mission. Sara`s giving of Hajer to Abraham, as Sara was barren after birthing Isaac, was polygamous, which slavery frowns upon, because polygamy offers an opportunity for women to sexually reproduce with each other their own human brainpower to escape from host womb enslavement to the parasite of war. Consequently, Christian preoccupations with the morality of adultery handicap an already adulterated human species trying to develop enough brainpower for the race to run away from the racists rather than allow itself to be led blindly over the cliff by the brain damaged legions of the damned:
` ... the unclean spirits entered the swine; and the herd rushed down the steep bank into the sea.` (Mk: 5. 13)
1 Joyce, James Ulysses, The Little Review, Chapter 4, Calypso, March 1918 - December 1920.
2 Lawrence, D. H. Lady Chatterley`s Lover, VII, Chapter 19, Tipografia Giuntina, 1928.
3 Joyce, James Ulysees, Chapter 18, Penelope, p. 533, Sylvia Beach, 1922.