Joyce and Herrick.

Contemporary critics of Joyce's Chamber Music (1907) saw in these early poems "something of the spirit of Waller and Herrick," "a courtliness that reminds one of Herrick and Lovelace" and "the lucid sensibility of Jonson and Herrick." Ezra Pound observed, "the wording is Elizabethan, the metres at times suggesting Herrick" (Robert Deming, ed., James Joyce: The_Critical Heritage (Lon: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970, 41, 44, 46, 168). There are also three references to Herrick in Ulysses (1922). Joyce takes "cherryripe red lips" from Herrick's lyric "Cherrie-ripe," slightly misquotes "a slight disorder in her dress" from "Delight in Disorder" and accurately quotes "Bid me to live and I will live thy protestant [suitor] to be" from "To Anthea, who may command him any thing" (Ulysses, ed. Hans Walter Gabler, NY: Vintage, 1986, 285:2, 340:1-2, 540:7-8, quoting The Complete Poetry of Robert Herrick, ed. J. Max Patrick, NY: Anchor, 1963, 30, 41, 149).

Two Herrick poems play a thematic rather than stylistic role in Ulysses and illuminate the bizarre sex life of Leopold and Molly Bloom. The buxom singer Molly, aged thirty-four, is the daughter of an Irish father and Spanish mother. Unlike Penelope, her faithful Homeric prototype, she lacks the traditional feminine qualities: gentleness, tenderness and affection. She defies social convention and is slothful, sensual and unfaithful. Bloom, aged thirty-eight, a Dublin Jew and advertising canvasser, is unusually sensitive and intelligent. They've been married for sixteen years but, following the death of their infant son Rudy, have not had complete sexual intercourse for ten years.

Molly's Homeric catalogue of real and imagined lovers features an Italian organ-grinder and the Lord Mayor of Dublin; the naval lieutenant, Mulvey, who'd known her when she was a girl in Gibraltar; the army lieutenant, Stanley Gardner, killed in the Boer War; the tenor Bartell d'Arcy; Stephen's father, Simon Dedalus; and Blazes Boylan, who has sex with her on the day the novel takes place. None of her numerous lovers has got her pregnant; and she makes Boylan withdraw and ejaculate on her.

Critics like Hugh Kenner, claiming her list is entirely imaginary, have argued that Molly had no lovers before Boylan. But all Dublin believes she's had many love affairs. A woman with her prodigious sexual appetite would not wait ten years and then make such a calculated and public assignation with Boylan; she would not permit, after a decade of abstinence, his crude and abrupt assault; and she would not suddenly gain her husband's tame acquiescence. Boylan plays the role of Judas in the novel. A betrayer, but necessary to achieve a higher end, he arouses Molly physically and Bloom mentally, and (we are led to believe) brings them together sexually. During Molly's encounter with Boylan, she frequently thinks of Bloom and desires him more than her current lover.

Bloom, afraid of creating another child who might die, associates the womb with death. Both pander and cuckold, he assumes responsibility for Molly's adultery. He's refused to sleep with his intensely physical and emotionally demanding wife, and quite understands why she seeks satisfaction elsewhere. Bloom thinks: "Unhappy woman, she had been too long and too persistently denied her legitimate prerogative" (334). Molly, in a rare moment of self-reflection and moral judgment, agrees with him: "serves him right its all his own fault if I am an adulteress" (641). Throughout the novel Bloom seeks a series of imaginary escapes from the chaos and disintegration that surrounds him: a country estate ("Bloom Cottage. Saint Leopold's. Flowerville." 587) and a journey to the East, doses of drugs and sexual fantasies. Most particularly, he's a clothes fetishist, obsessed by women's underwear. In Herrick's delightful, previously quoted "Delight in Disorder," he finds beauty in the becoming negligence of a woman's garments. The poem opens with the Bloomian premise: "A Sweet disorder in the dresse / Kindles in cloathes a wantonnesse." He describes how distracted linen, erring lace, neglectful cuffs, confused ribbons, waving petticoats and careless shoe-strings "Doe more bewitch me, then when Art / Is too precise in every part" (Herrick 41).

In the novel, Bloom is similarly riveted and wildly excited by seeing the underwear of Gerty McDowell, who shows herself off and attracts his avid attention to compensate for her crippled condition. Alluding to Fragonard's provocative painting The Swing (1766), in which the lady reveals her undergarments to an excited spectator, and evoking Bloom's stream of consciousness, Joyce writes: "he could see her other things too.... and she let him and she saw that he saw.... [and] he had a full view high up above her knee where no-one ever not even on the swing" saw her (300). Molly knows "hes mad on the subject of drawers" and is quite willing to accommodate him in the bed she's just shared with Boylan: "if he wants to kiss my bottom Ill drag open my drawers and bulge it right out in his face" (614, 642).

A foot as well as a lingerie fetishist, Bloom has devised a unique way, while sleeping with Molly, to avoid the dreaded conception of another child. When entering the bed he "removed a pillow from the head to the foot of the bed, prepared the bedlinen accordingly and entered the bed" (601). A few pages later Joyce, with deliberate pedantry, describes their counter-positions, as if sighting a ship at sea, in terms of latitude and longitude (606). Molly, who can't quite get used to his strange behavior, puns on "creation" as she drifts off to sleep: "I suppose there isn't in all creation another man with the habits he has look at the way hes sleeping at the foot of the bed how can he without a hard bolster its well he doesn't kick or he might knock out all my teeth" (634).

Bloom's peculiar position was inspired by Herrick's rich four-line poem, "North and South" (1647), which synthesizes several important themes in the novel:

   The Jewes in their beds, and offices of ease,
   Plac't North and South, for these cleane purposes;
   That man's uncomely froth might not molest
   God's wayes and walks, which lie still East and West. (511)

In both Joyce and Herrick the north-south alignment is intended to prevent conception by chaste behavior instead of encouraging uncomely sperm. Bloom, of course, is the Jew upside down in bed, associated with the north (Ireland) and the east (ancestral Hungary and Palestine, at the eastern end of the Mediterranean). Molly, at his side, is associated with the south (Spain) and the west (Gibraltar, at the western end of the Mediterranean). Between them, these universal characters encompass the geographical and cultural boundaries of Europe.

Jeffrey Meyers, Berkeley, California