You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Plump, buxom Molly Bloom, lolling in bed soliloquizes '… I wouldn't give a snap of my two fingers for all their learning, why don't they go and create something …' (p. 195)1 thus putting on the defensive learned, articulate critic Mark Shechner who, criticizing Joyce's creation from a psychoanalytic point of view (not himself creating) thus attempts exculpatory justification: 'It is the task of psychoanalytic criticism to bring to light the uneasiness beneath the finished surface of a work of art … (p. 158). In some deep-psychic arena … the contents of the human mind are few, simple, and boring. But it is from that primitive level of psychic redundancy that complex intellectual and imaginative materials draw their emotional power …' (p. 8). None of which, surely, would mollify Molly. So Shechner has another stab at it, more candid: 'It may be that what we honorifically call the critical temper is really a kind of nosiness on our part and criticism a sort of formalized gossip' (p. 54). Now this, Molly—every ample inch a petite bourgeoise —would go for in a big way: as who would not, be his temper that of a critic, a psychobiographer or—a psychoanalyst?
There are few things written in English (if Joycian can be called that) more inciting to nosiness and gossip than Ulysses: in which at one moment the focus is so sharp that we can delineate the stain of semen on a shirt-tail; and the very next moment the fog so thick that we grope, dismayed, among the most deliciously suggestive and incomprehensible allusions, references and mystifications. The hints, the conceits and concealments are legion, the smell that rises to our nosy noses is rich and rife with all variety of cloacal and sexual fragrance, and besides: there are unpublished letters, scandalous letters by the author revealing the extent to which he—probably—revealed himself in his work or, as the case may be, concealed himself … What a feast!
And Shechner, from the first chapter on, is a splendid gossi