Hungered flesh

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In James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses, Budgen recalls walking with Joyce "one evening on the Bahnhofstrasse" in Zürich. He asked how the writing of Ulysses was going, and Joyce replied, "I have been working hard on it all day."

     "Does that mean that you have written a great deal?'" I said.
     "Two sentences," said Joyce.
     I looked sideways but Joyce was not smiling. I thought of Flaubert.
     "You have been seeking the mot juste?" I said.
     "No," said Joyce. "I have the words already. What I am seeking is the perfect order of words in the sentence. There is an order in every way appropriate. I think I have it."
     "What are the words?" I asked.
     "I believe I told you," said Joyce, "that my book is a modern Odyssey. Every episode in it corresponds to an adventure of Ulysses. I am now writing the Lestrygonians episode, which corresponds to the adventure of Ulysses with the cannibals. My hero is going to lunch, But there is a seduction motive in the Odyssey, the cannibal king's daughter. Seduction appears in my book as women's silk petticoats hanging in a shop window. The words through which I express the effect of it on my hungry hero are: 'Perfume of embraces all him assailed. With hungered flesh obscurely, he mutely craved to adore.' You can see for yourself in how many different ways they might be arranged." (19-20)

As with the wax and rosewood sentence that Joyce rewrote twice for Telemachus, these two sentences are the product of obsessively perfectionist labor. Joyce's writing is scrupulous to an extraordinary degree: every clause, every modifier, every punctuation mark must be the right one and occupy its proper place. Budgen also recalls asking Joyce how long he had been working on Ulysses: "'About five years,' he said. 'But in a sense all my life.'" Budgen pointed out that some writers average two books a year: "'Yes,' said Joyce. 'But how do they do it? They talk them into a typewriter. I feel quite capable of doing that if I wanted to do it. But what's the use? It isn't worth doing'" (22).

§ One more detail from the first chapter of Budgen's book may be worth citing in connection with the sentences about sexual hunger: "when I, apropos of some love affair or other, used the conventional word, heart, he said in the same [blunt] tone: 'The seat of the affections lies lower down, I think'" (13). For all their poignancy Bloom's erotic reveries in Lestrygonians are strongly rooted in sexual desire. After being assailed by the "Perfume of embraces" on Grafton Street he thinks that if he eats lunch he will "Feel better then."

       He turned Combridge's corner, still pursued. Perfumed bodies, warm, full. All kissed, yielded: in deep summer fields, tangled pressed grass, in trickling hallways of tenements, along sofas, creaking beds.
     — Jack, love!
     — Darling!
     — Kiss me, Reggy!
     — My boy!
     — Love!

Having lunch does not help Bloom much. Sitting in Davy Byrne's a little later in the chapter, his sexual hunger reaches a despairing climax as he remembers his picnic with Molly on Howth Head.