Leave it to my hands
Leave it to my hands
In Brief
When the honorable Judge John M. Woolsey absolved Ulysses of pornographic intent, finding that it seeks to accurately represent human consciousness ("his locale," after all, "was Celtic and his season Spring") and that "nowhere does it tend to be an aphrodisiac," he charitably overlooked certain steamy passages. One of the most egregious occurs in Sirens: "On the smooth jutting beerpull laid Lydia hand, lightly, plumply, leave it to my hands. All lost in pity for croppy. Fro, to: to, fro: over the polished knob (she knows his eyes, my eyes, her eyes) her thumb and finger passed in pity: passed, repassed and, gently touching, then slid so smoothly, slowly down, a cool firm white enamel baton protruding through their sliding ring." This is pretty good pornographic writing—suggestive of graphic action, but not merely suggestive or merely graphic; evocative of various kinds of physical pleasure, emotional involvement, and desire; and palatable to both genders.
Read More
Of course, Joyce's sentences do represent the contents of
human consciousness, and to anyone who dislikes pornography
their artistic merit might possibly be defended on those
grounds. But such an argument would never have flown in his
time, and the fact that the humans involved are female would
only have heightened the ire of that era's pervasive morality
police, if they had been good enough readers to suspect the
passage of a dark design. The chapter that most excited their
outrage, Nausicaa, did so not only by making a
respectable young woman the object of a lascivious male gaze
but also by making her a willing, and more or less witting,
participant in the excitement.
The same is true here, where the bold flirtation that the
barmaids have been carrying on with the customers, the
admiring gazes that they have been receiving from them, the
maternal pity that Lydia Douce feels for the croppy boy
("Because their wombs," Bloom thinks), and the sense of danger
the song gives her ("Thrilled she listened, bending in
sympathy to hear"), all feed into the suggestive action that
she performs. Bloom looks at her "Blank face" and thinks,
"Virgin should say: or fingered only," but, as with Gerty
MacDowell two chapters later, lack of conscious awareness does
not imply lack of desire.
In the musical theme-and-variations manner characteristic of
Sirens, this passage cunningly repeats something that
Lydia said much earlier in the episode and imbues it with
lustful coloration. Recently returned from a vacation at the
beach, Miss Douce has asked Miss Kennedy,
— Am I awfully sunburnt?
Miss bronze unbloused her neck.
— No, said Miss Kennedy. It gets brown after. Did you try the borax with the cherry laurel water?
Miss Douce halfstood to see her skin askance in the barmirror gildedlettered where hock and claret glasses shimmered and in their midst a shell.
— And leave it to my hands, she said.
— Try it with the glycerine, Miss Kennedy advised.
Hands that tend to her own body may also tend to a man's. As Joyce
replied to a young admirer in Zurich who asked, "May I kiss
the hand that wrote Ulysses?": "No, it did lots of
other things too."
