Cian Hallinan on James Joyce's masturbatory odyssey
Now that another Bloomsday has passed I've just noticed that there are two types of people in this country: those who think it's a great day to celebrate and those who think, "What a load of old wank."
Well turns out you're both right.
As those pilgrims to the new Bloomusalem keep reminding us this year saw the 105th anniversary of Leopold's fictional trot around the city, but what actually happened to Joyce that day in June 16th 1904? What in fact made him choose that date?
On that fine June day, the young cocky Joyce waited at the corner of Merrion Square for a Galwegian chambermaid by the name of Nora Barnacle. Though she had failed to make their first assignation, she turned up this time.
The pair strolled leisurely out to Ringsend, where they sat down and where, as Joyce would write to Nora in a later letter, "you slid your hand down inside my trousers and pulled my shirt softly aside and touched my prick with your long tickling fingers and gradually took it all, fat and stiff as it was, into your hand and frigged me slowly until I came off through your fingers, all the time bending over me and gazing at me out of your quiet saintlike eyes."
A century and a smidge later, thousands of Joycean fanatics and thousands of people who only become interested in Joyce periodically (i.e. once in a Bloomoon) have flocked to the city to celebrate the very first time little Jimmy got a helping hand from a woman who was not a hooker.
The art of onanism was a constant concern of Joyce. When a stranger in Zurich asked him if he could kiss the hand that wrote Ulysses, Joyce replied, "No, it did lots of other things too."
Indeed masturbation figures throughout the text of Ulysses and each of the main characters indulges in a bit of it. Walking along the beach it is suggested that Stephen stops for a quick bit of self relief; preparing himself he thinks of a girl with longlashed eyes working him up to orgasm: "Touch me. Soft eyes. Soft soft soft hand. I am lonely here. O, touch me soon, now."
On the same beach hours later, Bloom ejaculates on to the rocks while watching the teasing exposure of Gerty McDowell. And the novel closes with Molly's soliloquy, a meandering lengthy piece of prose punctuated with her exclamations of masturbatory pleasure.
With his duel love of reading and spanking the monkey, perhaps Onan the Librarian might have been a better pseudonym than Stephen Dedalus.
In Finnegans Wake, that monumental work of mental masturbation, he writes of bespilling "himself from his foundingpen", of "laying cold hands on himself", of "palmsweat" and "Jerkoff" and "mastabadtomm". In a turbid haze of abstruse arcanea, Joyce wanks lyrical.
Is it any wonder he went blind?
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