Sarah Kofman once tells a childhood anecdote that her mother has forced her to eat as much as she can, whereas her father always gives a contrary order. Facing the maternal and paternal categorical imperatives, Kofman is situated in a double bind of eating and not eating.  In “Eating Words: Antigone as Kofman’s Proper Name,” Tina Chanter draws an affinity between Antigone and the French philosopher (1).  Like Antigone who is condemned to starvation in the crypt, Kofman, after the traumatic experience during the Occupation, “could no longer swallow anything and vomited after each meal” (2).  Here the oral testimony to Holocaust is some kind of nausea, related to the form of a fart. To write a wounded memory is to send off a lip-ogram, a letter missing and yet somatic in the traumatic narrative. The buried, smothered words in Kofman’s writings constitute a constipated body through which language becomes unutterable.  As jokingly as it sounds, Kofman’s association of her name with caca (pooh) and sarcophagus has demonstrated an anal-ysis of eating that ineluctably leads us to a binge of mourning (3). 

Joyce, too, might have prepared his literary concoction according to the recipe of death and loss.  Both writers seem to suggest that to masticate is somehow to masturbate.  The Joycean quizzical wordplay, words that play on themselves, has carried intestinal viruses of foot/d-and-mouth disease, and preserved as a letter in Stephen’s pocket.  “Mouth to her mouth’s kiss”—the protagonist’s lady of letters oozes grief and kickshaws (U 3.429).  Earlier, he imagines that a carouse would pierce the mail of his mind. Provided the soul is the form of all forms, Stephen’s envelope is similar to a porous body in which words are contained and need mincing in order for language to find an exit.  Recall Kofman’s metaphor of mouth, it is in comparison with a costive body that she remarks, “Generous mouth, spilling its offering of semen.  Closed mouth, mouth sewed shut, pursed, sealed.  Constipated” (4).  The mouth faces the nonplus of constipation, a dilemma of whether to digest or not. In Kofman as well as in Joyce, the issue of digestion brings about the question Diana Fuss poses years later: “what exactly determines what can or cannot be psychically incorporated?  What distinguishes…an edible object from an inedible one?” (5)   

The mouth bespeaks a contested site of ethical discourse charged with deprivation, nutrition, hospitality and hostility.  It is an organ that conflates mourning with burgeoning, vowels with bowels: “Mouth to her moomb.  Oomb, allwombing tomb” (U 3.401-2).  Joyce’s language is (de)structured like a gastronomic assemblage, a food faux pas rather than a mille-feuille nicely layered. Topographically speaking, the mouth is a “placeless place of articulation” (6).  Such kind of articulation is schizophrenic since a mouth is always double—it requires two lips.  In terms of Joyce’s stylization of cookery (or bookery), we might as well regard Ulysses as having a gaping mouth that utters ethical nonsense.  And ethics, especially that of eating, is none other but a heap of dung stored in our bodies.

In an interview with Jean-Luc Nancy, Derrida asks: “since one must eat in any case and since it is and tastes good to eat,…how for goodness sake should one eat well (bien manger)?  And what does this imply?  What is eating?  How is this metonymy of introjection to be regulated?” (7)  Derrida explains that the injunction to ‘eat well’ should be understood as an ethical imperative.  However, an epicure must be a dilettante in aesthetic killing—one has to eat well so much so that one appropriates the other unreservedly.  This concern for eating makes us reconsider the Kantian idea of taste, which, for the eighteenth-century philosopher, represents a social judgment (8).  Kant posits that we establish table etiquette fitting to a universal communicability. Derrida, nevertheless, sees an auto-affective structure in the Kantian paradigm of taste, which he calls “exemplorality,” or exemplary orality. Within the food economy, taste only functions at a visceral level and becomes a retreat of sociality. In “Economimesis,” Derrida asserts, “mouth…transforms everything into auto-affection, assimilates everything to itself by idealizing it with interiority, masters everything by mourning its passing, refusing to touch it, to digest it naturally, but digests it ideally, consumes what it does not consume and vice versa” (9).  He calls into question the border of this exemplorality.  How could it be possible to demarcate the object interiorized provided the object is annihilated in a pure form of subjectivity?  If aesthetic judgment is able to illicit disinterested, nonchalant pleasure, it is because the auto-affective appearance of subjectivity is not only objectless, but also subjectless—a subject non-identical to itself. The mouth eats itself up and then initiates a vomit.  In this sense, the mouth characterizes a status of an absolute other.

What decides what is indigestible for the mouth?  What distinguishes the mouth of poetry and speech from the mouth of disgust and vomit?  As we know, Joyce’s hungry hero eats all the time, and yet has no taste.  The shared seedcake, the passionate kissing between Bloom and Molly, only bridges two “flies buzzed” (8.918).  A promise of marriage, a promise of disgust. The oft-discussed quote “he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will yes” (18.1607-9), in a way, echoes a yes to the excremental.  In James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses, Frank Budgen reports that Joyce once tells him about Bloom’s “hungrily abject amorousness” (10).  In the encounter with perfumed bodies, Bloom is overwhelmed by a warm human plumpness: “with hungered flesh obscurely, he mutely craved to adore” (U 8.638-9).  To crave mutely, Bloom realizes that he “[m]ust eat” (8.640) due to the evitable circuit of digestion, imbibing and inhaling. Like his own hero, Joyce indeed must eat and digest the cipher of musty Bacon Shakespeare, hatching the mocking auric egg for pulling opal A. E. George Russell’s leg.  Eating, defecation, playfulness and mourning together mark Joyce’s Odyssean relation to Dublin or the Dublin literary circles. Not an entire exclusivity, but an intransitivity ‘mucking’ around.

Further, Joyce makes a link between telecommunication and food.  Stephen Daedalus, placing a call to Eden via the umbilical cord/telephone network, considers Eve’s belly a “whiteheaped corn” (3.43).  Enmeshed within connections of naval cords, a communication from stomachs to stomachs, Joyce’s characters are engaged in some telepathic operation and always longing for swallowing the other.  As Gray Kochhar-Lindgren puts it, “[t]here is no such thing as a monologue, whether it be Molly Bloom’s or anyone else’s.  There is, though, a telephony of the telepathic always at work in the soul” (11). The question of who is calling or who is eating whom is no longer important. One simply must say yes and must live by eating.

This function of telecommunication in eating, we might say, is also excommunication. Bloom calls the hour for eating “the very worst hour of the day” because it is “as if [he] had been eaten and spewed” (8.494-5).  The hungry stomach undergoes the process of mourning the loss.  And gastronomics becomes a way of courting death.  After all, “[a] corpse is meat gone bad” (6.981-2). If cheese is the corpse of milk, Bloom’s remark that “cheese digests all but itself. Mity cheese” also links the gorgonzola cheese he eats at Davy Byrne’s to something unassimilable, undead (8.755).  While cheese is related to corpses, it is actually a kind of food containing “the smallest ‘atom’ of living matter” (12).  The mighty cheese is indeed mity.  It makes reference to the mite, lice, life, and therefore affirms the infinite differences generated in death.  The “mawkish cheese” is reminiscent of the “[m]awkish pulp” transferred from Molly to Bloom during their kissing (8.851, 8.907-8).  The scene in which they conceive their first daughter foreshadows the death of their son Rudy.  Again, life and death have their liaison.  The time of fathering, the time of conception, is saturated with the sense of mourning and loss. 

Bloom’s “[h]ereditary taste” is heretic and heterogeneous in nature since what the son’s belly contains is a “good bellyful of…sewage” (8.174, 53). In mourning the dead son, Bloom contemplates: “Could never like it again after Rudy. Can’t bring back time.  Like holding water in your hand” (8.610-1).   His search for food, accompanied with his search for memory, traces the possibility that gastronomic need could be understood in a temporal and flowing dimension. Bloom observes that we are the most vulnerable during the “pudding time” (8.411). Vulnerable, vulner, vulnus—the Latin for wound, a wound caused by loss.  In this vein, the act of eating has everything to do with the recollections of loss.  In eating we follow the logic of “[e]ating with a stopwatch” (8.360) which indicates a proper manner at the time-table.  Following a normal procedure, we eat, carry on the dead, remember, and forget.  Nonetheless, such logic is a ghostly logic. If we cannot bring back time, it is not because time progresses in a linear way, but because time is spectral.  Upon seeing the time ball dropping, Bloom speculates on the parallax in time.  The different time zones suggest an indeterminacy of nows.  For Bloom, it is all about living presents.  To auto-affect one’s stomach is to produce a place of memory constituted not by numerous events of the past but by a non-presence of the present.  That is to say, the memory is nothing but the present, a multiplicity of “[f]amished ghosts” that feed on whatever “[t]ouched…sense[s], moistened remembered” (8.730, 899).
 
The aporetic wandering of Leopold Bloom resembling Odyssey’s homecoming and survival maps out a space where mourning circulates.  Our hero’s quotidian journey, nonetheless, is a journey without a period.  The inkblot at the end of “Ithaca” fails to put a full stop of daily mourning.  In Joyce’s Messianism, Gian Balsamo says, “Rudy’s constant remembrance cannot be exorcised; it turns the festive memory of his parents’ reciprocal incorporation into a burial meal.  Ultimately, it is Leopold and Molly’s symbiotic kiss, exchanged sixteen years before and turned into a burial meal…that determines all of Bloom’s culinary feats and decisions on June 16, 1904” (13). Rudy is not the only trigger evoking Bloom’s memory.  Even an egg is a ghost with poached eyes (8.508).  When Bloom stares at the postcard Mrs Breen hands to him, his eyes turns into oysters.  Mrs Breen, the ex-lover of Bloom, emits a “[p]ungent mockturtle oxtale mulligatawny” that makes him hungry (8.271).  The smell of mulligatawny soup, I will later argue, suggests the father’s ferocious appetite for his daughter Milly who’s got a position in Mulligar.

At this point, mourning has governed bodily cavities.  Thanks to these inner safes, the loss is preserved as “an outcast outside inside the inside” (14).  Derrida, explaining the logic of crypt as a function of keeping the foreign safe inside the self, points out that this site, the cryptic enclave, paradoxically “never stops eating away at its foundation” (15).  A crypt, the internal hysteria that sometimes manifests in the symptoms such as constipation, is a monumental effect of mourning and eating.  A crypt is “a radically other locus of subjectivity that could not be opened by the instrument of language” (16).  Food, as well as language, provides an oral moment in which the symbolic substitution is forever a “deferred filling” (17).  In eating, Bloom’s cryptic subjectivity bears a trace of multiplicity.  The hero attempts to hide from an acquaintance and exclaims “safe” at the end of “Lestrygonians” the culinary episode (8.1193). However, he endlessly keeps encountering other people and no longer maintains a rigid enclosure of the self. Eat pig like pig.  For Bloom, as for Derrida, eating becomes an imperative and inevitably entails a negative enjoyment, a process of expulsion, vomiting. And although eating always involves incorporation of the other, vomiting is what renders the digestive process impossible.  We swallow not in order to incorporate, but more importantly, to vomit, to constitute an unassimilable exterior-interior.

As Derrida says, the absorption of food is a progress of introjection/proper mourning, while the emetic is related to the fantasy of incorporation.  He writes that incorporation of the lost object “involves eating the object…in order to vomit it…into the inside, into the pocket of a cyst” (18).  In incorporation, the mourning subject swallows up and identifies with the lost beloved without digestion.  The encrypted other resides within the self like a parasite.  This interiorized subjectivity thus becomes characteristic of what Abraham and Torok term “endocryptic identification”.  They write that in the case of endocryptic identification, the I “is understood as the lost object’s fantasied ego” (19).  In other words, the illusion of the I is established on a fantasy of incorporation, an invention of a crypt.  The secret is folded up when mourning incessantly enfolds.  The mourned object fails to be introjected successfully because it is only in imagination, in retrospection, that one subjectivity folds onto another subjectivity that folds onto another.  Like an inner mouth, the parasites speak from inside through a kind of ventriloquism, a voice always plural, always in the procress of becoming.
 
At some level, infinite mourning begets subjectivity that carries secrets and differences.  In his imagined pregnancy, Bloom the henpecked husband lays eight eggs and becomes a woman, a mother.  The “Bloowho” becomes a flow-er, a genêt (broomflower) that has both a stamen and pistil (11.86).  Pondering on Stephen’s dietary habit, Bloom thinks, “Something substantial he certainly ought to eat, were it only an eggflip made on unadulterated maternal nutriment, or, failing that, the homely Humpty Dumpty boiled” (16.1569-71).  The word “egg,” associated with ovo, ovaries, and eier, German for testicles, connotes a differentiated sexuality (20). In a way, the folded scrambled eggs illustrate a figure of invagination that initiates a morphogenetic movement folding onto itself over and over again. The folds of life, the folds in between, the folds between two deaths and two sexes.  Even the inflexibility of eggshells is meant to be broken. No eggs are exempt from explosion of boundaries.  Joyce mentions the explosion of two eggs in the “Eumaeus” chapter.  The story of the “eggsniping transaction” (16.492) told by a sailor recalls another sailor’s egg in “Ithaca”: “square round Sinbad the Sailor roc’s auk’s egg” (17.2328-9).  The Bloom in bed spawns eggs with genetic variations (Sin-bad, Tin-bad, Jin-bad, Darkin-bad…). As square round, a squared circle, the egg occupies an impossible space generating infinite possibilities.  The roc’s egg belongs to an imaginary, extinct bird.  Yet this nonexistent presence implicates Sinbad’s survival.  Sinbad remains—as a testimony to that absence.

The egg may escape itself even in the state of self-preservation.  With reference to Joyce’s aging eggs, Don Gifford and Robert Seidman thus comment, “the Chinese preserve duck eggs by burying them in the ground…the egg undergo a peculiar fermentation in which the hydrogen sulfide formed by the rotting egg breaks the shell and escapes” (21). The fifty-year-old egg is interred, saved and yet cracked.  It undergoes a transformation via desubjectification and becoming.  It generates folds that traverse boundaries. The white becomes blue; the yolk becomes green; the shell oozes porosity and plurality. “Sucking duck eggs by God till further orders” (8.806)—this obligation to eat duck eggs indicates a necessity to incorporate otherness—something “high” or “[t]ainted game” (8.868-9). The egg, offering an example par excellence for “[a]ll the odd things people pick up for food” (8.856), is linked to sucking or any other events that takes place through a mouth. Rather than developmental formation, embryology is more about a cryptic, invaginated movement of esophagus, a route of consuming and containing, breaking and escape.  Undecipherable and unlocatable, the egg introduces an ethical imperative of differences.

Following this vein, we might assume that ethics features the figure of the mouth as well as the egg.  Jean-Luc Nancy, in Ego Sum, distinguishes orality from buccality—“La buccalité est plus primitive que l’oralité (buccality is more primitive than orality)” (22).  While orality concerns a face that seeks recognition, buccality is faceless, a mouth without a face and deprived of sensible sense.  The buccal involves a series of movements, such as speaking, eating, or vomiting, and yet resists signification.  This unrecognizable, buccal mouth operates prior to the Hegelian dialectic of desire.  It is the grin of the Cheschire cat.  Without the face, the mouth functions as defacement of ethics.  A gaping mouth is a wound unable to close or seal off (boucler), a wound that opens up the leakage of the ego. With the phrase “bouche bée” (mouth agape), Nancy proposes the possibility of infinite opening.  Not unlike Nancy’s metaphor of heart that is shattered in love, the mouth is disfigured (it can metamorphose into the anus) and permanently opened.  On a certain level, the mouth for Nancy is the face for Levinas.  The mouth, according to Nancy, is “l’étendue d’un visage, la béance d’un non-lieu (the extension of a face, the opening of a non-place)” (161) (23).

The mouth as a non-place belongs to the sphere of the il y a (there is) within Levinasian ethics which elicits the nonsense of being: “pain, an overflowing of sense by nonsense.  Then sense bypasses non-sense—that sense which is the-same-for-the-other” (24).  Levinas asserts that the taking place of the ethical requires one to suffer for nothing. All sensible beings are exposed to the nonsense of suffering.  Thus the sensible body becomes undermined by meaningless, nonsensical affect—“a surplus of nonsense over sense” (25).  Whereas nonsense is associated with enjoyment/suffering, sense emphasizes ethics and responsibility.  However, Levinas maintains that the distinction between the nonsense of the il y a (by-the-other) and the sense of responsibility (for-the-other) is ambiguous.  How can we tell the difference between by-the-other (being eaten) and for-the-other (eating)?  Simon Critchley describes the il y a as the “shadow or spectre of nonsense that haunts ethical sense” (26).  Seen this way, the act of eating is already a modality of being eaten. 
In “A Child Is Being Eeaten: Mourning, Transvestism, and the Incorporation of the Daughter in Ulysses,” Joseph Valente discusses Bloom’s relationship with his daughter Milly in terms of the economy of eating and desire.  For Valente, Bloom’s incorporation of food, along with his proclivity toward cross-gender masquerade, manifests an incestuous identification of the father with the daughter.  Milly as a kiddy (U 8.163) is related to the kidney which Bloom has for his breakfast in the “Calypso” episode.  During this chapter Bloom leaves home for pork kidneys.  While he returns, a letter from Milly is found on the threshold.  As he reads the letter, Bloom continues eating “piece after piece of kidney” (4.424-5).  Recall Bloom’s monologue in which Milly is both a “[p]ert little piece” and “wild piece of goods” (4.295, 429-30), the analogy between the daughter and the innards is made through the Joycean wordplays.  Later in the chapter “Circe,” when Lynch embraces Kitty Ricketts, he chants “Dona nobis pacem” (15.5640), Latin for “Give us Peace”. Here the association of Milly/kiddy/Kitty/kidney is pieced together through the act of ingestion.  As Valente puts it, “Milly becomes Meal-y” (27), and Bloom’s palate for innards becomes ersatz incestuous sexuality.

In his melancholic reverie, Bloom associates the Milly/Bannon affair with the tryst between Molly and Boylan.  Chester Anderson has noted that the “Calypso” episode indicates “Bloom’s repression of his incestuous desire for Milly” (28).  Bloom is anxious about Milly’s burgeoning sexuality.  Ruminating on the daughter’s letter, Bloom feels a “soft qualm, regret, flowed down his backbone” (4.447).  The incest motif seems to resemble the Carrollian obsession with little girls.  In describing Bloom’s affinity to Milly, Joyce pays a tribute to Lewis Carroll:

O, Milly Bloom, you are my darling.
You are my looking glass from night to morning.
I’d rather have you without a farthing
Than Katey Keoph with her ass and garden.  (4.287-90)

Authors of nonsense literature, Joyce and Carroll share a proclivity toward nursery rhymes, puns, and rebuses.  In “Circe,” Bloom’s nighttown adventure mirrors Alice’s adventure in wonderland. The porcine transformation of Bloom recalls the metamorphosis of a baby into a pig in the Alice books and the revulsion/attraction to pork in Kofman.  Engaged in a compulsory runaway, he ducks into the butcher’s, and buys “a lukewarm pig’s crubeen, the other a cold sheep’s trotter, sprinkled with wholepepper” (15.158-9).  Facing the presence of his father, Bloom decides to hide the food instead of eating it. He declares that he will “get all pigsticky” if he eats the pig’s crubeen (15.657-8), and then gives it away to a dog (a retriever that becomes a wolfdog that becomes a setter that becomes a mastiff).  Later, he loses his identity by becoming a pig.  The father is ‘glory’, or girly, the “[g]lory Alice” who occupies the position of a little girl (15.437).  Bloom’s identity, in continuous process, breaks down the structure of the paternal. At some level, it is not the maternal, but the daughter who laughs at the name of the father.  Indeed as Carroll and Deleuze recognize, it is only the daughter who could laugh at/mock the name of the father.  By ‘girling’ the father, Joyce leaves his family paradigm ambiguous. It is neither Oedipal, nor non-Oedipal. In describing the edibalization of the daughter, Joyce creates another version of oedipalization.  This punning effect, we may suggest, is the Joycean detour of sending the letter.
 
The letter, the “crumpled throwaway” (10.294), is also a litter, a textual symptom of the author’s obdurate, almost eerie, expulsion of psychoanalysis— as he later incorporates the name of psychoanalytic fathers into Finnegans Wake by inserting the phrase “Jungfraud” (460.20).  In diagnosing Lucia Joyce, Jung takes the daughter to be dementia praecox, an effect of the father’s schizophrenic writing style.  Ulysses, a book that Jung claims to “[turn] its back on [him],” deals with the anal, or annulment of psychoanalysis (29).  Furious at Jung’s comments on Ulysses and Lucia, Joyce declares that “my daughter is not my self” (30).  The figure of the daughter, for Joyce, seems to manifest the locality of the other. Yet, to what extent does this declaration echo Derrida’s law of the daughter?  Discussing Blanchot’s and Levinas’s works, Derrida notices the ambivalent status of the daughter.  It is the daughter, rather than the son, who marks the madness of sexual difference for Deleuze as well as for Derrida.  To further Levinas’s proposition that “the Other is what I myself am not” (31), Derrida proclaims the daughter as the Other is “the other sex” (32).  In contrast to the Law of the Father, the daughter’s law plays both a grammatical and a-grammatical sexuality. Impossible to define ‘glory,’ the daughter speaks the polysemy of madness: “my daughter, the law, is mad about me.  I speculate on my daughter.  My daughter is mad about me; this is law” (33).  The daughter’s craziness is the law (la loi), always feminine (34).  In her utterance of an excessiveness of yes, yes, yes, she echoes with polysexual others, articulating “the inflectional contiguity of the I and the we, the je and the nous” (35).

The female schizophrenia, the madness of the law, makes an impact on the father’s negation of psychoanalysis. Schizophrenia itself is a negation of psychoanalysis beyond its transferential logic.  The law of psychoanalysis is taunted as the “law of the jungerl” (36), the law of the jun-girl. Joyce’s denial of Lucia’s mental illness and the daughter’s refusal of transference; however, is not outside the visceral economy of psycho-anal-ysis.  The gesture of negation becomes a gesture of anal excrement.  Bloom defecates right after reading Milly’s letter—“He allowed his bowels to ease themselves quietly as he read…Costive one tabloid of cascara sagrada” (4.510). Molly, the stamp-collector’s daughter, keeps dancing in Bloom’s reverie.  “Her head dancing.  Her fansticks clicking” (4.528).  As a little girl, rather than a wife, Molly creates a kinetic memory of betrayal. Bloom recalls the affair between her and Boylan in terms of the adulterers’ pas de deux.  The husband wipes his buttocks.  At the same time, “girls in grey gauze” and “the knees, the houghs of the knees” flash across his mind (4.534, 542).  The logic of the knee (genou), again, plays, the never-ending game of je/nous.  The recurrent yeses of the little girl now accede to a plural self: “as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yues and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall” (18.1602-4). Molly corresponds with herself.  Like mother, like daughter.  Milly sends the scattered amberoid necklace to herself as letters.  The person who intends to write love letters all the time is in turn the addressee of a schizophrenic text.

Claire Culleton points out that the name of Alice has been inscribed in Bloom’s penis (37). In the cross-dressing scene, Bello, the whorehouse madam, tells Bloom that the petticoats he wears are “creations of lovely lingerie for Alice and nice scent for Alice” (648).  The soubrette costume now bears a signature on the part of the pelvis/penis: Alice.  Despite an unassimilable little girl, the daughter is still a “piece,” a “saucebox” that serves her father when he “[sops]…dies of bread in the gravy and [eats] piece after piece of kidney” (4.424-5).  This edible status does not render Milly a victim of the patriarchal authority.  Rather, the daughter is a disturbing figure, a metaphor for the obligation of eating. Eating one’s own children, one’s own legacy, is another form of eating up your past and future.  In “[t]he eating of the Other’s discourse…, what is transmitted is a pathological singularity, something impossible to incorporate or identify with comprehensibly” (38). The obligation of eating, thus, is an issue of intersubjectivity, or connections between bodies.  A being, while remaining singular, is contaminated by an indigestible morsel.  In that sense, to eat means to eat the other, the excremental, the filth.  What we swallow as a secret is something secreted, like a ghost which we attempt to exorcise in order to conjure it up.

Spotting someone from the vegetarian restaurant, Bloom gives us a reprimand against carnivorism: “Don’t eat a beefsteak.  If you do the eyes of that cow will pursue you through all eternity” (8.535-6).  The beef he eats makes him “on the run all day” (8.537).  The meat becomes shit.  All meals, in this way, partake of remnants and leftovers.  The emetic effect is at core here in that one not only has to eat the good, but to eat what is inedible: “we stuffing food in one hole and out behind: food, chyle, blood, dung, earth, food: have to feed it like stoking an engine” (8.929-30).  Rushing into the restaurant, Bloom feels that he “[c]ouldn’t eat a morsel” (8.673) because of the dirty scene.  Bloom’s feces are linked with absorption and resistance of ingestion at the same time considering his habit to read at stool.    In spite of his preference for clean eating, the ghost of urine haunts Bloom at the beginning of “Calypso” as he enjoys the kidney with “a fine tang of faintly scented urine” (4.4-5).  Fascinated by this oral-anus encounter, his mouth is full of shit.  The food that passes through the mouth decomposes quickly. For Bloom, death is incorporated and concealed in the fecality.  Defecation, as well as constipation, concerns the process of concealing/revealing. Since a corpse has a mouth, it is “[m]uch better to close up all the orifices.  Yes, also.  With wax. The sphincter loose.  Seal up all” (6.425-6).  The encounter with the dead, once again, anticipates the act of sealing and sending, a detour that starts backwards.

The opening passage of “Calypso” abounds with alimentary images—“inner organs of beasts and fowls…thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liver slices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencod’s roes” (4.1-3).  This initial relish for inner organs leads to Molly’s inner room where she lies on the bed with “large soft bubs, sloping within her nightdress like a shegoat’s udder” (4.304-5).  According to Joyce’s Linati schemata, this chapter’s symbol is vagina (39). By opening the chapter with images of dark inwards, Joyce introduces Bloom with a conflation of mouth and vagina.  Throughout “Calypso,” Bloom’s pleasure is essentially oral—“Kidneys were [always] in his mind” (4.6).  This carnivorous pleasure continues when Bloom recalls the kissing scene between him and Molly: “Ravished over her I lay full lips full open, kissed her mouth. Yum.  Softly she gave me in my mouth the seedcake warm and chewed. Mawkish pulp her mouth had mumbled sweet and sour with spittle.  Joy: I ate it: joy.  Young life, her lips that gave me pouting” (8.906-9).

The feeling of joy echoes Joyce’s signature: a plural joys, a joy that repeats itself.  Erin Soros acutely points out the series of puns on Joyce/joys/joy/Freude/Friede/peace/piece (40). She argues that Bloom’s pleasure not only lies in eating, but also in tearing.  He splits open Milly’s morning letter like he cuts slices of the burnt kidney.  After Bloom reads the letter, he thinks of “Seaside girls.  Torn envelope” (4.439), a reference to Milly and the piece of her writing.  The daughter is edible and so is the father.  Bloom finds his pleasure in oscillation between tearing and being torn, eating and being eaten.  Confronted with Bello, “Bloom squeals, turning turtle” (15.2902). The phrase is reminiscent of Bloom’s kidney breakfast which he “turned it turtle on its back” (4.386).

At some level, Milly, in Bloom’s fear of losing her, is a turtle-shell, or rather, something that hides in the shell.  Bloom describes the daughter’s onset of puberty as “coming out of her shell” (4.422).  The shell contains the matrix of the sea, and reminds us of the song about seaside girls mentioned in Milly’s letter: “Those girls, those girls, / Those lovely seaside girls” (4.442-3).  Milly is aligned with the seaside girls whom Bloom encounters in the Nausicaa episode. The equation “Milly Nausikaa” appears in an unused note that Joyce designs for this episode (41).  After Bloom’s risqué liaison with Gerty MacDowell on the beach, the daughter’s image is superimposed upon the seaside girl and other street women. Bloom recalls “[b]eef to the heel” (13.931-2), an expression first mentioned in Milly’s letter. In Bannon’s conversation with Mulligan, Milly is also described as “a skittish heifer, big of her age and beef to the heel” (14.502-3).   With Milly gone to Mulligar, Bloom feels anxiety about the nest now empty.  Like the sound of the sea deep within a shell, as Derrida puts it, Milly produces a mourning effect that forms a psychic place in Bloom’s memory.  The Milly-turtle emits a “mockturtle vapour and steam of newbaked jampuffs rolypoly…[which] tickled the top of Mr Bloom’s gullet” (8.232-4).  This edibility of Milly, to use the Joycean pun, becomes a result of the father’s adipose or “eatupus complex” (42).

During Bloom’s meal with Richard Goulding, the latter simply can’t help “harping on his daughter” (11.644).  This time Bloom orders his favorite liver, and Goulding eats steak and kidney.  Off stage, we have Molly and Boylan consume Plumtree’s potted meat at the same time.  By eating together, Bloom and Goulding “married in silence, ate” (11.523). This communal eating, with flowing music as background, serves as a model for what Bloom may call clean eating: “Clean tables, flowers, mitres of napkins” (11.570-1).  Unlike the dirty eaters at the Burton restaurant, Bloom introduces a proper table manner here: “bite by bite of pie he ate Bloom ate they ate” (11.521-2).  The bite-by-bite manner, in contrast to the ramming-a-knifeful-of-cabbage-without-digestion style at the Burton, implies a way of introjection or ideal mourning in which the object is successfully digested.  Nonetheless, it is also the moment when Bloom’s melancholy culminates due to Molly’s and Boylan’s tryst.  The time is four o’clock.  An echo of Bloom’s pudding time, the later declaration of Virag that “I’m the best o’cook” (15.2438), again, combines the culinary and time.  What is past is preserved in the stomach.  Four, fors, for—these words constitute Bloom’s ruminations on loss and its denial.  Despite Molly’s saying that the appointment is at four, in “Hades” and “Lestrygonians,” all he can remember is that the time is in the afternoon, and thus fails to indicate the exact timing.  As he fixes breakfast for Molly, Bloom counts, “Another slice of bread and butter: three, four” (4.11), and “Everything on it? Bread and butter, four” (4.297-8).  The traumatic moment of four remains indigestible.  It functions as a safe (fors) that saves something inside. The so-called clean eating in Bloom’s mind is not tenable inasmuch as he still feels “wind wound round inside” (11.1178-9).  Hearing the music, Bloom claims, “Four o’clock’s all’s well! Sleep! All is lost now” (11.1242). 

All is lost—Tutto è sciolto—a tenor aria from Bellini’s La Sonnambula.  The song is about the lament of love.  The musical phrase recurs over and over again in the chapter.  About to finish his lunch, “Bloom askance over liverless saw. Face of the all is lost. Rollicking Richie once” (11.646-7). Richie’s face is described as the face of the all is lost.  His daughter, Crissie Goulding, “Papa’s little lump of dung” (6.52-3), is confused with Milly as they are both identified as the “wise child that knows her own father” (11.644-5).  It is not clear to whose daughter this sentence refers since in another draft Joyce writes “my daughter” instead of “his”.  Analogous to Goulding, Bloom is despondent when all is lost at four.  The fors, the vault of the artificial unconsciousness, is occupied with plurality: the mourned is substitutable and yet remains singular.  The beauty of music brings out Bloom’s memory of Milly, Molly, and Rudy: “Milly young student.  Well, my fault perhaps.  No son. Rudy.  Too late now” (11.1067-8).  The lunch time now is a period of mourning.  Notably, eating foodstuff is interchangeable with listening or playing music for music has a mouth.  Suffice it to say, “our relation to music is one of mourning” (43).

The first sentence of the “Sirens” starts with “Bronze by gold”—the gold (or) is suggestive of an oral-cum-aural synthesis.  On one hand, the act of synthesis produces contamination and alterity; on the other, synthesis is a process of incorporation.  In the “Sirens” chapter, eating (the oral) and singing (the aural) sometimes overlap.  Not only the deaf waiter Pat is someone who has “open mouth ear waiting to wait” (11.718-9), but also Bloom “seehears lipspeech” shortly before he is about to leave the restaurant (11.1002).  The eye, the ear and the mouth are all orifices.  As Derrida states, “[f]or everything that happens at the edge of the orifices (or orality, but also of the ear, the eye—and all the ‘sense’ in general) the metonymy of ‘eating well’ (bien manger) would always be the rule” (44).  The necessity of orification is at stake here.  One has to hear even without the ability to hear.  The deaf Pat waits and listens.  The ear is closed open (ouvert fermé).  And the communication between Bloom and Pat is “the only language Mr. Dedalus said to Ben” (11.849).  The orifices of the body listen to the call from afar.  The ear and the mouth are permanently open.  In spite of Simon Daedalus’s allusion that “You’d burst the tympanum of her ear…with an organ like yours” (11.536-7), bodily openings are hymenal bonds not simply dealing with penetration, but revolving around the process of infoldings and outfoldings.  Above all, ears are “invaginated folds and involuted orificiality…restless cavity that is sensitive to all waves” (45).  In the name of eating well, one incorporates the flesh and blood of the other.  For Bloom, the language of love turns out an internalization of semen: “[f]lood of warm jamjam lickitup secretness flowed to flow in music out, in desire, dark to lick flow invading” (11.705-6).  The incorporation here becomes an audible process. Be there sound or not, the other is always audible.  When we pick up a seashell, we hear a blood-wave: “a sea.  Corpuscle islands” (11.946).

Throughout this chapter, Joyce accentuates the image of the shell, a cryptic place for sound, a “cave.  No admittance except on business” (11.943-4).  A shell as a crypt is not enclosed but leaky.  It is the most prominent body part, osmotic and ruptured. Bloom compares Miss Douce’s ear to a shell: “the peeping lobe there.  Been to the seaside.  Lovely seaside girls….Buttered toast” (11.938-40).  In Joyce’s Book of Memory, John Richard says, “[s]hells in Ulysses are often associated with emptiness, hollowness, and absence of life” (46).  Provided the shell is a tomb or crypt, we might as well posit that the shell is a signature of death.  After Bloom attends Patrick Dignam’s funeral, he sees an “obese grey rat toddled along the side of the crypt” (6.973).  This little rat from the crypt later becomes a shelly creature in “Circe”.  Crawling down through a coalhole, Dignam’s ghost is followed by a turtle shell, “an obese grandfather rat on fungus turtle paws under a grey carapace” (15.1256-7).  The figure of the shell reminds us of the Shelleyan signature, an inscription of the poet’s name that becomes encrypted in Ulysses (47).  In Defence of Poetry, Shelley writes that the “footsteps” of poetry are “those of a wind over a sea, which the coming calm erases, and whose traces remain only as the wrinkled sand” (48).  Hearing his own footsteps on “cracking wrack and shells,” Stephen contemplates “the ineluctable modality of the audible” (3.13).  The shell is first and foremost a musical trope.  It encapsulates dead treasure and leaks it out in a form of flowing. Chamber music is everywhere.  Or we should say, music is always chambered. As Bloom listens to the song of Sirens, “[h]e heard more faintly that that they heard, each for herself alone, then each for other, hearing the plash of waves, loudly, a silent roar” (11.934-6).

The whisper of the seashell is forever sought and lost, as well as “Human shells” (3.157).  Human beings are enveloped with crusts that are “baked through” all the time (49).  On the surface of this psychical monument, a Humpty-Dumpty-like eggshell, memory-traces are found or stimulated via various forms of sensation.  With this protective vesicle, the ego wards off the unwanted stimuli that it cannot introject (cast inside).  In explaining Abraham’s and Torok’s substitution of the shell for the Freudian ego, and the kernel for id, Christopher Lane writes:

Abraham’s metaphor of the Shell connotes an object with a large open rim withdrawing into convex and inaccessible recesses.  While this object’s shape is intriguing, Abraham implies that the Shell’s open rim is sufficient to “hear” and “receive” whatever “mysterious messages” the Kernel emits; unless repressed elements such as family secrets stand in the way, the drive reaches its destination in consciousness. (50)

In a way, the principle of eating and the principle of sending a letter coalesce when it comes to incorporation.  The ego, the envelope, contains and incorporates a mélange of messages.  It wears “a cap of hearing” on one side (51).  A sealed envelope, the shell contains the Somatic and unfolds the kernel’s messages from inside.  On this psychic membrane, the ghostly sender leaves a signature across the imagined boundary between me and the incorporated other.  The I who sends the letter am nothing but a specter.  Can one really send or receive a letter to/from the other? As much as the letter may never reach its destination, the assumed position of the sender remains.  At some level, the circulation of messages is always an address to oneself.  Like Molly’s self-addressed letters, all love letters are a kind of epistolary masturbation. Even in the phrase ‘Je t’aime’, the qui at stake here is the I, while tu is pluralized, unrecognizable.  Without exception, the love letters are spam mails disseminated everywhere.  Nonetheless, the destination of this sending the self is destined to be an inevitable tragedy.  The letter returns to haunt.  Derrida, in his argument about the detour of the letter, says: “It does not succeed in having itself arrive to the other….This is the tragedy of myself, of the ego, in ‘introjection’: one must love oneself in order to love oneself, or finally, if you prefer, my love, in order to love” (52).

As Karen Lawrence observes, men in Ulysses play a “shell game in the many pockets of their suits” (53). Before cooking breakfast for Molly, Bloom buys a kidney: “His hand accepted the moist tender gland and slid it into a sidepocket” (4.181).  To prevent the floating kidney from wandering around, he has to preserve it in the pocket. In Bloom’s correspondence with Martha Clifford, he keeps the letter in his pocket while using the finger to “[rip] it open in jerks” (5.78).  He “took out the envelope, tore it swiftly in shreds and scattered them towards the road” (5.300-1).  A moment earlier, he expresses the urge to tear up the letter: “Let everything rip. Forget” (5.293).  The flowery message is ripped to pieces, disseminated, self-inseminated.  The yellow bloom enclosed in Martha’s letter points to moly, the “yellow milk” (54) flower Joyce mentions once, and also to the post part/posterior of Molly, the “mellow yellow smellow melons” (17.2241). Nevertheless, Bloom’s kiss on Molly’s rump is stamped yet never arrives at the ass.  Bloom, at most, is merely an “[a]dorer of the adulterous rump” (15.2839). The destination is a betrayal. Deprived of full coition, he and Molly are en route to endless deferral of sexual satisfaction.  In mourning, the couple cannot have any intercourse except kisses on the bottom.  On the “adipose posterior,” the lover’s kiss is “obscure prolonged provocative” (17.2232, 2242-3).  The postal effect of the kiss delivers ambiguous meanings.  If to kiss is to heal the wound, then Bloom’s obsession with Molly’s bottom only reveals a forever rift wound, coldness, and deferral.  “[A]ny man thatd kiss a womans bottom Id throw my hat at him after that hed kiss anything unnatural where we haven’t 1 atom of any kind of expression in us all of us the same 2 lumps of lard” (18.1401-4), complains Molly about the Bloomian stamp on her buttocks.  Always two, always cold. 

In a letter to Frank Budgen, Joyce depicts moly as “a nut to crack” which has “many leaves, indifference due to masturbation” (55).  It is the herb that Hermes gives to Odysseus to break Circe’s spell, to protect him from transforming into a swine.  Joyce makes a link of the flower of moly to Bloom’s potato talisman.  The potato contained in his pocket, the “hard black shriveled potato” (15.1309-10), is associated with the nuts off side, something indicating the symptomatic body of Bloom.  He is, after all, diagnosed as “virgo intacta” because of amnesia caused by some family complex (15.1785-6). Asking Zoe to return the potato, he claims that the potato is a “relic of poor mama” (15.3513).  Full of personal memorabilia, Bloom’s pocket is a vehicle for incorporating food: lemon soap, kidney, bread, chocolate, etc.  The pocketed secret is protean.  As Erin Soros maintains, like Shakespeare who “carried a memory in his wallet” (9.246) Bloom too, carries secrets in his pocket (56). Stashing away his treasure, the hero hides Martha’s letter in his pocket.  Torn into pieces, the letter loses its signification, and deviates from its destination.

Under the control of Bella’s fan (folds), Bloom is still apathetic to the course of the postal: “I stand, so to speak, with an unposted letter bearing the extra regulation fee before the too late box of the general postoffice of human life” (15.2778-80).  Albeit too late, one has to send the letter, to send oneself to oneself (s’envoyer), and by signing, to leave the oral mark. Interrogated by Bello, Bloom is surrounded by his sins of the past including adultery, voyeurism, and indulgence of a “nauseous fragment of wellused toilet paper” under the influence of “gingerbread and a postal order” (15.3039-40).  It is clear that Bloom is a sexual pervert, but he is, above all, a masturbator.  Thanks to the masturbatory experience in “Nausicca,” he gains sexual release by “[putting] his hands back into his pockets” (13.559-60).  It is as if Bloom is ‘saved’ by the act of masturbation. His body feels the most comfortable when it is under the onanistic exposure.  Saturated in the Turkish bath, Bloom fantasizes about masturbation: “Also I think I. Yes I.  Do it in the bath.  Curious longing I” (5.503-4).  The body experiences a process of folding-up and longs to envelope itself, to incorporate one’s own flesh.  Hence, eating, even eating the other, has an inclination toward me.  Assigned an oneiric position, the letter is constantly on itinerary, swerving off from its intended destination.  For Derrida, a letter is always wandering even when it seems to arrive somewhere.  A missive never reaches the I, and it never has any specific sender or recipient.

In Ulysses, masturbating is often concurrent with sending the self.  After Bloom finishes his lunch, he receives a “quiet message from his bladder” (8.933). No sooner has the postal imperative occurred to his mind (“Postoffice.  Must answer”) than he begins a prelude of masturbation: “he slid his hand between waistcoast and trousers and, pulling aside his shirt gently, felt a slack fold of his belly.  But I know it’s whitey yellow” (8.1133, 1140-2).  Later on, he finds a piece of paper on the beach, a quasi-letter that he cannot read.  Trying to leave a message to his masturbatory partner Gerty MacDowell, he writes an “I” on the sands.  The tracing of the I, the “AM. A” (13.1264), is never completed.  A sending without closure comes back to the scene of eating. With his unfinished open-ended sentence, Bloom opens his mouth.  Simultaneously, the clock cooes “cuckoo” when the priest and his guests take “tea and sodabread and butter and fried mutton chops with catsup” (13.1294).  The knell tolls at the hour of eating.  The timepiece announces the husband’s cuckoldom and chimes in with a sense of being betrayed.  However, perhaps the clock does not sound the hour of betrayal after all. It conveys a message that one sends to oneself, a signature that is lost on the way.  Eating, the attempt to live on, turns out to be a kind of eating nothing but oneself.

Having mimicked Circe, Bello/Bella turns Bloom into a sow: “I shall have you slaughtered and skewered in my stables and enjoy a slice of you with crisp crackling from the baking tin basted and baked like sucking pig with rice and lemon or currant sauce” (15.2898-2901).  This association of ‘piece’ and alimentary pleasure is also seen in Stephen’s drunken evocation: “if desire act awfully bestial butcher’s boy pollutes in warm veal liver or omelette on the belly pièce de Shakespeare” (15.3908-9).  While the Hamlet-like Stephen is identified with the omelette/homme-let (57), the word ‘joy’ appears to mark a signature peace of Joyce himself (58).  John Cage, in Writing through Finnegans Wake, notices the tearing effect of the Joycean signature by linking ‘piece/peace’ to ‘joy’:

my lips went livid for from the Joy
of feAr
like almost now. How? How you said
how you’d givE me
the keyS of me heart.
Just a whisk brisk sly spty spink
spank sprint Of a thing
i pity your oldself I was used to,
a Cloud.
in peace (59)

Milly’s Christmas card also bears the author’s signature: “MAY THIS YULETIDE BRING TO THEE, JOY AND PEACE AND WELCOME GLEE: a butt of red partly liquefied sealing wax” (17.1782-4).  The card carries Joyce’s signature, a signature multiplied and self-inseminated like a flower: “My joy is other joy.  But both are joys.  Yes, joy it must be” (11.969-70).  The signature is a yes.  By answering ‘oui,’ the I/aye has become a ‘we’.  Sending, although it does not aim for the other as the recipient, is “exposed to alterity prior to any intention to communicate” (60).  If to send oneself off is to have relation with one’s own death, even in this singular death, we experience the counter-signature of the other.  The card sent to Milly, whose name begets thousands (mill-), is somehow analogous to the imaginary number (AA001, 11001) Stephen calls to Edenville: “Aleph, alpha: nought, nought, one” (3.39-40).  Not the one, but many.  The phone calls never get through.  The internal connection from one yes to another yes has curled its way back.

Whether the letter from Milly or the kiss from Molly, the postal and the oral face a quandary of subjectivity.  Subjectivity cannot be sustained through the subject’s overcoming of loss.  In the act of sending and eating, the other remains forever mournable and untraceable despite any attempt at self-assertion. In Ulysses, characters are continually engaged in sending a sort of dispatch that Derrida calls “the Ulyssean circle of self-sending” (61).  At some level, to send something is to write on a planchette.  Writing or calling, the affirmation of self-presence, is haunted by the absence of the other.  As Derrida argues, the phone call is always from interiority—“Mr. Bloom phoned from the inner office” (7.411).  All the time, Bloom is hooked up to an incorporated telephonic device.  The eaten has called from the inside of the belly, looking for some vent. To recall Bloom’s “pamphlet of which [he] received some days ago, incorrectly addressed. It claims to afford a noiseless inoffensive vent” (15.3275-6), the position of I has remained address unknown. Wherever the letter arrives, it is somewhere other than itself.  What we have here is only a farting body, a body that answers yes yes yes.