In Ulysses Gramophone, Jacques Derrida envisaged the possibility of calling his talk "On the perfumative in Ulysses", and subsequently mentioned a "grammar of perfumes" that would be set forth from "Nausicaa" to "Penelope."(1) This is the trail—or rather the scent—I would like to follow, starting from the middle of the thirteenth episode in Ulysses, as Leopold Bloom catches a whiff of Gerty MacDowell's perfume after she has left: "What is it? Heliotrope? No. Hyacinth? Hm. Roses, I think. She'd like scent of that kind. Sweet and cheap: soon sour. Why Molly likes opoponax. Suits her with a little jessamine mixed" (U 13:1008–11).(2) What exactly may be Gerty's perfume? Hyacinth is just mentioned in passing, and roses might only be a joke, since Gerty, like so many other women in Ulysses, "has her roses probably" (U 5:285–7). "Heliotrope," being a rarer word, is more likely to strike the reader's mind, together with "opoponax"—a rich, pungent smell associated with Molly Bloom throughout Ulysses. The implicit opposition between these two perfumes, and what they might be saying about the writing of the feminine, is what I will first pursue here.
1
The scent of heliotrope is the result of a little trick performed by Gerty, who always keeps a piece of cottonwool scented with her favourite perfume in the kerchief pocket of her blouse: "Gerty had an idea, one of love's little ruses. She slipped a hand into her kerchief pocket and took out the wadding and waved in reply of course without letting him and then slipped it back" (U 13:757–59). The missing verb is "see" ("without letting him [see]"), and the question of how much one can see is indeed central to "Nausicaa," bearing in mind that the organs associated with the episode in the Linati schema are the nose and the eye.(3) Later on, we learn Bloom did catch the scent, and perhaps even see the ruse: "Wait. Hm. Hm. Yes. That's her perfume. Why she waved her hand. I leave you this to think of me when I'm far away on the pillow" (U 13:1007–8).
However, instead of attaching his thoughts to Gerty, the smell immediately sends him reminiscing about his wife Molly's perfume, and theorizing about the scent of women in general: "It's like a fine fine veil or web they have all over the skin, fine like what do you call it gossamer, and they're always spinning it out of them, fine as anything" (U 13:1019–21). The notion of a trace left by women everywhere is part of Bloom's speculations about the workings of feminine seduction, the idea being that female charm works at a distance and that distance is part of women's power. Indeed, all day long, Bloom will remain at a distance from women, peeping at them wherever and whenever he can, both to enjoy their seduction and to guard himself against it.(4) Of course, both voyeurism and astronomy imply—or require—distance.
Perfume thus plays a part in the necessary distance of seduction. However, Bloom's nose seems most sensitive to the difference between Gerty's perfume, "sweet and cheap: soon sour," and Molly's more evocative and majestic scent. An excellent article by Judith Harrington about perfumes in Ulysses reveals that, in advertisements at the time, opoponax was known as "the flower king."(5) It is a rich, strong smell, rather sharp, comparable to musk, and like musk generally considered suggestive of sex. In contrast, heliotrope is fruity and much lighter. Indeed, the scent of opoponax is so evocative and titillating, that when Bloom is confronted with another woman's perfume, opoponax will come back to haunt him, just as Molly herself seems to haunt and obsess him throughout Ulysses.
In "opoponax," we can identify the Greek opos (juice), which suggests the liquid and fluid in Molly, to be confirmed later in the flow of her monologue. We also recognise panax (panacea), which is in keeping with the leitmotif running throughout Ulysses of the thought of Molly as an antidote to be kept by her husband; it reappears in "Circe" with the allusion to the Homeric "moly."(6) The thought of Molly is thus kept by Bloom throughout Ulysses, and this creates a network, or web, of leitmotifs associated with her, which can surface at any time, as if they were situated in some preconscious layer that could easily be summoned into Bloom's stream of consciousness. Opoponax becomes one element in that web.
If we go further than the etymological associations, and start playing with the word a little, then opoponax may become extremely suggestive indeed. Joyce chose the rarer form of "opoponax" instead of the more common "opopanax," perhaps in order to let us hear the French "au pot" or "popo"—a scatological leitmotif which will be fully developped in relation with Molly later on, especially when she spends half the last episode squatting on her chamber pot (pot) with her period (the juice again). This is in keeping with Bloom's fascination with his wife's behind. And he will finish the day, lying down alongside and embracing her, head to bottom, with her "plump melloneous hemispheres" (U 17.2242) his last sight and smell before falling asleep.
2
Gerty on the other hand could not be approached or seen from behind. Or rather, when she is seen from behind, as she walks away from Bloom across the strand, this is when the secret of her imperfect body is revealed:
This is the very moment when Bloom's stream of consciousness replaces the third person narration associated with Gerty, and this new narrative instance makes it possible to tell the truth about her. The word "lame," for instance, could not have appeared in the first half of the episode. It would have been turned (or "troped" into) some more delicate, sweet-smelling phrase, like the one actually used ("she walked with a certain quiet dignity characteristic of her"). Just like Gerty's behaviour is made of "love's little ruses," the prose associated with her is made of little narrative and stylistic ruses. To the girl's cosmetic façade corresponds the cosmetic quality of the language describing her.
Cosmetics are a recurrent motif in the first half of "Nausicaa,"(7) but it is not in any way emphasised or given an explicit central position. It works like a constant but disconnected infection that comes to disrupt the main narrative. This is perhaps particularly remarkable with the description of Gerty in the beginning:
It feels very much like leafing through a women's magazine—a strange blend of clichés borrowed from cheap literature, with a mixture of Biblical, mythological, and literary imagery recycled, interrupted by sequences of advertisements, with brand names and cheap cosmetic recipes. These two intertwined styles bear a complementary relation to each other, with the vulgar advertising interruptions betraying the delicate, ladylike phrasing which seems to be forever striving to remain the main narrative. This is obviously not Gerty's, but probably the style Gerty would wish to be used about her.(8) The end result is clearly a style not her own, borrowed even from other borrowings, and we understand why so many critics have reached the conclusion that Gerty was spoken rather than speaking—more spoken against than speaking.
Joyce has clearly buried her under a heap of devastating clichés. The concentration of hackneyed phrases and commonplaces in the first half of "Nausicaa" is a feat in itself. Setting the tone from the very beginning, the episode actually opens with a rhetorical figure which is in itself a cliché-pathetic fallacy: "The summer evening had begun to fold the world in its mysterious embrace. Far away in the west the sun was setting and the last glow of all too fleeting day lingered lovingly on sea and strand" (U 13:1–3). The setting chosen for Gerty is very symptomatic here because, being both heliotropic and lame, Gerty would only wish to be seen in the light of such a loving, but also feeble, sun.
Thus Gerty's cheap scent of heliotrope is but the representation of the cheap tropes and style associated with her. Gerty's heliotropism means she is forever turning her cosmeticised face to the light and gaze of her admirers, hiding her various imperfections and disabilities in the shadow behind her. Her elegant, gentrified style is the kind of style which turns (or "tropes") her on, but also "tropes" her out of view. Further on in the episode, Bloom says women "[...] open like flowers, know their hours, sunflowers" (U 13:1089). Like the woman here, the style is heliotropic, "sweet and cheap: soon sour"; but Joyce will have us, like Bloom, eventually see the back of it: and from the back, this women's magazine banter is rather subversive and healthy, albeit a little harsh on Gerty.
3
In Gerty's case, one can definitely talk of a character for whom Joyce—in true Flaubertian fashion—has meagre compassion and much irony. In contrast, Molly's strong personality and even stronger affirmation of it in first person in "Penelope" could well be announced with the sharper, more suggestive scent of opoponax.
Beyond the nature of their perfumes, another major difference can be found in the timing of their scents. As Gerty waves her wadding, she has already leant back on pretext to see the fireworks, and Bloom has already caught a good glimpse of her while masturbating. So the scent she leaves is only there to produce a trace, a memory, looking back towards a past experience. Molly's perfume on the other hand, works like a promise before one actually sees, or rather hears or reads her. And this may not only be true for the male characters in the book, but also valid for the readers, who read the lines about Molly's perfume a long time before Molly is given to them in the flesh and text. Molly's suitors—be they in or out of the book—will follow the scent and the promise it carries with it.
The readers' curiosity about Molly's perfume had first been triggered in "Lotus Eaters," when in the titillating letter sent to Bloom by Martha, we find the following post scriptum: "P.S. Do tell me what kind of perfume does your wife use. I want to know. Xxxx." (U 5:258–59). Thus we are left wondering what perfume is used by Bloom's wife. We wait until "Nausicaa" to find out Molly uses opoponax, and then again until "Ithaca" for the smell to be rendered more precisely, as Bloom notices: "A pair of new inodorous halfsilk black ladies' hose, a pair of outsize ladies' drawers of India mull, cut on generous lines, redolent of opoponax, jessamine and Muratti's Turkish cigarettes" (U 17:2092–94). This again is through Bloom's nose—and thus again in association with Molly's behind, or in this case—in characteristic fetishistic fashion—in association with her drawers.
Coming back to Martha's letter, we may notice that in her postscriptum, perfume is for the first time associated with kissing. In her article, Judith Harrington mentions that a good candidate for Joyce's olfactive inspiration could have been the Piesse & Lubin opoponax perfume, which was entitled "Kiss-me-quick."(9) Besides, the exact transcription of the epistolary code in Martha's postscriptum ("Xxxx" for kisses) draws the readers' attention to the writing of a kiss rather than to the kiss itself-and this is an element that we should definitely keep in mind as we reach the end of the book.
We do finally get a first-hand (or first-mouth) account of the experience with the kiss evoked in the very last lines of Ulysses, which, as expected, are suffused in perfume:
Derrida links the "perfumative" to the "performative" and to Molly's repeated "yes," which implies both a subject's acquiescence, but also the other, to whom the yes is addressed. Molly's "yes" (and her "eyes"—visually of course, the word "eyes" is only one letter away from the word "yes"),(10) asks Bloom to ask her the question to which she will answer yes.(11)
The notebooks acquired three years ago by the National Library in Dublin reveal that the idea of Molly's perfume started as only a marginal addition to the first draft: "so he could smell my perfume" is added in the left-hand margin, and a long arrow shows it should be inserted just before the last six words. It shows at this stage a first consideration of the other (Bloom, in this case) and of his perception (or smell) of Molly's perfume. In the final version—quoted just above—, this first marginal addition has been expanded into "so he could feel my breasts all perfume" (adding touch to smell), and the words "and his heart was going like mad" have also been included, again showing how much Molly is aware of, and actually checking on, signs that her lover has perceived and been physiologically affected by her perfume and seduction. Besides, two or three yesses have been added, which is both an obvious rhythmical improvement, and goes to prove Derrida's point about the parallel between Molly's "yes" and the taking into account of the other (or lover).
This first marginal addition about perfume, and all the expansion it has led to, shows that a parallel can be made between Molly's final kiss and Joyce's writing of the kiss: Molly's awareness of the other (as desiring subject) corresponds to, and even to some extent represents, Joyce's awareness of the other (as reading subject).
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This leads to a consideration of the readers' position and function in respect to this "grammar of perfumes." What is the reader? A subject? An object? A direct or indirect object?
In "Ithaca," Bloom had identified Molly's perfume as opoponax mixed with jessamine (U 17.2093), but in "Penelope," Molly mentions opoponax and violet (U 18.1609). It is only a detail, but it does remind us what an impossible construct of a character Molly is throughout the book, what a collection of contradictions, both in such details and in the profusion of contradictory myths and archetypes with which Joyce drapes his character.(12) The fact that with Molly readers are being endlessly sent back from one extreme image (or opinion, or stereotype, or myth) to another is well exemplified by the double, almost stammering, opposition we can hear in "op-op-onax." In fact, the reason why Molly functions as a convincing and effective character, in spite of the stereotypes of femininity used in her characterisation—in other words, what makes the difference with Gerty—is that the maddening excess of contradictions precludes the ironic reader-response Gerty triggers. By sending readers in all sorts of contradictory fantasmatical directions, Joyce makes it impossible for them to pinpoint Molly and hence construct a reductive vision of her.
The indeterminacy of Molly's perfume also reminds us how extremely careful we have to be in interpreting anything in Ulysses, and how useful it can be to consider several perspectives at the same time, which of course brings me to the notion of "parallax," a word Bloom mentions repeatedly in Ulysses. Parallax is an astronomical method of calculating the distance between the earth and a celestial body, by looking at it from different points on the terrestrial orbit. The parallactic calculation consists in drawing lines between the celestial body and two points on the terrestrial orbit. From those two points are calculated the angles formed by the terrestrial orbit and the two lines. Since the sum of the angles of a triangle is always equal to 180 degrees, the angle formed by the two lines can be deduced. It is called the parallactic angle, envisaged as if from the celestial body. Knowing the distance between the two points of observation and that the other two sides of the triangle must be equal, then the length of these sides can be calculated, thus giving the distance between the celestial body and the earth.
Bloom is the main mediator through which readers try apprehending Molly before the final episode, and since she is associated both with the earth (as symbol for "Penelope") and the moon (in the "Ithaca" episode),(13) parallax may be the ideal method to find her, both for Bloom and for the reader. When Bloom first mentions "parallax" in "Lestrygonians," he notices the Greek prefix, and evokes "parallel": "Parallax. I never exactly understood. There's a priest. Could ask him. Par it's Greek: parallel, parallax" (U 8:110–2). But at the other end of the word, the rhyme also brings up one of the very few words in Ulysses ending in "ax"—opoponax.
This is where the scent has led us. Holding together different perspectives, and trying to calculate the angle—as seen from the celestial body's perspective—, seems to have been Bloom's technique to reach Molly: looking at her from the front and from the back, multiplying viewpoints on her in fact, but also sympathysing or identifying with her to understand her own angle on things—in other words, envisaging the object as a subject. Finally, just as Molly's seduction parallels Joyce's writing, Bloom's parallactic calculation should be the model for our reading and interpreting Ulysses: trying to hold together as many perspectives as we can, calculating the angle as seen from the object's perspective, would be the best response to Molly's, and to Joyce's, perfumative performance of seduction. This should be the best possible interaction—perhaps the only possible consummation—between us and the text.
(c) Valerie Benejam, 2006