The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [339]
As the frustrated Bloom wanders round Dublin, his mind constantly harps on sex. Few passages in the book are unwittingly so comical to a modern reader as the extracts from the supposedly pornographic novel he picks up on a bookstall, which by later standards seem so tame (with supposedly provocative references to a woman's embonpoint). Equally startling to later eyes are the mentions of ladies' underwear. References to `drawers' and `stays' might have seemed daringly titillatory in Joyce's day, but today such lumpish terms are merely a reminder of just how complete was the repression of such matters to the consciousness of a postVictorian world. But what is more revealing than anything is the nature of the two sexual episodes which are described in any detail. One is the extraordinary scene as dusk is coming on in the evening, where a young woman, Gerty, and her friends are on the beach, watching a fireworks display. The solitary Bloom, still in his black suit from the funeral, comes up behind Gerty, who becomes aware he is watching her. She deliberately leans over to show him more and more of her thighs, exciting him to the point where he ejaculates in unison with the climax of the firework show. As she walks away, it is clear she has taken pleasure from arousing him in this manner. It is also clear that she is lame.
The second physical episode, forming the climax to the whole book, is that which comes right at the end of Molly's monologue, when she has been remembering, firstly, her lovemaking with Bloom on Ben Howth when they had first met, and then the passion of her first-ever teenage sexual encounter at the top of the Rock in her native Gibraltar. The two memories, interspersed with romantic images of the sun and the monkeys, the tropical vegetation and Moorish white walls of the Mediterranean, excite her too into stimulating herself, so that the book can end on her orgasmic cry of `Yes'. Two acts of solitary sex, by husband and wife, totally isolated from each other in their unhappiness and frustration. The contrast to the ending of the Odyssey, depicting a mature husband and wife in perfect loving union on every level, body, mind, heart and soul, could not be more complete. Yet what we are seeing is an exact reflection of what happens when human consciousness becomes restricted to no more than the ego, and the complexities of human love are reduced to no more than the physicality of the sexual drive. This finds its ultimate expression simply in the physical release of masturbation, stimulated by fantasy images in the mind. Once the sense of the Self and a living connection with the world outside the ego is lost, such is the sterile dead end to which the whole process must inexorably lead.'
The countdown continues: Lawrence and Lady Chatterley
Five years after Joyce completed Ulysses, D. H. Lawrence began writing in Tuscany the book which was eventually to make him one of the best-known novelists of the twentieth century. Published in 1928, and almost immediately suppressed in both Britain and America, Lady Chatterley's Lover approached what Lawrence called `the problem of sex' in a way totally different from Joyce. Whereas in Ulysses, the sexual act is presented as furtive and solitary, in Lady Chatterley the descriptions of the happy coupling of a man and a woman take centre stage. Indeed, scarcely has the novel begun than two things about it become obvious. As we first meet the heroine, Lady Chatterley, `a ruddy, country-looking girl' with `big, wondering eyes', and her husband, Sir Clifford Chatterley, with his `ruddy, healthylooking face' and `pale-blue, challenging, bright eyes', it is clear from Lawrence's novelettish tone that this is to be a story conceived on a highly sentimental