Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- 1 Introduction: what hole?
- 2 The modernist rat
- 3 Strandentwining cables: Henry James's The Ambassadors
- 4 The Woolf woman
- 5 The darkened blind: Joyce, Gide, Larsen, and the modernist short story
- 6 The name and the scar: identity in The Odyssey and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
- 7 Skinscapes in Ulysses
- Afterword
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
7 - Skinscapes in Ulysses
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 January 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- 1 Introduction: what hole?
- 2 The modernist rat
- 3 Strandentwining cables: Henry James's The Ambassadors
- 4 The Woolf woman
- 5 The darkened blind: Joyce, Gide, Larsen, and the modernist short story
- 6 The name and the scar: identity in The Odyssey and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
- 7 Skinscapes in Ulysses
- Afterword
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Joyce once remarked that “modern man has an epidermis rather than a soul.” It is therefore appropriate that Ulysses, the story of a day in the life of modern man, puts the epidermis in the foreground. Joyce described Ulysses as the “epic of the human body,” and assigned a body organ to each episode, specifying “skin” as the organ of the “Lotus-Eaters” episode. Accordingly “Lotus-Eaters” abounds with references to skin, the action of the chapter interspersed with snapshots of epidermal suffering. The prose itself, speckled with images of boils, pimples, warts, bunions, flakes, and pustules, seems to be afflicted with a rash of epidermal metaphors. These images of diseased and tormented skin may be understood as symptoms of modernist anxiety about the boundaries of the human body. From a psychoanalytic perspective, such images reveal archaic fears about the fragility of the bodily envelope, fears – I would argue – that precede the Freudian castration complex. To investigate these epidermal complexities, the present chapter focuses on “Lotus-Eaters,” while branching out into the pimpled, scarred, and pockmarked skinscapes of modernity.
Despite the prevalence of skin in “Lotus-Eaters,” this organ was an afterthought in Joyce's plans for his epic of the human body. The first of his schemata for Ulysses, known as the Linati schema (1920), designates “genitals” as the organ for “Lotus-Eaters,” while the second, known as the Gilbert/Gorman schema (1921), replaces genitals with “skin.”
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Nets of ModernismHenry James, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and Sigmund Freud, pp. 151 - 166Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010