"Hypsos" or "Spadia"? Rethinking Androgyny in Ulysses with Help from Sacher-Masoch

Abstract

Locating moments of androgynous consciousness in Joyce is not difficult, but explaining their significance has consistently baffled critics. While many scholars have noted that in general Joyce's aesthetics are connected to his interest in androgyny, critical debate on these questions has centered for the most part on whether Joyce's ideas about art and the imagination are or are not misogynistic or reactionary. To the question What is their function? critics have tried to ascertain the degree to which these androgynous images represent either violent appropriation of metaphors of procreation or liberalizing social gesture.(1) The problem with these positions is that they ultimately dehistoricize and decontextualize Joyce's efforts to come to terms with new sexual landscape. Rather than threatening him sexually, the entrance of women into the world of arts and letters had specific artistic consequence: It rendered his inherited model of artistic production obsolete by destabilizing the once normative relation between male artist/subject and female muse/object. For example, in Stephen Hero, when Stephen shows his brother his poems, Maurice asked who the woman was. Stephen looked little vaguely before him before answering and in the end had to answer that he didn't know who she was. (36) Rather than source of transcendent inspiration, the Romantic Muse has been reduced to an outworn, meaningless trope bearing little resemblance to the real-life struggles and aspirations of complex modern Dublin women like Emma Clery. I would like to explore the ways in which the historically specific concept of an androgynous imagination functions as Joyce's troubled solution to this crisis of authorship by taking closer look at Bloom's masochistic nightmares in the Circe section of Ulysses. Diagnosed as bisexually abnormal by sex-specialist Buck Mulligan (402), Leopold Paula Bloom is presented in his Circean fantasy as a finished example of the new womanly man (403). Yet while the language of medical anomaly parodies the sexual degeneracy theories of modern scientists, Joyce - himself former medical student - also shapes their rhetoric to make more positive comment about Bloom's androgynous condition; specifically, we are told that he manifests something called hypsospadia (402). While the disease sounds lot like hypospadia, medical/sexual deformity that is characterized in men by an increased opening of the urethra on the underside of the penis that makes the external genitalia look more like woman's, the addition of the s turns what might be read as degenerate hermaphroditic condition into transcendent and empowering one, as indicated by the term As Paul Scorn has pointed out, such an addition strongly suggests that this combination of the masculine and feminine traits in single individual is higher form of human life (114), and that this kind of progressive evolution (109) is what Circe, and large portion of Ulysses, is all about. Yet I think we can take the significance of this term even further, for is term not only associated with height or transcendence; it has an intertextual link as well with Longinus's treatise on the sublime, or as he calls it, hypsos. Longinus associates the term hypsos with especially powerful, transportive discourse. That Joyce links it with androgyny suggests that sexual indeterminacy, not the possession of an indeterminate Muse, is connected on figurative level with heightened artistic ability. Joyce did have precedent for connecting the potential for transcendent creative abilities with an androgynous consciousness: the same sex theory on which much of the discussions in Circe are based. This chapter is rich with allusion to the work of Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Havelock Ellis, Edward Carpenter, and Otto Weininger; and Joyce builds on their universal belief that artistic aptitude is often concomitant with kind of psychic hermaphroditism, or the swift and constant interaction between masculine and feminine elements (Carpenter 192) or plasms (Weininger 17) in the brain. …