More than any other human reality, Ulysses is
about love—sexual love. June 16, 1904 was the date on which
Joyce first went out walking in Ringsend
with Nora Barnacle. (She pulled him off inside his pants, and
he was smitten.)
Fictionally, it is the day on which the sexual dysfunction in
the Blooms’ marriage reaches a climax, as Molly begins an
affair with Blazes Boylan. In Telemachus Joyce
implicitly connects the crisis in the Blooms' marriage with
his young persona's progress toward maturity: "Pain, that was
not yet the pain of love, fretted his heart."
In Proteus Stephen, walking alone on nearby Sandymount Strand, imagines
an encounter like the one Joyce found with Nora: “Touch
me. Soft eyes. Soft soft soft hand. I am lonely here.
O, touch me soon, now." He goes on to think, "What
is that word known to all men? I am quiet here alone.
Sad too. Touch, touch me.” Gabler’s 1984 edition
explicitly answers the question about the “word known to all
men,” by adding to Scylla and Charybdis several
sentences of internal monologue left out of previous editions:
“Do you know what you are talking about? Love,
yes. Word known to all men. Amor vero aliquid
alicui bonum vult unde et ea quae concupiscimus ...”
Whether or not this “correct answer” to the question belongs
in the novel, its mere existence in Joyce’s handwriting
encourages a reader to suppose that Stephen wishes to
understand the emotion of love better than he presently does.
Gifford traces Stephen's Latin sentence to a passage of Aquinas’ Summa
Contra Gentiles, several unconnected phrases
of which he recalls and patches together in memory. The sense
of the rather contorted Latin is that true love (amor vero)
makes one will another person’s good (aliquid alicui bonum
vult), whereas those things which we merely desire or
covet (ea quae concupiscimus) we desire for our own
good, not the good of the other. Aquinas is making an
essentially Augustinian distinction between real love (caritas)
and mere desire (cupiditas).
In a preface to the paperback release of Gabler’s edition,
Richard Ellmann commented on the inclusion of these sentences
as exemplifying the novel’s central message of
love. Ellmann's preface observes that the message is
announced again in Cyclops, when Bloom argues that
force and hatred are not the essence of life: “everybody
knows that it’s the very opposite of that that is really
life . . . Love.” The Citizen, his antagonist in
the pub, immediately mocks the Jew for promoting a Christian
message of “Universal love,” and the narrative itself chimes
in by mockingly chanting, “Love loves to love love . . . You
love a certain person. And this person loves that other person
because everybody loves somebody but God loves everybody.”
This may be sheer “twaddle,” Ellmann observes, but it aligns
Bloom’s world-view more or less with that of Aquinas, for whom
love is a universal cosmic principle deriving from God. The
annihilating mockery “protects
seriousness by immediately going away from intensity.”
But while diverted from “didacticism or sentimentality, we
perceive that the word known to the whole book is love in its
various forms, sexual, parental, filial, brotherly, and by
extension social. It is so glossed by Stephen, Bloom, and
Molly.” Ellmann’s un-Christian conclusion: “Affection between
human beings, however transitory, however qualified, is the
closest we can come to paradise.” The human love that Stephen
is struggling to discover, and that Bloom and Molly are simply
struggling with, represents a kind of universal principle in
the novel, comparable to (but radically different from) the
divine love expounded by Christian writers.
In A Portrait, Stephen’s one significant literary
accomplishment was a love poem addressed to the young woman
identified only as E. C. It is radiantly beautiful, but filled
with Catholic notions of sin.
On the last page of the novel Stephen encounters E. C. after a
long absence, and she "Asked me, was I writing poems? About
whom? I asked her. This confused her more and I felt sorry and
mean. Turned off that valve at once and opened the
spiritual-heroic refrigerating apparatus, invented and
patented in all countries by Dante Alighieri. Talked rapidly
of myself and my plans."
These plans include moving to Paris and becoming an artist, but
before he does so another woman intrudes into his diary,
recommending the emotional understanding that he needs to become
an artist: "Mother is putting my new secondhand clothes in
order. She prays now, she says, that I may learn in my own life
and away from home and friends what the heart is and what it
feels. Amen. So be it." The sentence in
Telemachus
suggests that he has made little progress on this front since
leaving home.
