God's command to "Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the
earth, and subdue it" (Genesis 1:28), which the Catholic
church interprets in a remarkably literal and prescriptive
way, echoes throughout Ulysses. Bloom has no use for
the sexual totalitarianism. In Lestrygonians he
observes that its enforcers do not have to live with the
consequences: "That’s in their theology or the priest won’t
give the poor woman the confession, the absolution. Increase
and multiply. Did you ever hear such an idea? Eat you out of
house and home. No families themselves to feed." Still, he
feels the power of the call to reproduce, and in Oxen of
the Sun Joyce harps on the theme, suggesting that his
male protagonists have some work to do in the bedroom.
In Proteus Stephen thinks of his parents having
performed "the coupler's will." Gifford reasons that
God is the "coupler" because He joins men and women in the
sacrament of marriage, and it is His "will" that human beings
procreate. In a personal communication, Senan Molony argues
that the coupler, which Joyce does not capitalize, should
instead be seen as the priest who married Stephen's parents,
because he is the one who actually gave them the charge. And,
as Bloom observes, it is also the priest who enforces the ban
on practicing birth control. But Stephen is thinking of God
just before and just after he speaks of the coupler, and other
passages in the novel suggest that the Almighty has not
entirely delegated this particular "will" to his vicars on
earth. In Nausicaa Bloom recalls the Irish
expression, "As God made them he
matched them," which suggests that couplings may be
effected at a higher pay grade.
The distinction is a fine one not worth much argument, but
the question of how the church's teaching may apply to Stephen
and to Bloom is more interesting. Bloom thinks of the doctrine
in Lestrygonians when he sees Simon Dedalus'
half-starving daughter on the street. With no exaggeration of
Joyce's family background he reflects, "Fifteen children he
had. Birth every year almost." (The actual number was sixteen,
though six died in infancy or early childhood.) It seems
unlikely that the apostate Stephen will ever practice such
murine reproduction (Joyce himself had only two children), but
clearly he wants to find a mate, and clearly he is not doing
much to make it happen. In Oxen of the Sun, which
plays relentlessly with the idea that fecundation is a
divinely ordained imperative, Bloom grieves "for young Stephen
for that he lived riotously with those wastrels and murdered
his goods with whores."
But the chapter subjects Bloom to similar criticism. Another
of its sections condemns him as "his own and only enjoyer," a
husband whose field "lies fallow for the want of a
ploughshare." Having produced only one child who survived to
reproductive age, and having neglected his marital duty since
the trauma of losing his infant son, thereby making it
impossible to heal the breach with another child, is Bloom
failing, if not the church's command to subdue the earth with
children, then at least his biological imperative to
perpetuate his lineage? In Ithaca he thinks, no, he
has raised one child and therefore is not obligated to make
any others: "The parties concerned, uniting, had increased
and multiplied, which being done, offspring produced and
educed to maturity, the parties, if not disunited were obliged
to reunite for increase and multiplication, which was absurd."
Having sex with Molly after she has taken a lover seems all
the more undesirable, and absurd to boot, since the purpose of
sex is to create children, and that phase of his life is over.
But repetitions of the word "multiply" hint at the sad
sterility of the marriage. In Calypso Bloom thinks of
the Jewish people "multiplying, dying, being born
everywhere," and then of the Dead Sea, "an old woman's:
the grey sunken cunt of the world." Later in Lestrygonians
he dreams of governments giving every child a financial start
in life: "give every child born five quid at compound interest
up to twentyone five per cent is a hundred shillings and five
tiresome pounds multiply by twenty decimal system
encourage people to put by money save hundred and ten and a
bit twentyone years want to work it out on paper come to a
tidy sum more than you think. / Not stillborn of course. They
are not even registered. Trouble for nothing." In Oxen of
the Sun Mulligan lewdly proposes a fertilizing farm to
remedy the childlessness of women with no mates, or poor ones,
and thereby to "multiply the inlets of happiness."
This chapter's evocations of a God who insists on
procreation, and who is angry when his will is thwarted, echo
the Homeric god who is angered by the slaughter of his cattle.
It seems impossible that Joyce meant to affirm the Catholic
church's rules for sexual behavior, but it also seems that he
is affirming the deep human drive couched in the biblical
injunction. Edna O'Brien remarked on this contradiction,
noting that Joyce "at thirty-nine would weep because of not
having had a large family of his own yet cursed the society
and the Church for whom his mother like to many Irish mothers
was a 'cracked vessel for childbearing'" (1). Considering the
importance placed on children in Ulysses, readers may
well assent to the assertion, in Oxen's first long
paragraph, that "no nature's boon can contend against the
bounty of increase."
