Lestrygonians focuses on the hunger for food evoked by
Homer's story of the cannibals, but it pursues several brief
detours into sexual hunger. The first comes as Bloom stands on
Grafton Street gazing at "Gleaming silks, petticoats on slim
brass rails, rays of flat silk stockings" in a shop window.
Sexual desire, he thinks, generates this traffic in expensive
clothing: "All for a woman, home and houses, silkwebs, silver,
rich fruits spicy from Jaffa. Agendath Netaim. Wealth of the
world. / A warm human plumpness settled down on his brain. His
brain yielded. Perfume of embraces all him assailed. With
hungered flesh obscurely, he mutely craved to adore."
According to Frank Budgen, Joyce devoted an entire day of his
life to ordering the words in the last two sentences.
In James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses, Budgen
recalls walking with Joyce "one evening on the Bahnhofstrasse"
in Zürich. He asked how the writing of Ulysses was
going, and Joyce replied, "I have been working hard on it all
day."
"Does that mean that you
have written a great deal?'" I said.
"Two sentences," said Joyce.
I looked sideways but Joyce was not
smiling. I thought of Flaubert.
"You have been seeking the mot juste?"
I said.
"No," said Joyce. "I have the words
already. What I am seeking is the perfect order of words in
the sentence. There is an order in every way appropriate. I
think I have it."
"What are the words?" I asked.
"I believe I told you," said Joyce,
"that my book is a modern Odyssey. Every episode in it
corresponds to an adventure of Ulysses. I am now writing the Lestrygonians
episode, which corresponds to the adventure of Ulysses with
the cannibals. My hero is going to lunch, But there is a
seduction motive in the Odyssey, the cannibal king's daughter.
Seduction appears in my book as women's silk petticoats
hanging in a shop window. The words through which I express
the effect of it on my hungry hero are: 'Perfume of embraces
all him assailed. With hungered flesh obscurely, he mutely
craved to adore.' You can see for yourself in how many
different ways they might be arranged." (19-20)
As with the wax and rosewood sentence
that Joyce rewrote twice for Telemachus, these two
sentences are the product of obsessively perfectionist labor.
Joyce's writing is scrupulous to an extraordinary degree:
every clause, every modifier, every punctuation mark must be
the right one and occupy its proper place. Budgen also recalls
asking Joyce how long he had been working on Ulysses:
"'About five years,' he said. 'But in a sense all my life.'"
Budgen pointed out that some writers average two books a year:
"'Yes,' said Joyce. 'But how do they do it? They talk them
into a typewriter. I feel quite capable of doing that if I
wanted to do it. But what's the use? It isn't worth doing'"
(22).
§ One
more detail from the first chapter of Budgen's book may be
worth citing in connection with the sentences about sexual
hunger: "when I, apropos of some love affair or other, used
the conventional word, heart, he said in the same [blunt]
tone: 'The seat of the affections lies lower down, I think'"
(13). For all their poignancy Bloom's erotic reveries in Lestrygonians
are strongly rooted in sexual desire. After being assailed by
the "Perfume of embraces" on Grafton Street he thinks that if
he eats lunch he will "Feel better then."
He turned Combridge's
corner, still pursued. Perfumed bodies, warm, full. All
kissed, yielded: in deep summer fields, tangled pressed grass,
in trickling hallways of tenements, along sofas, creaking
beds.
— Jack, love!
— Darling!
— Kiss me, Reggy!
— My boy!
— Love!
Having lunch does not help Bloom much. Sitting in Davy
Byrne's a little later in the chapter, his sexual hunger
reaches a despairing climax as he remembers his picnic with
Molly on Howth Head.
