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James Joyce and masturbation

The theme of masturbation in Joyce is pervasive, but I've never seen these references inventoried.

Proceeding chronologically, Joyce discovered masturbation c1896, at 13 or 14yo. In late 1917, vacationing in Locarno, as Joyce was preparing the Telemachia for publication, he had a flirtation with 26yo recovering TB-victim Dr Gertrude Kaempffer, and wrote her a letter describing his first sexual experience. She destroyed the letter but described it to Ellmann in 1963 as saying that at fourteen (or possibly in his 14th year?) [quoting Ellmann here, E418-19]:

"...he was walking with the family nanny through fields on the edge of a wood when she suddenly apologized and asked him to look the other way. As he did so he heard the sound of liquid splashing on the ground. (Joyce used the word 'piss.' with which the young doctor was unfamiliar.) The sound aroused him: 'I jiggled furiously,' he wrote. (Earwicker was accused of the same offense.) She did not understand this phrase either."

I suspect the word he used was really 'frigged' but 'jiggled' might mean he didn't touch himself but created friction by jiggling up and down. ('Frigged' doesn't always seem to mean masturbated, either...?)

It will probably be possible to date this via the clues of 'woods' and 'nanny' to either the Drumcondra house in early 1896, or the Fairview house in late 1896. [map: J95 or J97]

Joyce had been elected to the sodality at Belvedere in Dec 1895, and in Sept 1896 was elected prefect. The rector, Father Henry, interviewed Stannie at some point about his brother's moral life, and Stannie for whatever reason almost destroyed James by reporting that he'd engaged in some sexplay with the nanny (how much Stannie really knew then is uncertain).

The nanny was dismissed (Costello p135 imagines she was named Mary Driscoll, and claims she was paid only four pounds per year!?? cf [prices]) but Joyce managed to charm his way out of it.

Joyce also implies he had been present (but not watching) in June 1894 when the 'Captain of Fifty' masturbated in "An Encounter":

After a long while his monologue paused. He stood up slowly, saying that he had to leave us for a minute or so, a few minutes, and, without changing the direction of my gaze, I saw him walking slowly away from us towards the near end of the field. We remained silent when he had gone. After a silence of a few minutes I heard Mahony exclaim:

"I say! Look what he's doing!"

As I neither answered nor raised my eyes Mahony exclaimed again: "I say ... He's a queer old josser!"

"In case he asks us for our names," I said, "let you be Murphy and I'll be Smith."

We said nothing further to each other.

(Mahony was actually Stannie!)

'Portrait' implies that Joyce had access to some sort of disreputable literature while at Belvedere:

All the leisure which his school life left him was passed in the company of subversive writers whose gibes and violence of speech set up a ferment in his brain before they passed out of it into his crude writings.

This seems carefully phrased to suggest that he was reading advanced writers at an early age, but he never cited anything more adventurous than Hardy and Meredith in any writing that survives. I suspect more likely it was Police-Gazette style pornography. (Joyce avidly sought out books by Erckmann-Chatrian in 1898, so I wonder if they had a pornographic element?) [calendar of reading]

Stannie describes Joyce spending hours studying in his room, and coming down after with a strange glow, but since Joyce's marks were really pretty bad, given his supergenius intelligence, my suspicion is that he wasn't really studying!

After the Hellfire retreat Stephen thinks:

Shame rose from his smitten heart and flooded his whole being. The image of Emma appeared before him and, under her eyes, the flood of shame rushed forth anew from his heart. If she knew to what his mind had subjected her or how his brutelike lust had torn and trampled upon her innocence! Was that boyish love? Was that chivalry? Was that poetry? The sordid details of his orgies stank under his very nostrils: the sootcoated packet of pictures which he had hidden in the flue of the fireplace and in the presence of whose shameless or bashful wantonness he lay for hours sinning in thought and deed; his monstrous dreams, peopled by apelike creatures and by harlots with gleaming jewel eyes; the foul long letters he had written in the joy of guilty confession and carried secretly for days and days only to throw them under cover of night among the grass in the corner of a field or beneath some hingeless door or in some niche in the hedges where a girl might come upon them as she walked by and read them secretly. Mad! Mad! Was it possible he had done these things? A cold sweat broke out upon his forehead as the foul memories condensed within his brain.

Joyce also carefully confuses the timeline of the retreat, dating it to Belvedere but implying that he was already visiting prostitutes before age 16. Costello argues convincingly (p151) that Joyce's first prostitute was in the second week of August 1898, a few weeks after the vision of Lucy the birdgirl, between graduating Belvedere and starting at University.

Joyce was certain that masturbation was general over Ireland, and he shocked his acquaintances by speaking freely about it. There's a great anecdote someone tells of a speech given by one of the heads of the University where he praised the students' chastity in this regard, Joyce from his seat in the audience greeting this comment with a very audible guffaw!

3 Dec 1904 letter to Stannie, re Nora: "...She has told me something of her youth, and admits the gentle art of self satisfaction."

Chamber Music

Referring to Dubliners in 1905, Joyce explained "the spirit directing my pen seems to me... plainly mischievous..." The same has been claimed for his earlier poems, published in 1907 as Chamber Music, which open with this vaguely ambiguous image: [etext]

All softly playing,
    With head to the music bent,
And fingers straying
    Upon an instrument.

Dubliners

Besides Encounter, there's this suggestive image from Lenehan in Two Gallants: "He was tired of knocking about, of pulling the devil by the tail, of shifts and intrigues."

Portrait

-- Anything else, my child?
There was no help. He murmured:
-- I... committed sins of impurity, father.
The priest did not turn his head.
-- With yourself, my child?
-- And... with others.
-- With women, my child?
-- Yes, father.
-- Were they married women, my child?

He did not know. His sins trickled from his lips, one by one, trickled in shameful drops from his soul festering and oozing like a sore, a squalid stream of vice. The last sins oozed forth, sluggish, filthy. There was no more to tell. He bowed his head, overcome.

The priest was silent. Then he asked:
-- How old are you, my child?
-- Sixteen, father.

The priest passed his hand several times over his face. Then, resting his forehead against his hand, he leaned towards the grating and, with eyes still averted, spoke slowly. His voice was weary and old.

-- You are very young, my child, he said, and let me implore of you to give up that sin. It is a terrible sin. It kills the body and it kills the soul. It is the cause of many crimes and misfortunes. Give it up, my child, for God's sake. It is dishonourable and unmanly. You cannot know where that wretched habit will lead you or where it will come against you. As long as you commit that sin, my poor child, you will never be worth one farthing to God. Pray to our mother Mary to help you. She will help you, my child. Pray to Our Blessed Lady when that sin comes into your mind. I am sure you will do that, will you not? You repent of all those sins. I am sure you do. And you will promise God now that by His holy grace you will never offend Him any more by that wicked sin. You will make that solemn promise to God, will you not?

-- Yes, father.

(If there really was such a retreat every December, Joyce's sixteenth December would have been 1898, in his first year of university. This would also be after the first prostitute.)

Telemachus:

The first (?) reference to masturbation in Ulysses is this special mystery from Mulligan:

The key scraped round harshly twice and, when the heavy door had been set ajar, welcome light and bright air entered. Haines stood at the doorway, looking out. Stephen haled his upended valise to the table and sat down to wait. Buck Mulligan tossed the fry onto the dish beside him. Then he carried the dish and a large teapot over to the table, set them down heavily and sighed with relief.

-- I'm melting, he said, as the candle remarked when... But hush! Not a word more on that subject! Kinch, wake up! Bread, butter, honey. Haines, come in. The grub is ready. Bless us, O Lord, and these thy gifts. Where's the sugar? O, jay, there's no milk.

I'd like to propose a longshot hypothesis as annotation to this:

Most commentators accept Gogarty's explanation of Joyce's departure from the Tower on 15 Sept 1904, that it involved shooting off Haines's gun. There's absolutely no other evidence for this, however (including a lack of bulletscars on the Tower's walls).

Eglinton must have known the true story, but never explained beyond this: "One morning, just as the National Library opened, Joyce was announced; he seemed to wish for somebody to talk to, and related quite ingenuously how in the early hours of the morning he had been thrown out of the tower, and had walked into town from Sandycove."

There can't be many reasons for throwing someone out in the early hours of the morning, but if three men are sharing a small space, and one of them is heard masturbating in the middle of the night, this could be one explanation. It has the further attraction of accounting for everyone's later silence in real life, and maybe for this comment in Proteus about Mulligan as homophobic:

Wilde's love that dare not speak its name. His arm: Cranly's arm. He now will leave me. And the blame? As I am. As I am. All or not at all. (3.451)

But this requires that in the Ulysses-universe Stephen and Buck have recently had words about masturbation, but that it didn't cause the break as it did (hypothetically) in real life. (As a result of this change, Ulysses can be much more oblique about the dynamics of the breakup, and Stephen can go to Deasy's before the Library.)

Proteus:

I think Stephen probably is masturbating on the rocks at the end of ch3, as Hayman first proposed:

If I were suddenly naked here as I sit? I am not... [vampire-poem stuff] ...Who watches me here? ...She trusts me, her hand gentle, the longlashed eyes. Now where the blue hell am I bringing her beyond the veil? Into the ineluctable modality of the ineluctable visuality. She, she, she. What she? The virgin at Hodges Figgis' window on Monday looking in for one of the alphabet books you were going to write. Keen glance you gave her. Wrist through the braided jess of her sunshade... Touch me. Soft eyes. Soft soft soft hand. I am lonely here. O, touch me soon, now. What is that word known to all men? I am quiet here alone. Sad too. Touch, touch me...

He lay back at full stretch over the sharp rocks, cramming the scribbled note and pencil into a pocket, his hat tilted down on his eyes.... I am caught in this burning scene. Pan's hour, the faunal noon. Among gumheavy serpentplants, milkoozing fruits, where on the tawny waters leaves lie wide. Pain is far....

In long lassoes from the Cock lake the water flowed full, covering greengoldenly lagoons of sand, rising, flowing. My ashplant will float away. I shall wait. No, they will pass on, passing chafing against the low rocks, swirling, passing. Better get this job over quick. Listen: a fourworded wavespeech: seesoo, hrss, rsseeiss, ooos. Vehement breath of waters amid seasnakes, rearing horses, rocks. In cups of rocks it slops: flop, slop, slap: bounded in barrels. And, spent, its speech ceases. It flows purling, widely flowing, floating foampool, flower unfurling.

Joyce would then be associating masturbation with poetic inspiration, and possibly synchronising Stephen's masturbation with Bloom's bath-without-masturbation. [chronology]

Lotus-eaters

Bloom clearly plans to do it in the bath:

Nice smell these soaps have. Time to get a bath round the corner. Hammam. Turkish. Massage. Dirt gets rolled up in your navel. Nicer if a nice girl did it. Also I think I. Yes I. Do it in the bath. Curious longing I. Water to water. Combine business with pleasure. Pity no time for massage. Feel fresh then all day.

Eolus

7.1018: "onehandled adulterer"

The implication of masturbation is faint here, behind Nelson's lost arm, and possibly chamber-pots' conventional single handle.

Scylla

Mulligan goes on at length about his playlet about masturbation (so there may be an important subtext about Gogarty's hypocrisy).

Nausikaa:

Besides the central Bloomian wank, Gerty also anticipates the subject:

She leaned back far to look up where the fireworks were and she caught her knee in her hands so as not to fall back looking up and there was no-one to see only him and her when she revealed all her graceful beautifully shaped legs like that, supply soft and delicately rounded, and she seemed to hear the panting of his heart, his hoarse breathing, because she knew about the passion of men like that, hotblooded, because Bertha Supple told her once in dead secret and made her swear she'd never about the gentleman lodger that was staying with them out of the Congested Districts Board that had pictures cut out of papers of those skirtdancers and highkickers and she said he used to do something not very nice that you could imagine sometimes in the bed. But this was altogether different from a thing like that because there was all the difference because she could almost feel him draw her face to his and the first quick hot touch of his handsome lips. Besides there was absolution so long as you didn't do the other thing before being married and there ought to be women priests that would understand without your telling out and Cissy Caffrey too sometimes had that dreamy kind of dreamy look in her eyes so that she too, my dear, and Winny Rippingham so mad about actors' photographs and besides it was on account of that other thing coming on the way it did.

The seminal-emission motif:

There's a series of extremely subtle references in Oxen and Circe to the scent of Bloom's ejaculate being detected by passersby:

14. "Your starving eyes and allbeplastered neck you stole my heart, O gluepot."

Thornton guesses 'Your starry eyes and alabaster neck' while Gifford asserts-- and Dent partially confirms-- that 'gluepot' implies the smell of cum (slang).

This would seem very farfetched if not for the later: 15.534 "Jewman's melt!" yelled after Bloom by the Bawd, and 15.3909 "omelette on the belly" joke shared by Stephen and Bella, plus a (relocated) draft comment by Pope Hennesy about Bloom being covered in gravy.

Circe

Bloom's various trials include many accusations implying masturbation, in high school and during marriage.

Ithaca

What limitations of activity and inhibitions of conjugal rights were perceived by listener and narrator concerning themselves during the course of this intermittent and increasingly more laconic narration?

By the listener a limitation of fertility inasmuch as marriage had been celebrated 1 calendar month after the 18th anniversary of her birth (8 September 1870), viz. 8 October, and consummated on the same date with female issue born 15 June 1889, having been anticipatorily consummated on the 10 September of the same year and complete carnal intercourse, with ejaculation of semen within the natural female organ, having last taken place 5 weeks previous, viz. 27 November 1893, to the birth on 29 December 1893 of second (and only male) issue, deceased 9 January 1894, aged 11 days, there remained a period of 10 years, 5 months and 18 days during which carnal intercourse had been incomplete, without ejaculation of semen within the natural female organ...

Penelope

and the last time he came on my bottom when was it
I know what boys feel with that down on their cheek
doing that frigging
drawing out the thing by the hour
question and answer
would you do this that and the other
with the coalman yes
with a bishop yes I would
encouraging him
making him worse than he is
who is in your mind now tell me who are you thinking of
who is it tell me his name who tell me who
the german Emperor is it yes
imagine Im him think of him
can you feel him
trying to make a whore of me what he never will
he ought to give it up now at this age of his life
simply ruination for any woman
and no satisfaction in it
pretending to like it till he comes
and then finish it off myself anyway
and it makes your lips pale...

that old servant Ines told me that one drop even
if it got into you at all
after I tried with the Banana
but I was afraid it might break and get lost up in me somewhere
because they once took something down out of a woman
that was up there for years covered with limesalts...

he was clever enough to spot that of course
that was all thinking of him and his mad crazy letters
my Precious one everything connected with your glorious Body
everything underlined that comes from it
is a thing of beauty and of joy for ever
something he got out of some nonsensical book
that he had me always at myself 4 and 5 times a day sometimes
and I said I hadnt
are you sure
O yes I said I am quite sure
in a way that shut him up
I knew what was coming next
only natural weakness it was
he excited me...

Molly is probably climaxing with the final words.

The most explicit references to masturbation in FW are in the first chapter: [condensed]

Bygmester Finnegan, of the Stuttering Hand... with goodly trowel in grasp and ivoroiled overalls which he habitacularly fondseed, like Haroun Childeric Eggeberth he would caligulate by multiplicables the alltitude and malltitude until he seesaw by neatlight of the liquor wheretwin 'twas born, his roundhead staple of other days to rise in undress maisonry upstanded (joygrantit!), a waalworth of a skyerscape of most eyeful hoyth entowerly... Mastabatoom, mastabadtomm, when a mon merries his lute is all long. For whole the world to see...

It was of a night, late, lang time agone, in an auldstane eld, when Adam was delvin and his madameen spinning watersilts, when mulk mountynotty man was everybully and the first leal ribberrobber that ever had her ainway everybuddy to his lovesaking eyes and everybilly lived alove with everybiddy else, and Jarl van Hoother had his burnt head high up in his lamphouse, laying cold hands on himself ...And Jarl von Hoother had his baretholobruised heels drowned in his cellarmalt, shaking warm hands with himself...

Your fame is spreading like Basilico's ointment since the Fintan Lalors piped you overborder and there's whole households beyond the Bothnians and they calling names after you... And admiring to our supershillelagh where the palmsweat on high is the mark of your manument...

By chapter two, the imagery is extremely ambiguous:

We are told how in the beginning it came to pass that like cabbaging Cincinnatus the grand old gardener was saving daylight under his redwoodtree one sultry sabbath afternoon, Hag Chivychas Eve, in prefall paradise peace by following his plough for rootles in the rere garden of mobhouse, ye olde marine hotel, when royalty was announced by runner to have been pleased to have halted itself on the highroad along which a leisureloving dogfox had cast followed, also at walking pace, by a lady pack of cocker spaniels... Naw, yer maggers, aw war jist a cotchin on thon bluggy earwuggers...

And it stays pretty subtle until III.4:

And he has pipettishly bespilled himself from his foundingpen as illspent from inkinghorn.... Jerkoff and Eatsup...

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Ulysses:
chapters: summary : anchors : 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12a 12b 13 14a 14b 15a 15b 15c 15d 16a 16b 17a 17b 18a 18b
notes: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18
reference: Bloom : clocktime : prices : schemata : Tower : riddles : errors : Homeric parallels : [B-L Odyssey] : Eolus tropes : parable : Oxen : Circe : 1904 : Thom's : Gold Cup : Seaside Girls : M'appari : acatalectic : search
riddles: overview : Rudy : condom : Gerty : Hades : Strand : murder : Eccles
maps: Ulysses : WRocks : Strand : VR tour : aerial tour : Dublin : Leinster : Ireland : Europe
editing: etexts : lapses : Gabler : capitals : commas : compounds : deletes : punct : typists
drafts: prequel : Proteus : Cyclops : Circe
closereadings: notes : Oxen : Circe

Finnegans Wake:
txt: [I.1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 II.1 2 3 4 III.1 2 3 4 IV] : [HTML]
shorter: main : I.1-4 : 5-8 : II.1-2 : 3-4 : III.1-2 : 3 : 4 : IV
reference: thunder : Quinet : waves : [MP3 ALP] : FrALP : ItalALP : ch4 digest : Finn's Hotel : JAJquotes : search
drafts: NewGame : ROC : Kev : B&P : T&I : HCE : Mmlj : Cad : Rev : Pacata
closereadings: notes : ROC : T&S : Kev : B&P : T&I : HCE : Mmlj : Cad
theory: AI : archetypes : WakeOS : notes : origin : Scribble

Portrait:
ref: main : ch1 : ch1 notes : ch2 : 3 : 4 : 5a : 5b : Pinamonti : [notes] : [Cave] : [Gabler]

SHero: outline : quotes : PoA04

Dubliners:
etexts: Sis : Sis04 : Sis05 : Enc : Araby : Evel : After : 2Gall : Board : LitCl : Cntr : Clay : Pain : Ivy : Moth : Grace : Dead
guides: main : [Cave] : [Peng]

Other:
Exiles: Ex1 : 2 : 3

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