One of Bloom’s mooted entrepreneurial schemes involves selling human waste on an industrial scale. Joyce’s work is mired in excremental language and imagery: water closets, commodes, sewers, ‘clotted hinderparts’, ‘slopperish matter’, ‘nappy spattees’, ‘pip poo pat’ of ‘bulgar … bowels’ and so on. Nowhere is Joyce more potty-mouthed than when taking on the language and procedure of religious devotion. At the outset of Finnegans Wake the books of Genesis and Exodus become urinary and colonic tracts and Christ the salmon turns into a big brown trout, a ‘brontoichthyan’ thunderfish or turd floating in a stream mingling with ‘piddle’. But, again, the process has already begun in Ulysses. Bloom starts his day by votively bowing his head as he enters his outhouse to perform the act of defecation that will see him hailed as ‘Moses, Moses, King of the Jews’ who ‘wiped his arse in the Daily News’. Buck Mulligan, in his parody of Mass, quick-changes from priest to military doctor, peeping at an imaginary stool sample floating in what he has been presenting as an altar bowl. The shaving bowl doesn’t contain faeces, but other sorts of human waste: stubble and cast-off skin cells. These things, too, belong to the category of excreta, as do phlegm, bile, navelcords and blood: whatever is excessive, leaking, trailing, dragging.
Ulysses is packed to overflowing with such things: in it every concept, no matter how intangible or rarefied, is transformed into something lowly, degraded, abject – and the more so the more elevated it held itself to be. Poetry turns into snot; nature, and the contours of the Romantic sublime, into a bowl of sluggish vomit. Forget Apollonian beauty: what Bloom wants to know is whether statues of Greek gods have arseholes. For him, the heart, seat of refined emotions, is a rusty pump; communion is cannibalism; justice just ‘means … everybody eating everyone else’. He’s obsessed with falling bodies, their weight and volume and the speed at which they fall. Ulysses is a heavy book, a book full of weight, a fallen book. What has fallen in it, into it, is everything literature previously held to be immaterial or abstract: in its pages metaphysics collapses into what the artist Jake Chapman nicely calls meatphysics. It’s hard to think, outside of zombie movies, of a work more omnivoric – and omni-emetic. Rats eat corpses; savages eat missionaries; Bloom eats cheese; cheese eats itself; dogs eat themselves, spew themselves out, eat themselves again; the city and the day eat and spew out Bloom …
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n12/tom-mccarthy/ulysses-and-its-wake
