James Joyce and the English vice

Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Fall 1995 by Lamos, Colleen

A notable exception to the epistolary beating fantasies in Joyce's texts is the scene of Bloom's torture at the hands of Bella/Bello Cohen in "Circe." In general, this scene conforms to the flagellant pornography and sexual practices of the day, yet it differs in an important respect. Although the scenario is conventionally enacted as a forced confession and subsequent punishment, including the baring of Bloom's bottom and his flogging, for a brief period in the scene Bella switches genders and is called Bello, while Bloom, in turn, is feminized and referred to as "she." At this crucial moment, Bello penetrates Bloom, his fist going into what is called Bloom's vulva rather than his anus. By this sleight of hand, Bloom is (barely) spared the indignity of sodomy; the scene exposes sodomical desires yet maintains the nominal heterosexuality of the partners.

Understanding the coexistence at the turn of the twentieth century in Great Britain of, on the one hand, widespread pedagogical flagellation, morally approved yet energized by covert homoeroticism, and, on the other hand, equally widespread heterosexual flagellation, morally illicit yet commonplace in pornography and prostitution, calls for a historically nuanced model of male flagellant fantasies that is also answerable to the valence of same- and other-sex desires. Needless to say, we do not have such a model. Current theoretical debate on the issue seems deadlocked between Freudian and Deleuzean paradigms.

According to Freud, the male fantasy of female aggression is a displacement of his desire for the father's love. The male masochist's overt fantasy, formulated as "I am being beaten by my mother," in truth conceals a wish to be beaten and, finally, to be loved by the father; the male "beating-phantasy has its origin in an incestuous attachment to the father" ("Child" 198). The male masochist's guilt stems from his introjection of paternal authority, producing a conscience whose sadistic demands are a "substitute for a longing for the father" (Freud, "Ego" 37). What is thus at stake in masochism for Freud is the subject's homosexual love for the father.

By contrast, Gilles Deleuze argues that the male masochist abjures the father and transfers the paternal functions onto the mother, especially the oral mother. In order to challenge the father's authority and to exorcise the repression he exercises over sexual desire, he engages in an alliance with the mother. Having expelled the father, "

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he masochist experiences the symbolic order as an intermaternal order in which the mother represents the law ... she generates the symbolism through which the masochist expresses himself" (Deleuze 63). By investing the mother with the symbolic power of the law so that she becomes the "ideal phallus," the subject in effect punishes the father (Deleuze 68). Thus, according to Deleuze, in the flagellant scenario it is "a father that is being beaten," and the masochist thereby achieves an ironic, even humorous overthrow of the paternal prohibition (Deleuze 66). Whereas Freud's theory is based upon a primary homosexual desire at work in masochism, evaded by switching the gender of the imaginary beater, Deleuze's theory supposes a primary heterosexual desire.