"Hypsos" or "Spadia"? Rethinking androgyny in 'Ulysses' with help from Sacher-Masoch - analysis of hypsospadia in 'Ulysses'

Locating moments of androgynous consciousness in Joyce is not difficult, but explaining their significance has consistently baffled critics. While many scholars have noted that in general Joyce's aesthetics are connected to his interest in androgyny, critical debate on these questions has centered for the most part on whether Joyce's ideas about art and the imagination are or are not misogynistic or reactionary. To the question "What is their function?" critics have tried to ascertain the degree to which these androgynous images represent either a violent appropriation of "feminine" metaphors of procreation or a liberalizing social gesture.(1) The problem with these positions is that they ultimately dehistoricize and decontextualize Joyce's efforts to come to terms with a new sexual landscape. Rather than threatening him sexually, the entrance of women into the world of arts and letters had a specific artistic consequence: It rendered his inherited model of artistic production obsolete by destabilizing the once normative relation between male artist/subject and female muse/object. For example, in Stephen Hero, when Stephen shows his brother his poems,

Maurice asked who the woman was. Stephen looked a little vaguely before him before answering and in the end had to answer that he didn't know who she was. (36)

Rather than a source of transcendent inspiration, the Romantic Muse has been reduced to an outworn, meaningless trope bearing little resemblance to the real-life struggles and aspirations of complex modern Dublin women like Emma Clery. I would like to explore the ways in which the historically specific concept of an androgynous imagination functions as Joyce's troubled solution to this crisis of authorship by taking a closer look at Bloom's masochistic nightmares in the "Circe" section of Ulysses.

Diagnosed as "bisexually abnormal" by "sex-specialist" Buck Mulligan (402), Leopold Paula Bloom is presented in his Circean fantasy as "a finished example of the new womanly man" (403). Yet while the language of medical anomaly parodies the sexual degeneracy theories of modern scientists, Joyce - himself a former medical student - also shapes their rhetoric to make a more positive comment about Bloom's androgynous condition; specifically, we are told that he manifests something called "hypsospadia" (402). While the disease sounds a lot like "hypospadia," a medical/sexual deformity that is characterized in men by an increased opening of the urethra on the underside of the penis that makes the external genitalia look more like a woman's, the addition of the s turns what might be read as a degenerate hermaphroditic condition into a transcendent and empowering one, as indicated by the term hypsos. As Paul Scorn has pointed out, such an addition "strongly suggests that this combination of the masculine and feminine traits in a single individual is a higher form of human life" (114), and that this kind of progressive "evolution" (109) is what "Circe," and a large portion of Ulysses, is all about. Yet I think we can take the significance of this term even further, for "hypsos" is a term not only associated with "height" or transcendence; it has an intertextual link as well with Longinus's treatise on the sublime, or as he calls it, "hypsos." Longinus associates the term hypsos with especially powerful, transportive discourse. That Joyce links it with androgyny suggests that sexual indeterminacy, not the possession of an indeterminate Muse, is connected on a figurative level with heightened artistic ability.

Joyce did have a precedent for connecting the potential for transcendent creative abilities with an androgynous consciousness: the same sex theory on which much of the discussions in "Circe" are based. This chapter is rich with allusion to the work of Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Havelock Ellis, Edward Carpenter, and Otto Weininger; and Joyce builds on their universal belief that artistic aptitude is often concomitant with a kind of psychic hermaphroditism, or the "swift and constant interaction between masculine and feminine elements" (Carpenter 192) or "plasms" (Weininger 17) in the brain. Nevertheless, within a few moments the initial promise of Bloom's "hypsospadia" and its sublimity of sexual indeterminacy modulates into perhaps the most bizarre masochistic nightmare in modern fiction. Why this shift from transcendence to travesty?

Ironically, Joyce's problem lies in his creative solution. For while androgyny - described by his contemporaries as the simultaneous coexistence of male and female cells or plasms in the brain - was believed to promote heightened sensitivity and greater artistic vision, it was also considered by some theorists (particularly Krafft-Ebing, Ellis, and Carpenter) to be indicative of either overt or repressed homosexuality, a condition these scientists dubbed "sexual inversion." How to effect the former without the latter becomes the challenge for Joyce as a male heterosexual modernist writer. Recently, considerable attention has focused on Joyce's purported homophobia, with critics arguing that to various degrees his "denigration of his own homoerotic energies" function as a "fundamental determinant" of his earlier narratives (Valente 169).(2) While I agree that both Stephen (in Portrait) and Bloom struggle with anxieties about their gender identities, I will argue that Bloom's failure to fulfill the promise of his "hypsospadia" is due less to the actual nature of his "condition" than to the socially imposed directive to view that condition as a feminizing disease. In other words, Bloom's masochistic self-punishments function as Joyce's critique not of androgyny itself, but rather of the hierarchical sexual politics that prevent its realization in culture.(3)