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Joanne M. Gass Associate Professor of Comp. Lit. Dept. of English & Comparative Literature California State University Fullerton Fullerton, CA 92634 Derrida/Joyce: The Purloined Post Card
In this paper, I have tried to establish a relationship between the modern novel and the post-modern text. I have referred to the post-modern work as "text" rather than "novel" because questions of Truth and fiction tend to lose value in the open weave of story that is the post-modernist text. I have used Ulysses as my model for the modernist novel because I believe that it is the quintessential modernist novel, not because I want to prove it flawed or wrong in any essential way. I have used Jacques Derrida's The Post Card to show how a post-modern work "purloins" certain modernist qualities which correspond in crucial ways to its predecessors and yet transforms those correspondences into something uniquely post-modern. I wrote the paper as the culminating project for a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar in 1991 at Cornel University, under the direction of Professor Daniel R. Schwartz, and I want to thank him for the wonderful opportunity he gave me when he accepted me into that seminar. I begin with a "review":
Thus does Jacques Derrida begin the "review" notes (or re-view, since he implies that one has already read the book and has turned to the back cover to see what one has already read) on the back cover of The Post Card, and in so doing, he "determines" our reception of his book. And I, having received his post card (having accepted that "impossible reception"), now prepare myself to "post" another impossible loveletter from Derrida to Joyce to Fuentes and Beyond . . .. In posting this loveletter, I risk being like Molly Bloom whose transliterations--her malapropisms--"base barreltone" and "met him pikehoses," confuse, amuse, and confound her Leopold. Molly's reception of Bloom's attempts to educate her is to demand that he "tell us in plain words." Molly refuses the Greek, the metaphysical, post which Leopold intends to her and receives only "plain words." Molly is the blossom (the bloom) toward which Leopold posts himself, but as Derrida has so often pointed out, the post never arrives. Like Molly, I perform the double function of the sender and the destinataire who receives love letters from Derrida and Joyce and who sends my own to them and to whoever will receive them. In the process, I will perform my own acts of weaving and of triage. As Derrida says, "je trame, I weave, je trie, I sort, I treat, I traffic, I transfer, I intricate, I control, je filtre, I filter . . ." (232). In the process of weaving my own epistle, I participate in the general dissemination of the post--both Joyce's and Derrida's, committing my own acts of telepathy. As I sort, I am going to examine the relationship between Joyce's Ulysses and Derrida's The Post Card, especially the "Envois," a relationship which Derrida himself has explored in Ulysses gramophone. In fact, I, myself, am playing the role of Penelope, weaving my own tapestry of tale, and hoping to develop the correspondences between Ulysses and The Post Card. These correspondences--these relays in the postal system which include their similarities and their differences--will develop into a pattern which may shed some light upon the relationships between modernist and post-modernist novels. I am, quite frankly, asserting that for all intents and purposes The Post Card "corresponds" to a post-modernist novel. I am also arguing that in the "Envois" to The Post Card, Jacques Derrida "purloins" the Joycean post card and becomes Joyce's contrefacture (his imitation, disguise, counterfeit). As Joyce/Stephen/Leopold/Molly, Derrida co-opts the modernist Odyssean (Ulyssesan?) project and makes of it a post-modernist "novel"--an open weave of tapestry--which affirms the joyful play of life and love and merges the masculine voice of Hermes, the messenger/artist with the feminine voice of Aphrodite, the lover/muse. The fully-sexed Hermaphrodite, I argue, is the appropriate figure for the post-modernist novel, replacing the Joycean androgyne. Having made the assertion that there is a fundamental difference between the modernist and post-modernist vision, let me equivocate somewhat by saying that the question of the differences between the two is a vexed one and that there are many more similarities between the two than there are differences. However, at the risk of over-simplifying, I would like to rely upon a definition provided by Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane in their 1976 book, Modernism:
This definition of the modern has many correspondences to the post-modern, and one can justifiably ask what the differences are. Bradbury and McFarlane go on, however, and make what I think is the crucial assertion about the modern which sets it apart from the post-modern:
Bradbury and McFarlane's emphasis upon "fusion" and "new wholes" underlines the crucial difference between modern and post-modern art, for the modernist still aims for order, for unity, and for meaning; conversely, the post-modernist tends to celebrate disorder, disunity, and provisional meaning. For the modernist, they go on to say:
Modernism's "Janus-faced" aspect, its attempt to hold together in creative tension the binary oppositions which Bradbury and McFarlane enumerate, also emblematizes its preoccupation with history--a preoccupation it shares with post-modernism. David Harvey tells us that disillusioned with the lessons of the past, modernist artists searched for ways in which to "represent the eternal and immutable in the midst of all the chaos" (20). Believing himself betrayed by history, the modernist sought another venue by which he might reach meaning: modernism, Harvey says, "took on multiple perspectivism and relativism as its epistemology for revealing what it still took to be the true nature of a unified, though complex, underlying reality" (30). Thus, although the modernist perceived a world of chaos and meaninglessness, he nevertheless believed that there was an underlying reality--a Meaning--which could be uncovered, and the means by which he sought to discover that underlying Meaning was through myth--a myth which "either had to redeem us from the 'formless universe of contingency' or more programmatically, to provide the impetus for a new project of human endeavor" (Harvey, 31). Daniel Schwarz says, in respect to the modernist problem, that
David Harvey puts the problem even more succinctly: "In the absence of Enlightenment certitudes as to the perfectibility of man, the search for a myth appropriate to modernity became paramount" (30). The essential problem that the modernists tried to solve through the invention of a new myth was how to acknowledge a world divided by binary oppositions--rationality/irrationality, order/chaos, meaning/meaninglessness, man/woman, religion/atheism, etc.--, and, while acknowledging that these oppositions appeared to be irreconcilable, to hold them in tension through some sort of recognition of meaning behind the oppositions or to posit meaning as a product of opposition; hence the figure of the Janus-faced modernist looks in both directions yet holds its opposition together in one figure. The post-modern writer, however, recognizes that the concept of binary oppositions is in itself an ordering mechanism and that those oppositions are irreducible; she/he also recognizes that language refers only to the meaning which it creates--it is opaque, not transparent--; therefore one cannot discern meaning by looking beyond language; furthermore, he/she denies the unifying impulse behind myth-making; there is a tragic intensity about the modernist's insistence upon looking to the "end of things" at the same time as he looks longingly back toward lost origins as most myth-making does. One thinks of Paul DeMan's self-ironizing ironizer, caught in the aporia between an irrecoverable past and an unreachable future. Instead, the post-modern author, the one I am talking about who has accepted a world without transcendent meaning, focuses upon life itself and upon the story of human life, seeing it as a neverending story which weaves a celebratory tapestry which has no beginning or end--there is no teleology, no alpha and omega, here. Whereas the modernist text insists upon a linearity (beginning, middle, and end), because it is organized by time (re.: Joyce's one day in Dublin and Woolf's "Time Passes"), the post-modernist text revels in its "in the middestness." The concept of "in the middestness" certainly is not new nor is it even particular to post-modernism: one immediately thinks of the epic convention of beginning in medias res; however that convention assumes a beginning which will be recovered in the course of the narration. Probably the most famous one in our literature begins, "nel mezzo del cammin de nostra vita"--"in the midst of our life"--with which Dante opens The Inferno. Just as Dante's spiritual epic begins in the middle of his life, so does Leopold Bloom's epic journey through Dublin on June 16, 1904, begin in his thirty-eighth year (a little more than half way through a man's allotted three score and ten), and so does Jacques Derrida's "Envois" to The Post Card take place in the midst of his (or at least "Jacques'") life; in fact "Jacques" quotes Dante's famous opening lines somewhere in the midst of his correspondence and so does Stephen in Ulysses. My emphasis upon the chronological moment of "in the middestness" is a bit misleading here since regardless of where one is in one's life, one is always in the midst of it. The "Envois" to The Post Card is a series of post cards sent to an unknown lover by "Jacques" as he travels from Oxford to New Haven to Paris delivering papers, meeting with theorists and other academics at institutional seminars, and, in general, being in transit (a not insignificant term as I use it here and as it weaves its way throughout the text). The cards' composition spans approximately the years 1977-1979, but one does not want to dwell excessively upon the exact sequence of "sending" or upon the precise years of correspondence, since we are told that some have been lost in the post, others have been burned, and still others arrived too late to be included in the text. However, if one were to impose a plot sequence upon the "Envois," one might identify the inciting incident as having occurred in Oxford, on June 5, 1977. "Jacques" has arrived there to participate in a seminar at Balliol entitled "+Limited inc." The seminar is sponsored by Alan Montefiore and Jonathan Culler. "Jacques" relates what happened:
What "Jonathan" and "Cynthia" have led him to in the "labyrinth between the colleges" is a post card, an illustration from Matthew Paris' thirteenth century fortune telling book, which shows Plato standing behind Socrates while Socrates writes. Plato could be (a) tapping Socrates on the shoulder to get his attention, (b) dictating the text (the dialogues) to Socrates, (c) reading over Socrates' shoulder, (d) admonishing Socrates for some reason, (e) all of the above, (f) none of the above, (g) any combination of the above, or (h) any number of possibilities heretofore unthought of. "Jacques," because of his abiding interest in Plato, the western metaphysical tradition, and the transmission of that tradition, especially its judeo-christian roots, throughout the past two thousand years, is seduced; he buys all of the cards (and all of the ones at the Bodelian Library) and begins sending them to his correspondent(s). In the course of the correspondence (of which we have only his writing; we never are privileged to see the responses, if there are any), "Jacques" speculates upon the postal system, the system of transmission whereby the laws of western civilization from Plato to Descartes, (although he is never specifically named) to Freud and to Derrida "call us up" or are destined for us. What has this self-consciously fragmentary, parodic, deliberately obfuscating, often mysterious, extremely passionate narrative have to do with Ulysses? A great deal. Putting aside for the moment the references Derrida makes both to Ulysses and to Finnegans Wake in The Post Card and for the time being ignoring the substantial work Derrida has produced in reference to Joyce ("Ulysses gramophone," "Deux mots pour Joyce," etc.), I would like to do a close reading of the paragraph I quoted earlier concerning the "discovery" of the post card in order to establish some of the many correspondences between the two texts. In doing this, I agree with Gayatri Spivak that "It is of course risky to generalize about the work of someone who calls the possibility of adequate generalization into question" (25). To begin with, it is far from insignificant that both Leopold Bloom and "Jacques" are wandering Jews. Both are essentially marginal characters working their way into the heart of cultures with the ostensible purpose of working some sort of radical change upon them, identifying themselves in an oblique way with those cultures, and yet being keenly aware of and at times emphasizing their marginality. Bloom, the "jewgreek" Irishman, occupies the quintessential Derridean position: he is neither wholly outside the society in which he lives, nor is he wholly accepted by it. For example, Bloom painfully feels his difference from his fellow Dubliners, especially when the Citizen attacks him and he becomes the victim of virulent anti-semitism. Yet Bloom also functions within that society as a friend, as an employee, and as a husband; his solicitude for Paddy Dignam and his family is but one of many examples of his generosity and kindness. Like the governor's coach which sweeps through Dublin at noon, Bloom's voyage through Dublin crosses the paths of every type and class of citizen and of every one of Dublin's institutions--the Royal mail, the courts, the governor, the pub, the church, the Freemasons, journalism, the family, the school, etc.--, and as he crosses them, Bloom in some way disrupts their flow either benevolently or not. To return to Bloom's confrontation with the Citizen, Bloom's presence in the bar and his confrontation with the Citizen nearly cause a riot; earlier his call at the hospital to inquire about Mrs. Purefoy leads to his benevolent intervention in Stephen's plunge toward dissolution. In fact, one could say that Bloom corresponds with institutions and citizens in such a way as to bring into sharp relief and to question the foundations of the institutions upon which Dublin functions (or does not function). "Jacques," too, occupies the margins; he is a French, Algerian Jew with a fixation upon Greeks--Plato and Socrates. His life is spent "wandering" from university to university--a seemingly neverending Odyssey--examining the institutional bases for western culture. On a more specific scale, he has arrived at the heart of the English educational institution, Oxford, where he meets his disciples, "Jonathan" and "Cynthia," who take him into the "labyrinth between the colleges" where he finds, at the heart of the institution, Plato and Socrates. "Jacques" suspects a plot; his guides have led him with a rather singular purpose toward the discovery of the card; they "knew the carte"--they know their way around the institution--, and they also are engaged in work the subjects of which encapsulate the subject matter of The Post Card. "Jonathan's" work on the "poetics of the apostrophe" doubles the post card project since the rhetorical device, apostrophe, is related to the epistolary novel, and, among other things, The Post Card is an epistolary novel. The apostrophe, Abrams, in A Glossary of Literary Terms, says, "is a direct and explicit address either to an absent person or to an abstract or inanimate entity. . . . Many apostrophes . . . imply a personification of the object addressed." Thus "Jonathan's" project mimes, in sense, "Jacques'" in that both examine the questions that arrive in reference to the address and the addressee. "Jacques" says:
Thus the post cards, fragmentary messages which address an unknown subject, are also apostrophes which interpellate a subject at the same time that they interrupt the logical flow of discourse that aims toward completion, delivery, and thesis. Furthermore, the information that "Jonathan's" project is a poetics refers ironically to Aristotle whose Poetics institutionalized specific forms of rhetoric. "Cynthia's" "work projects," too, double the text we are reading. She is working on "eighteenth century correspondence"--the epistolary novel and epistles in general surface again, as well as the question of the postal system which transmits or sends itself--, a "whole plot of writings" which cannot be summarized--The Post Card itself resists summarizing at every turn; in fact, Derrida states that it is the bad reader, "the reader in a hurry to be determined, decided upon deciding," (4) who looks for the thesis or the destination of this post card--, and "Daniel Deronda, by G. Eliot, a story of circumcision and of double-reading"--both topics which permeate this text (especially in its discussion of Freud and Lacan in "To Speculate--on 'Freud'" and in "The Purveyor of Truth" and specifically in the repetition of sending the same post card each time and in the relationship of circumcision to the law of the father)." Finally, the "discovery" of the post card leads "Jacques" to speculate, "Has all of this been prescribed by the mysterious fortune-telling book?" The reference to fortune-telling reflects (notice how many times I use terms of doubling, coupling, reflection, reproduction, etc.) The Post Card's meditation upon transmission and reception of messages, especially post cards from Plato, to\from Freud, and beyond. The most obvious relationship between Bloom and "Jacques," then, is their marginality to the social structures within which they operate. Whereas Bloom's universal experience occurs within the confines of the city limits (more or less) of Dublin--in a microcosm--, "Jacques'" odyssey takes place, paradoxically, on the macrocosmic level in that he is a member of a community of scholars, like the ones in David Lodge's Small World, who jet from university to university; thus there really is no boundary to his physical world. The paradox appears when we examine the parameters of the voyage; "Jacques'" odyssey takes place in the gaps which appear when he begins to examine the history of the western metaphysical tradition. "Jacques" travels in language, and in his travels, he disrupts the institutions and assumptions upon which our society bases itself. Just as there is no definitive boundary to the world through which "Jacques" voyages, so does he expose the infinite play of substitution which unravels philosophical claims to Truth. Unlike, Bloom, whose journey leads him back to his home, his bed, and his wife, an act which most critics agree gives the novel its unity--its telos, if you will--, "Jacques'" voyage expands; it never ends. Ulysses is a novel which exemplifies the "postal system." In his review of The Post Card, Gregory Ulmer explains what makes the postal system and letters exemplary of logocentrism:
Bloom, then, reaches his destination; "Jacques" does not. "The theme of The Post Card is precisely 'tradition' into whose continuity Derrida insinuates himself" (Ulmer, 47). In effect, "Jacques'" meditation upon the legacies of Socrates, Plato, and Freud "purloins" the posts which Joyce, in Ulysses, deploys and which he tries to bring together in Molly's soliloquy and Bloom's return to home and bed. The posts which Derrida purloins are those of inheritance, history, psychology, and philosophy, all of which come under the umbrella term, logocentrism, and all of which are examples of phallocentric discourse. The problem, if there is one in Ulysses, is not that Joyce questions these teleological discourses, as we shall see he does, but that he reinforces and in the end validates them; Ulysses is teleological; Bloom returns to Molly and home (certainly completing his odyssey). Christine van Boheeman-Saaf, among many others, argues that Ulysses preserves its unity by giving Molly that final word and establishing her final word as an "emblem of original presence":
Even as the structural matrix, Molly assumes the role of Gea Tellus, "in her symbolical character as fruitful earth mother," as Frank Budgen assures us Joyce intended her to be (Budgen, 269). Molly is a metaphysical presence--the alpha and the omega of the text. Molly's voice is precisely the voice of presence, because she is woman as Other, as binary opposite of man, essential and irreducible. As van Boheeman-Saaf points out, "The discourse of the Other is never truly Other. It is always a variant of, and within, the dominant discourse" (97).
The Post Card, conversely, employs the female voice as a means of deconstructing presence, opening closure, and turning the postal system away from determinacy toward indeterminacy. "Jacques," for example, deliberately confuses and obscures his or her sexual identity at the same time that the text is very sexual. The addressee is variously referred to as "you," "she," "presence," "Sophie," "Bettina," "my sister," "my love," etc. The addressor, "Jacques," writes in the guise of a man, a woman, a woman about to give birth, a man about to give birth, Freud's daughter, Sophie, and in any number of other guises. Woman, therefore, instead of being opposed as Other in the text, is enfolded within the text itself, "replacing destiny with chance" (Ulmer, 51) and rendering identification of any kind impossible. Gayatri Spivak suggests "that it is possible to say that 'woman' on the scene of Derrida's writing, from being a figure of 'special interest,' occupies the place of a general critique of the history of Western thought" (22). Consequently, when woman in this guise enters the postal system, she opens it up to chance and therefore to life.
Thus the feminine is identified with life, whereas destiny, identity, presence, and teleology--postmarks of the modernist novel--become in the post-modernist text identified with endings, with stasis, and above all, with death. Having purloined for his own purposes woman's voice and Bloom's role as marginal figure, "Jacques" establishes further correspondences with Ulysses. As everyone who has read it knows, Ulysses is filled with post cards, letters, fragments of letters upon which poetry has been written, or upon which Bloom has cleaned himself, billboards, and advertisements. All of these means by which messages are conveyed to people which might appear to be realistic details in the description of Joyce's Dublin, nevertheless also in many ways comment upon the text itself. In The Post Card, too, all of these means of correspondence provide messages about the post-modern condition. Take, for example, the sandwichmen who weave in and out of Dublin's streets crossing Bloom's path several times, and encountering a number of other characters and even the Royal Mail and the Lord Mayor's coach.
Bloom reads the message on the hats and contemplates their message. He considers this a very poor way of advertising (some girls in a glass coach writing would be better), yet he also remembers the priest he saw in the morning upon whose back the letters I.H.S. and I.N.R.I. appeared. Molly, at another time, had "translated" them for him: "I have suffered" or was it "I have sinned?" and "Iron nails ran in" (81). Molly's reading and Bloom's "understanding" comment upon the gap between the Catholic church's determination of meaning and Truth and the average person's comprehension of it. Molly's reading has more everyday truth than does the literal meaning of I.N.R.I. which "identifies" Jesus as king of the Jews (of course, on the back of the priest, it identifies no one) or that I.H.S. means "Jesus the Saviour of Man" (Gifford, 94). "I have suffered" has far more human value than the "true" meanings do. The gap between what Molly and Bloom know and what these signs mean can also be related to another annotation which Gifford makes in reference to the phrase "a shout in the street" (Ulysses, 34). Gifford glosses this to refer to Proverbs I:20-22: "Wisdom crieth without; she uttereth her voice in the streets" (39). Consequently, the mixed readings of the sandwichmen's message might lead to a further reading: "Wisdom--he lies." In other words, conventional wisdom (the female voice crying in the streets?) goes unheard and conflicts with institutional wisdom. In The Post Card, "Jacques" notes that what he calls the "pancarte" is ubiquitous in Western culture just as the sandwichmen are ubiquitous in the streets of Dublin. For example, he refers to Socrates and Freud as the "great metaphysical pancarte" (84) and says that the pancarte is "a billboard that we have on our backs" (25). Again, he says, "for the Jews, a pancarte [is] worn suspended from the neck and on which were inscribed lines of Mosaic law . . ." (82). The pancarte relates directly also to Stephen's remarks that "history is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake" and "a nightmare from which you will never awake" (34, 137). The history we have on our backs, then, in a modernist context is somewhat monolithic and often deadly. The post-modernist reading of history, as Gayatri Spivak argues, takes a different turn:
Stephen's claim that history is a nightmare does not repudiate any theory of history as arche and telos, as continuum, or plot, or cycle, or any other unitary scheme of history. For the modernist Stephen, history is betrayal: it has led to the betrayal of Ireland, of Ireland of her people, of the church of its followers; nevertheless, the paralysis which arises out of this type of betrayal implies that the "plot" which is history is to blame for that paralysis. Even though Joyce openly disavowed the linear view "that history moves toward one great goal; combining social Darwinism with traditional Protestant theology, [the] view that history is an upwardly evolving force" (Schwarz, p. 22), he nevertheless embraced the unitary view of history which he found in Vico's Scienza Nuova; the view that history "repeats itself in crucial ways" (Schwarz, p. 23). Cycles are no less idealizations which imply purpose and meaning than are linear models of historical movements. They are just another kind of plot; and any kind of plot, Hayden White asserts, has "the odor of the ideal" (10). And plots are theses; as Alan Bass reminds us in his "Introduction" to The Post Card, theses are the work of "the great philosophers," and "Derrida calls the great philosophers masters of the post, interns of theses that bring things to a halt" (xxvi). Derrida, in his works, has consistently identified philosophy and history with the law of the Father, the posting of patriarchal authority through the establishment of institutions. The primary concern of patriarchal authority is inheritance, the passing on of the law of the Father from father to son. Bloom's tragedy, of course, is that his son, Rudy, died after only eleven days of life, and much of Joycean criticism focuses upon this tragedy and upon Bloom's relationship to Stephen, which is almost always regarded as a father-son relationship. But the assumption that Bloom's fatherly attention to and solicitude for Stephen results in the welding of a future relationship in which the artist Stephen accepts the good man Bloom as a surrogate father is problematized by the fact that Stephen leaves Bloom's house rather than stay the night; furthermore, Stephen in no way indicates that he plans to return, nor are we assured that he even plans to see Bloom again. However, Bloom does tell Molly about Stephen, and both fantasize about a future relationship with him. Whatever, the future might bring, it is nevertheless true that Bloom keenly feels the loss of his own son and that he would very much like to have another one. (One wonders about the absent daughter, Milly, who occupies her father's thoughts periodically, but not obsessively.) Stephen, on the other hand, questions paternity and filiation; his own father is profligate at best, and Stephen flees his home in order to strike out on his own and avoid the disintegration and chaos of his home which his mother's death has caused. In his questioning of paternity, Stephen reflects, in relation to Shakespeare and no doubt himself, "Paternity may be a legal fiction. Who is the father of any son that any son should love him or he any son?" To Stephen, a father may be "a necessary evil" (207). Later, in the same discussion, Stephen says, "What links them in nature? An instant of blind rut" (208). Stephen may be speaking, as Hamlet did, about the inconstancy of woman, but I do not think so. The question of paternity as perhaps a "legal fiction" and of the institutionalization of the law of the Father occurs regularly in The Post Card; "Jacques" meditates upon filiation and institutionalization as they have been passed on to us from Socrates, Plato, and Freud (a father who determined his own institution and heirs). The relationship between these meditations and Ulysses is apparent in Derrida's remarks he made to the Ninth International James Joyce Symposium:
In the same address (and I use this term knowing full well its implications), Derrida says, "the motif of postal difference, of remote control and telecommunications, is already powerfully at work in Ulysses." Joyce, in other words, by establishing himself as an institution has accomplished what Bloom could not: he has assured himself of heirs. "Jacques," too, it seems to me has looked into the future and found that in spite of everything that he has done to deconstruct institutions, to avoid stating his own postal theses, and to refuse patriarchal identity, he cannot avoid speculating about his heirs. Certainly, he has found himself institutionalized; he is, in fact, at the very heart of the institution of higher education, and he has posted himself in philosophy and even in architecture. The fragmentation of narrative, of voice, of signature in The Post Card seems to be an attempt to forestall at least the institutionalization of the author, to avoid determination--the dead end--, and to give "Jacques" room to live. There is, however, a tone of despair in some of the post cards which reflect upon filiation and inheritances. In spite of this occasional underlying note of despair, however, the novel of The Post Card, a novel which never ends (there are always cards which have been burned, lost, left out, or arrived too late), affirms life, chance, and love. And that is the final and most important post card which Derrida has purloined from Joyce. Richard Ellmann has stated that the word which is known to every man is "Love." He goes on to say:
Love is indeed the common denominator between the modern novel Ulysses and the post-modern novel/text The Post Card. However, Ellman's major interest is not, despite his remarks to the contrary, physical love between men and women: he is interested in sexual love as a vehicle for the artist's imagination and as a means whereby the imagination can transcend time. As I have shown before, in this modernist context, it is the artist (who is male) who is transformed through love; the female voice is the voice of the Other who remains essentially Other. The artist, Ellmann also asserts, like Bloom, takes on certain female or womanly attributes: he becomes an androgyne--"In short the artist, combining both parents in himself, is an androgyne. In this two-backed beast are united various symbols of maleness and femaleness. . . . True art is copulative" (87). Ellmann is, of course, assuming that in the end it is Stephen who as the artist takes on the attributes of his symbolic parents, Leopold and Molly Bloom. The result, the alpha and the omega in this case is art, that vehicle by which the modernist can transcend the chaos and disillusionment of the modern world. For the post-modernist, however, androgyny fails, as does the kind of love which transcends, and we might be able to use the ending of the "Ithaca" section as a starting point from which we might move toward another kind of love, which is even more physical than that which Molly and Leopold no longer have. First of all, Leopold and Molly are sleeping wrong end to: Leopold kisses the warm globes of her buttocks; she agrees to make his breakfast in the morning, but there is no real sexual union. It is clear that Leopold and Molly love one another, and that despite their infidelities the return to the matrimonial bed signals the closure of Ulysses. Let us leave them there--art and the androgynous artist provide the closure necessary to the modernist text. The problem with androgyny is that in some of its meanings it implies effeminacy or it connotes asexuality; in other words, we are still in a patriarchal universe in which woman and woman's voice validate the law of the Father. The post-modernist text, however, suggests a figure which fully incorporates both the male and the female voices in equal measure--the Hermaphrodite. "Jacques" himself says to his addressee, "We are Hermaphrodite himself."
The Hermaphrodite is fully-sexed; he/she is neither one nor the other and yet fully both, and the figure of the Hermaphrodite, the binding of lover/messenger/muse allows for both the male and the female voice. But according to the Oxford English Dictionary there is one further very important definition of hermaphrodite: "a plant or flower in which the stamens and pistils (or equivalent organs) are present in the same flower, as in the majority of flowering plants." And that brings me back to Molly/Moly; for moly was the magic herb given to Odysseus by Hermes to protect him from Circe. And it is the voice of Molly, of Penelope, with which I will end, for it is the storytelling voice of the woman as muse which makes the post-modern novel what it is, an open-ended weave, a tapestry of story in which lover and muse speak with equal voices. Molly, the "Rose of Castile," is the flower which Claudette Sartiliot describes in her essay, "Telepathy and Writing in Jacques Derrida's Glas":
The open text, which is The Post Card and other post-modern novels like those composed by John Barth, Carlos Fuentes, Angela Carter, and many others, refuses or at least diffuses the post cards, the destinations of the past; like the Hermaphrodite and like the bloom they remain open to life and love; they receive the correspondences from the past but they are not determined by them. There is a joy in the play of the post-modern text which validates human life and human beings without recourse to ultimate meaning or transcendent truth.
Budgen, Frank. James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses, 2nd. ed. London: Grayson & Grayson, 1937. Caughie, Pamela L. Virginia Woolf & Postmodernism: Literature in Quest & Question of Itself. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991. Cixous, Helene. "The Laugh of the Medusa," in Contemporary Literary Criticism, Robert Con Davis and Ronald Schleiffer eds. New York: Longman, 1989. ___. "Sorties," in Modern Criticism and Theory, David Lodge ed. New York: Longman, 1988. DeMan, Paul. Blindness and Insight. Minneapolis: Univer- sity of Minnesota Press, 1983. Derrida, Jacques. The Post Card, Alan Bass tr. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. ___. Ulysse gramophone: Deux mots pour Joyce. Paris: Editions Galilee, 1987. Ellmann, Richard. James Joyce, the new and revised ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982. ___. Ulysses on the Liffey. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972. Eysteinsson, Astradur. The Concept of Modernism. 1990. Friedman, Alan. The Turn of the Novel. New York: Oxford
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