Ulysses Essay 13 (21:21)
Chapter 1 (Telemachus) No. 13
“My twelfth rib is gone”

Mulligan, undressed to his underpants before diving into the water, palpates his side under his flapping shirt and announces, “My twelfth rib is gone. I’m the Uebermensch.” Gifford explains that Mulligan is referring to Nietzsche’s Zarathrusta who asserts that “the most contemptible thing…is the last man.” By Mulligan’s rather contorted reckoning, if this assertion is correct, it follows that since Adam who ostensibly lacks a twelfth rib was the first man, he was therefore an uebermensch, and consequently Mulligan (who, like Adam, “lacks a twelfth rib”) must also be an uebermensch, i.e., a superman. Actually we all have two twelfth ribs (along with the two similarly foreshortened eleventh ribs) which are part and parcel of the thoracic ribcage, but since they are not connected to the sternum, they are termed “floating ribs.” What a fatuous narcissist Mulligan is.

In the wake of the biblical story that God created Eve from Adam’s rib while “the first man” slept, a widespread folk belief grew up asserting that women have one rib less than men, which is of course patently untrue. However, a completely different anatomical take on the whole story is propagated in a Midrashic legend, composed perhaps in order to reconcile the two contradictory biblical descriptions of the creation of woman (Genesis 2:7 and 2:21,  and see Telemachus Note 8 on “women’s unclean loins”). Basing itself on the fact that the Hebrew word for “rib” (“tsela”) can also mean “side” (as in the description of the architecture of the tabernacle in Exodus 26:26 where the phrase “tsela ha’mishkan” means “side of the tabernacle”), the Midrash, in a rather unusually egalitarian mode, asserts that Adam and Eve were created as one being side by side (like Siamese twins) and that the operation performed by God while Adam slept was a surgical separation of the two (let’s not get into the absence of any mention of Eve being anesthetized but as the feminists famously aver, human history and mythology deal almost exclusively with the doings of men). Still, the Midrashic theory could explain why Adam, on beholding Eve, says, “Now this is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman (Hebrew: ‘Ishah’) because she was taken out of Man (Hebrew: ‘Ish’)” (Genesis 2:24). Not just bone, but flesh as well.


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