Ulysses Essay 16 (35:6)

Chapter 3 (Proteus) Note 1

“Aleph, alpha; nought, nought, one…Adam Kadmon: Heva, naked Eve”

It is 11 a.m. and with school out early for the half day, Stephen goes for a walk near the rocks on Sandymount beach, just south of the mouth of the Liffey River, at the same spot where later that evening (in the “Nausicaa” episode) Leopold Bloom will have a masturbatory orgasm – more hinted at than explicit – on espying a young woman (Gerty MacDowell) lifting her skirt to show him her shapely legs, and thereby cause “Ulysses” to be banned for decades by government censors in the U.S. and England, although there are much franker and more vulgar sexual references later in the book, including not a few “fucks” and “cunts”. Apparently what really got the censors’ goat was the fact that Joyce describes a Mass for the Virgin Mary being sung at a nearby church while Leopold and Gertie are engaging in their short-lived but sexually charged affair – the subtle juxtaposition of religious purity and onanistic pleasure being in the opinion of the male censors far too offensive and provocative to be made openly available

(especially to female readers).

Stephen encounters two Dublin midwives who too are walking on the beach, apparently relaxing after having attended a home birth in “The Liberties” – a nearby district whose churches and enterprises were historically afforded tax exemptions (hence its name), but which by 1904 had deteriorated into s a poverty-stricken tenement slum (although I read that currently it has gentifried into an effervescent center of arts and culture). On seeing the midwives, Stephen’s thoughts wander (as Mulligan’s did when contemplating his “missing” twelfth rib earlier in the day) to the biblical story of the creation of man and woman and their sin in the Garden of Eden He imagines the fetal umbilical cord as an unbroken chain stretching back to “Adam Kadmon” (“primordial man”), a Midrashic term which in modern Hebrew is used simply to designate “prehistoric man” but which in the Kabbalah refers to not only the biblical Adam (“Adam Ha’rishon” – “the first man”) but also encompasses entire mystical and inchoate worlds (“sefirot” – literally “enumerations”), both divine and Adamic. The Garden of Eden reminds him of a housing development in Dublin called Edenville (apparently no longer extant) and, transmuting the umbilical cord into a telephone cord, he imagines asking the operator to put him through to an Edenville number (11001), which he enunciates multilingually: “Aleph,  alpha: nought, nought, one.”

My first association on reading this odd phone number was “four, five, oh, six, three”, the similarly five-digit phone number of the home in which I grew up in the 1940s in Queen’s Road, Sea Point, Cape Town (and of course I cannot for the life of me recall other phone numbers of mine from the ensuing seven decades). Memory is a funny thing and I guess it’s better to forget than to remember (I read in the paper yesterday that there are some rare individuals who can recall every day of their life down to the smallest detail – what a burden).

Like all the letters of the Hebrew and Greek alphabets, the letters “Aleph” and “Alpha” have a numerical value, and as they are the first letters of their respective alphabets they both signify “one” You sometimes see Jewish women (and occasionally men) with a pendant made up of the two Hebrew letters “Chet” and “Yod” making up the word “Chai” (“alive”),  and as these are the eighth and tenth letters of the Hebrew alphabet – i.e. the word has a total numerical value of eighteen – the number eighteen has special , significance in Jewish tradition (and it’s quite customary among Jews to give monetary presents in multiples of eighteen on festive occasions such as birthdays and weddings. weddings and birthdays. So what is the significance of Stephen’s desired phone number? (Notwithstanding the premise that the operator would surely have replied, “There is no such number, sir”). “Aleph” and “Alpha” obviously signify first things, and in the Kabbala the letter “Aleph” represents God’s nature, while the Book of Revelations (1:8) announces that “God is the Alpha and Omega”. But I have my own theory: maybe Joyce, a brilliant mind with a background in physics, was already predicting the future digital computer revolution based on the “one-zero” binary system (devised by Leibnitz in 1679) as first propounded in Alan Turing’s seminal paper in 1936, only fourteen years after the publication of “Ulysses”.

But it is Eve who has Stephen’s attention, much more than Adam:

                                                                                                                                    

“Spouse and helpmate of Adam Kadmon: Heva, naked Eve. She had no navel. Gaze. Belly without blemish, bulging big, a buckler of taut vellum, no, whiteheaped corn, orient and immortal, standing from everlasting to everlasting. Womb of sin.”

Joyce transliterates the Hebrew name of Eve incorrectly: it should read “Hava” or even more accurately “Chava”. The word is related to “Chai” and means “living one” or more figuratively “source of life”. The tradition that Eve had no navel is longstanding, and indeed many artistic renditions portray her without a navel although for some reason Adam usually has a navel. For Stephen, however, her navel-less belly renders her perfect, and he is reminded of two references to female beauty in the Song of Songs (“The Song of Solomon” in the Christian canon): “You are beautiful all over, my love, and there is no blemish on you” (4:7) and “Your belly is like a heap of wheat, set about with lilies” (7:3). The “Song” is an erotic love poem, telling of an alluring peasant girl’s all-consuming love for a young shepherd, a love which is unconsummated because she is taken captive to the king’s palace. Eventually, her anguished yearning persuades the king to let her go back to her lover, proving in the words of the poem (8:7) that “many waters cannot quench love.” Both Jewish and Christian commentators searched for a metaphorical justification for including the text in the biblical canon, strewn as it is with numerous explicit sexual references. For instance, here is the shepherd extolling his beloved’s beauty: “Your two breasts are like two fawns, twins of a gazelle which feeds among the lilies,” (4:5) or the king addressing the maiden: “Your bearing is like a palm-tree, and your breasts liker clusters of grapes…I will climb up into the palm-tree; I will take hold of its branches; and let your breasts be as clusters of the vine; and the fragrance of your face like apples (7:8-9)” Jewish tradition holds that the young lovers’ immutable relationship is an allegory of God’s love for the people of Israel, while Christian theology avers that it represents the love between God and the Church. My father, like many orthodox Jews, would read the Song of Songs every Friday evening before going to synagogue to greet the incoming Shabbat, and the entire text is read in the synagogue during the Passover spring festival, especially because of its unequalled poetic description of spring in the Land of Israel: “For behold, the winter is past; the rain is over and gone. The blossoms have appeared on the earth; the time of the nightingale has arrived, and the voice of the turtledove is heard in our land. The fig-tree has put out her young green figs, and the budding grapes give out their fragrance” (8:11-13).