The Joycean Nightscape

Ulysses can be read as transubstantiation from body to soul; and vice versa. Dog’sbody, Dignam’sbody (rotting in bog-peat) Molly’sbody in bed-sheets (mobbed in gobspit) and Stephen’s dearly departed mother’sbody pleuritic with coalman’s lung. Blake’s etchings best evoke the transubstantiality of the Joycean nightscape, the juxtaposition of lifelessness with the immanence of the living, the dead rising, corseting the black Irish Sea. There is a no separation between the dead and the living, but simply an inversion of language, a distance that never recedes into the background (foreground), an opposable unity of language, separation and line; transubstantiation of body and soul (life and death) sung in a tenebrous, lilting Irish brogue.