"Get another of Paul de Kock's. Nice name he has": Molly's
mind is no less filled with organs than her husband's is. Her
remark in Calypso would be less funny had Joyce
simply made the name up, but in fact Monsieur de Kock was a
popular writer of mid-19th century Paris. In addition to the
lewd double entendre, "Paul de" sounds like Molly's
affectionate nickname for her husband: Poldy. So this is a
"nice name" in several senses.
Charles-Paul de Kock (1793-1871) was born into a family of
Dutch descent living in Paris. He wrote novels at a clip
rivalling Balzac's and with subject matters resembling
Dickens'. Though less brilliant than either of these literary
giants, he enjoyed huge popularity throughout France. Most of
his stories concerned the lives of middle-class Parisians:
seamstresses, flower girls, milkmaids, shopgirls, clerks,
barbers. He did not hesitate to imitate coarse details of
ordinary life. Gifford cites an Edwardian judgment that "His
novels are vulgar but not unmoral."
Molly, however, assumes that de Kock is a lewd pseudonym. In
Penelope, she thinks, "Mr de Kock I suppose the
people gave him that nickname going about with his
tube from one woman to another." In Sirens
the suggestive name becomes elided with Boylan's penis as he
stands at the Blooms' front door, rapping with the metal door
knocker: "One rapped on a door, one tapped with a knock, did
he knock Paul de Kock with a loud proud knocker with a cock
carracarracarra cock. Cockcock."
In Circe the Kock-centered adulterous meeting
becomes Bloom's fault when Mrs. Yelverton Barry accuses him in
court : "I deeply inflamed him, he said. He made improper
overtures to me to misconduct myself at half past four p.m. on
the following Thursday, Dunsink time. He offered to send me
through the post a work of fiction by Monsieur Paul
de Kock, entitled The Girl with the Three Pairs of
Stays." La Femme aux Trois Corsets (1878)
was one of de Kock's novels. Later in Circe, when "Mute
inhuman faces throng forward" to hear Bloom's answer to
Bello's demand, "What was the most revolting piece of
obscenity in all your career of crime?," one of them is "Poldy
Kock."
Most of these later references to de Kock in Ulysses
call attention to Molly's infidelity with Boylan, and indeed
Joyce owned a copy of de Kock’s Le Cocu (The
Cuckold) when he was living in Trieste. But Poldy Kock
turns Molly's "nice name" into a domestic endearment, as Harry
Blamires notes in The New Bloomsday Book (26).
Whether or not she is conscious of this meaning, Molly's
affection for the name Paul de Kock holds out some hope that
her sexual passion for her spouse is not dead.
