In Lestrygonians Bloom leaves the bar to urinate: "Dribbling
a quiet message from his bladder came to go to do not to do
there to do. A man and ready he drained his glass to the
lees and walked, to men too they gave themselves, manly
conscious, lay with men lovers, a youth enjoyed her, to
the yard." The referent of "they" is clear––Bloom has been
thinking about Greek goddesses in the previous paragraph––but
the particular goddess and the "youth" with whom she had sex
are not specified. Thornton and Gifford suggest, however, that
the sentence may allude to Shakespeare's Venus, Gifford noting
that "manly conscious" evokes Shakespeare's relentless
characterization of the goddess as masculine. There are
countless examples of this, e.g., "Backward she push'd him, as
she would be thrust" (41). The mention of a "youth" would also
distinguish Adonis from the many grown men to whom goddesses
give themselves in Greek myth, though, as Gifford notes,
Adonis does not "enjoy" Venus in the poem: "Venus is unable to
overcome the resistance of Adonis's 'unripe years' (524)."
Slote and his collaborators appear skeptical of an allusion
to Shakespeare, instead mentioning "Calypso and Circe, who
both slept with Odysseus, and Thetis who slept with Achilles's
father Peleus." This more general reading makes better sense
of "enjoyed," but it completely ignores the word "youth." The
Slote team supplies some interesting commentary on "yard,"
noting that it can mean "toilet" in Ulster dialect, or "penis"
according to the OED. (One wonders whether Davy
Byrne's might have had an actual back yard, with or without an
outhouse, in 1904. Presumably they have looked into this
possibility and ruled it out.)
If Thornton's hunch is correct, it would cohere with the
theme of unmanning that Stephen advances in the next chapter.
Shakespeare presents Venus as a kind of failed rapist,
aggressively dominating Adonis but unable to command an
erection from her partner. (Instead of a portrait of
aggressive female sexuality the poem could be read as a veiled
expression of the author's homosexuality, but Stephen does not
respond to it in this way.) Venus's unsuccessful seduction
might seem irrelevant to Bloom, since like the "youth" he has
had sexual relations with his love, but the thought of
emasculation is highly relevant at this moment in Lestrygonians.
Bloom has just been remembering a rapturous sexual experience
with Molly years ago on Howth Head, a memory that reproaches
him now when he cannot summon the potency to satisfy his wife.
("Me. And me now.") The "Dribbling" flaccidity of his penis as
he thinks of urinating puts him in mind of his halfway state
between sexual engagement and impotence: "to go to do not to
do there to do."
Shakespeare's characterizations of Venus as a woman who wants
to penetrate as well as be penetrated, and of Adonis as a man
who does not do but is done to, receive symbolic expression at
the end of the poem when Adonis, abandoning Venus for the
hunt, is gored by a boar. Running after him in distress, she
finds "the wide wound that the boar had trench'd / In his soft
flank, whose wonted lily white / With purple tears, that his
wound wept, [was] drench'd" (1052-54). Lest anyone miss the
way in which the boar has acted out her desire, Shakespeare
has Venus say that the animal "by a kiss thought to persuade
him there; / And [nuzzling] in his flank, the loving swine /
Sheath'd unaware the tusk in his soft groin. // Had I been
tooth'd like him, I must confess, With kissing him I should
have killed him first" (1114-18). The combination of tender
feeling and rapacious desire expressed so skillfully in these
lines lies behind Stephen's picture of the effect that Anne
Hathaway had on Shakespeare: "The tusk of the boar has
wounded him there where love lies ableeding." Like
Bloom, Shakespeare had sex with a "boldfaced" female and was
undone by her unfaithfulness: "Belief in himself has been
untimely killed."
Many less consequential echoes of Venus and Adonis
sound in Scylla and Charybdis. Stephen refers to "The
greyeyed goddess who bends over the boy Adonis,"
alluding both to the poem's description of Adonis as "the
tender boy" (32) and to Venus's words, "Mine eyes are gray and
bright and quick in turning" (140). His reference to Anne's "blue
windows" recalls Shakespeare's account of Venus raising
her eyelids: "Her two blue windows faintly she upheaveth, /
Like the fair sun" (481-83). (Gifford notes that in
Elizabethan English "gray eyes" meant blue.) When he thinks of
himself as a "Seabedabbled" Icarus he is recalling the
poem's picture of a "dewbedabbled" hare chased
by hounds. When he imagines Shakespeare writing Anne
into his fictions he includes Venus: "Who Cleopatra, fleshpot
of Egypt, and Cressid and Venus are we may guess." And when he
imagines Anne getting religion late in life he gives her a
mythic name: "Venus has twisted her lips in prayer."
