This post looks at the word “fascinate” in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake.

Toward the end of “Ithaca” (Ulysses, Chapter 17), Leopold Bloom thinks about three women in the day who had “favorably received” his “magnetic face, form and address” (Mrs. Breen, Nurse Callan, and Gerty MacDowell). A “possibility suggested itself” to him: “The possibility of exercising virile power of fascination in the not immediate future.”

Forms of the word “fascinate” appear several other times, often in a sexual context — including connected to Blaze Boylan — and, interestingly, in a political context, with reference to Charles Stuart Parnell.

In Chapter 6, the funeral carriage passes Blazes Boylan, and as Bloom tries to distract himself by looking at his nails, he thinks of the word “fascination” in reference to the hold Boylan has over women:

Mr Bloom reviewed the nails of his left hand, then those of his right hand. The nails, yes. Is there anything more in him that they she sees? Fascination. Worst man in Dublin. 

Then in Chapter 8, Bloom thinks of the word in terms of Parnell (“You must have a certain fascination: Parnell”) and again when he sees Parnell’s brother: John Howard Parnell would

Drop into the D.B.C. probably for his coffee, play chess there. His brother used men as pawns. Let them all go to pot. Afraid to pass a remark on him. Freeze them up with that eye of his. That’s the fascination: the name.

The word appears again in Gerty MacDowell’s thoughts in Chapter 13, when Cissy runs over to Bloom to ask the time. Bloom nervously pulls his hand out of his pocket and plays with his watchchain. Seeing his ability to turn from passion to seriousness, Gerty (amusingly) thinks that he

had enormous control over himself. One moment he had been there, fascinated by a loveliness that made him gaze, and the next moment it was the quiet gravefaced gentleman, selfcontrol expressed in every line of his distinguishedlooking figure. 

A stage direction in Chapter 15 describes Bloom as “fascinated” by Zoe the prostitute, immediately after Bloom gives her his potato. In that same chapter, Bloom recalls his friend Gerald had been “fascinated by sister’s stays” and developed a kink for crossdressing. Later, when Bella Cohen, transformed into “Bello,” is converting Bloom into a prostitute during a fantasy sequence, he/she says to Bloom, referring to male customers, “Bring all your powers of fascination to bear on them. Pander to their Gomorrahan vices.”

So when Bloom looks forward to the possibility in the future of exercising “power of fascination,” he imagines claiming a power that belongs to Blazes Boylan, the Parnells, and, in its feminine form, to women. But Bloom anticipates employing “virile power of fascination,” the masculine version that the counterpart of female wiles that Bella encourages Bloom to exercise in the Nighttown fantasy.

Interestingly enough, the word “fascinate” comes from a Latin word meaning to bewitch or ensorcell, and it has a particularly sexual origin: the fascinus in ancient Rome was a magical charm that was an “embodiment of the divine phallus.” The word thus gestures to the power of sexuality to captivate attention — and in terms of the political references to great leaders fascinating crowds, the word reminds me of the (too) close relationship that often exists between politics and sexual neuroses. Someone once said — only half jokingly — that much of politics is a kind of sexual dysfunction. That is, people tend to project their bizarre sexual hangups onto the ways they characterize the political landscape and especially the ways they demonize their political opponents and valorize politicians on their own side. In 1984, Orwell proposes that repression of sexuality is important to the Party because the resulting frustration can be channeled into nationalistic fervor. All the parades and marches and rallies and chants, the Two Minute Hate, all of it — it’s all “sex gone sour,” a pathological manifestation of the sex drive when it’s forcibly repressed and directed toward weird goals.

The word “fascinate” appears a few times in Finnegans Wake, where it is used in the context of the torments of love and jealousy in the fallen world, employed by both male and female characters. In II.1, Izod (Issy) is being “fatally fascinated” by Chuff (Shaun) after she has “jilted Glugg” (Shem). So I guess he is exercising those “virile powers of fascination” a la Boylan. But in II.4, Issy, in the guise of Miss Yiss, is called a “fascinator” (I wonder if Miss Yiss/Miss Yes is a reference to Molly Bloom and the great Yes that ends her monologue — perhaps it refers more generally to the female principle of the universe and its association with affirmation of life).

An interesting appearance of the word is in garbled form in III.3, during the cross-examination of Yawn. The witness describes the world tree in Phoenix Park, HCE as the great tree that contains the world. This is a reference to Yggdrasil in Norse myth, as well as to his erection.

creatures of the wold approaching him, hollow mid ivy, for to claw and rub, hermits of the desert barking their infernal shins over her triliteral roots and his acorns and pinecorns shooting wide all sides out of him, plantitude outsends of plenty to thousands, after the truants of the utmostfear and her downslyder in that snakedst-tu-naughsy whimmering woman’t seeleib such a fashionaping sathinous dress out of that exquisitive creation and her leaves, my darling dearest, sinsinsinning since the night of time and each and all of their branches meeting and shaking twisty hands all over again in their new world through the germination of its gemination from Ond’s outset till Odd’s end. And encircle him circuly. Evovae!

“Fashionaping” is a garbled version of “fascinating.” The passage links the Fall from the Garden of Eden (and the temptations of the serpent and Eve) with the evolution of humans from apes. The development of our intelligence beyond that of other members of the animal kingdom is indeed both our gift and our downfall: we have used it to create incredible technology to make our lives easier, but we are also plagued with worries and concerns from which other animals are free.

Finnegans Wake treats fashion and clothing as an important symbol, as I have detailed in other posts, and specifically connects it to evolution in I.5 (“some definite articles of evolutionary clothing”) and social evolution in I.6 (the speaker’s portrait of Marge/Issy is “suggestive of gentlemen’s spring modes, these modes carrying us back to the superimposed claylayers of eocene and pleastoseen formation and the gradual morphological changes in our body politic”).

In the sexual connotations of “fascinating,” the word “fashionaping” points to sexuality as a source of both Fall and Redemption (“Hearasays in Paradox Lust,” Joyce puns in II.2).