I. Ejaculation

I. Ejaculation:

When the body is written as text, it is often degraded by such banter that focuses almost solely on the orgasm, or even more disgustingly, ideology. Somehow one is projected as if from the cannon of love, no pun intended, into the paramount height that is orgasm. Why the unnecessary romantic banter? What of foreplay, intention, stroking, or impotency? What of viagra that is delivered to the house days in advance, or the time one spends waiting for one’s girlfriend to finish her period? Despite the predominant move in much discourse on the body to attribute it a romantic spontaneity, there is always, and inevitably an extensive prelude.

Prelude to orgasm: The steady rise, the excitement. An image of mother that one attempts to shake from the mind. The blood that flows from various parts of the body, through increasingly narrow channels and shafts. The warmth that friction generates by means of the movement of hands. The exchange of the gaze. Masturbation, sex, masochism, foreplay, denial, etc. One need look no further for the evidence of this anti-spontaneity than Barthes’ image repertoire. We draw on images that we have collected, to satisfy a certain, very physical means.

Here, and for this very reason, it is Joyce that provides the best literature on the masturbatory experience:

…and she saw that he saw and then it went so high it went out of sight a moment and she was trembling in every limb from being bent so far back that he could see high up above her knee where no-one ever and she wasn’t ashamed and he wasn’t either to look in that immodest way like that because he couldn’t resist the sight of those skirtdancers behaving so immodest before gentlemen looking and he kept on looking, looking…And then a rocket sprang and bang shot blind blank and O! then the Roman candle burst and it was like a sigh of O! and everyone cried O! O! and it gushed out of it a stream of rain gold hair threads and they shed and ah! they were all greeny dewy stars falling with golden, O so lovely! O so soft, sweet, soft! (Ulysses 2485)

Here, one is quick to assert that the “O” is an indication of the pleasure associated with orgasm. Unfortunately, the same literary critics overlook the temporality of the orgasm. The body is denied a spontaneity. It is prolonged for two pages, as Leopold Bloom carefully watches Gerty. The entire chapter is inextricably bound to this excitement, to the arrival of the orgasm. And if to spite the reader, Joyce continues and describes the effects.

To understand Funk night as orgasm is to miss the greater text within which it is embedded. Funk night, as the body during ejaculation incorporates the elements of planning, structure, coordination.