Preface

If, as M'Coy says, "there's a touch of the artist about old Bloom," Bloom's progenitor is the supreme artist of touch. In his study of "Irish Haptoglyphics," Mark Osteen demonstrates how, within the sensorium of Joyce's fiction, tactile encounters and manual tropes illuminate characters and their social relationships in evolving ways. Drawing on Disabilities Studies, Osteen characterizes the many trembling hands in Dubliners, from Father Flynn's to Gabriel's, as markers of physical and psychological dysfunction that typically "betray poverty of purse and spirit." Even when tightened in violent fists, like Farrington's in "Counterparts," the hands in these stories are "captive," imprisoned by familial abuse, colonial oppression, and religious indoctrination. Osteen notes that in stories like "A Mother," handshakes function not as tokens of congeniality and solidarity but of coercion and ambition. In his reading of Portrait, Osteen holds that the pandying of Stephen's palms at Clongowes is the seminal trauma of his life, an event he wants to forget but recalls compulsively in flashbacks "like a soldier suffering from shell shock." Stephen associates his lacerated hands with punishment for onanism, which functions as the "unspoken motive" for his anxiety and weariness through much of the novel. He combats this pain and guilt in his aesthetic theory, Osteen argues, by figuring the artist-god as a "creative masturbator" behind his "handiwork." Stephen fearfully yearns for a woman's touch, but it is only in Ulysses, "a mammoth atlas of manual behavior," that he frees himself from paralyzing tactile associations through his "valedictory" handshake with Bloom, a fleeting instant of reciprocal touch that conveys genuine "solidarity and support."

Kent Emerson, by contrast, regards the meeting of Bloom and Stephen as the "stillborn reunion of a sonless father and a fatherless son." Reading the later chapters of Ulysses as the expression of an impersonal "database aesthetic," he holds that the accretion of non-narrative information marks "a decentralization of the creative role of the human." Emerson argues that, beginning with the comically long lists of "Cyclops," Joyce's compositional practice increasingly subordinates narrative progression and character development to an "overload of information." However, this seemingly chaotic acceleration of adventitious data is carefully regulated by "information management systems" operating automatically "below the page's surface." These systems are derived from the novel's "original Homeric programming," but Joyce developed them beyond the initial narrative parallels with The Odyssey by expanding categories of correspondence "in every imaginable register," as reflected in the Linati and Gilbert schemas. Governed by a powerful "associational logic," the disrupted text thus acquires the open-ended construction of a database and anticipates twenty-first-century electronic information gathering "in its nearly infinite capability to connect individual elements." Citing, in particular, the question/answer format of "Ithaca," Emerson describes a complex network that gathers, organizes, and distributes content, providing structural links like hypertext in tracing the systematic flow of water from the Dublin aquifer to Bloom's kitchen tap.

Two of the essays in the 2017 JSA mine the seemingly limitless terrain of Joyce's sources in Ulysses. Tristan Power provides an informed tour of Joyce's "personal masochistic library," as reflected in the books Bloom procures for Molly and summons in his Nighttown fantasies. The influence of Sacher-Masoch's Venus in Furs has been long established, but Power notes that previous critics have relied on the Savage translation, published after Joyce drafted "Circe," not the Carrington edition of the novel that he discovered on his 1909 trip to Dublin. Power shows that Joyce drew on the specific language of this edition in his erotic letters to Nora (rife with requests for flogging and furs), in his notes for "Exiles," and repeatedly throughout Ulysses. Examining the erotic literature Bloom peruses at the bookstall in "Wandering Rocks," Power finds echoes of the Carrington translation in passages from Sweets of Sin, establishing Venus in Furs as "the main model" for this imaginary text. He traces another fictitious work in Ulysses, the sadomasochistic novel Fair Tyrants, to Sacher-Masoch's story "Disgrace at Any Price." In "Circe," Bloom stages notorious scenes of humiliation not just from the pages of Venus...