The Ineluctable Modality of the Visibly

Disabled in James Joyce’s Ulysses

Paul Marchbanks
California Polytechnic State University
The Ineluctable Modality of the Visibly Disabled

Though Leopold Bloom has long been beloved for his frail and familiar humanity, he has
also been praised, regularly, for one outstanding virtue: sympathy. Reexamination of the
central protagonist of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) reveals, however, that Bloom’s brand
of pity is one link in that “chain of complicity” perpetuated by occidental institutions
throughout the twentieth century, a posture “that colludes (knowingly or unknowingly)
to limit the freedoms and mobility of people with disabilities” (Snyder and Mitchell 4).
Bloom’s fundamental unwillingness to accept his status as one of the “temporarily abled”—
an individual whose position along a continuum of physical and mental differences will
necessarily change with age and experience (Davis 1, 7)—generates an abiding, opaque fear
that shadows the halting kindheartedness for which he has been celebrated. By sketching
Bloom’s less blatant prejudices alongside those of his louder, more demonstrative fellow
citizens, Joyce insinuates a critique of not only his own era’s ingrained bigotry, but that of
all cultures and individuals who find it difficult to solidify relationships with those whose
disabilities remind them of their own finitude.

An Unsettling Sympathy

If the stylistic audacity of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) polarized an unprepared

reading public, its presentation of the kind yet prurient Leopold Bloom
split that audience in two. Contemporary novelists Ernest Hemingway and
Arnold Bennett praised the work’s sexual frankness, but Joyce’s own brother
vehemently disliked the tale’s attention to the fantasizing of a man whose
wife has not consented to sex in ten years, and Virginia Woolf thought
the whole reminiscent of a “‘queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples’”
(Ellmann 528–32). In the years that followed, critical consensus slowly pushed
the challenging novel towards the top of many a best books list, and Bloom
himself began to emerge as an awkward but sympathetic outsider beloved as
much for his familiar imperfections as for that supposed compassion toward
Dublin’s disabled and disenfranchised which appears to set him apart from
his more self-interested peers. Presumably, the compassion of this altruistic,

Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies 12.1 (2018) © Liverpool University Press
ISSN 1757-6458 (print) 1757-6466 (online) https://doi.org/10.3828/jlcds.2018.4
54 Paul Marchbanks

postmodern seer contrasts particularly sharply with the “robust insensitivity”

of the book’s other central figure, the young Stephen Dedalus (Kiberd 65).
Harry Blamires’s The New Bloomsday Book: A Guide through Ulyssses, a
popular guidebook for newcomers ever since its initial publication in 1966,
has steadfastly configured Bloom as a warmhearted outsider, one whose
marital problems and stigmatized Jewish heritage sharpen his sensitivity to
others’ suffering. As Blamires would have it, Bloom sports the same “genuine
and touching,” unadulterated concern for the impoverished Dilly Dedalus
as he does for the long-suffering Mrs Purefoy, now in her third day of labor,
and functions as a “compassionate Jesus-Bloom” as he “charitably” assists a
young, blind boy to cross the street (60–61, 65, 73–74). The more recent Ulysses
and Us (2009) by Dublin native Declan Kiberd similarly praises Bloom as “a
man open to many perspectives,” one who “has taught himself to question
every cosy consensus and to adopt the less obvious, less popular viewpoint”
(135, 80). Bloom’s marked inconsistencies of opinion and desire are cast as
evidence of an enviable “equilibrium that […] proceeds to embrace [the] code
which he has just appeared to reject” (131), his egregious “outburst of racism
and misogyny” in the Nausicaa episode becomes the uncharacteristic defense
mechanism of a man “who feels that he has already conceded too much” (203),
and his refusal to confront his wife about her adulterous intentions apparently
reflects an attempt to apply bohemian and socialist principles to bourgeois
marital relations (246, 125) by cleansing sexual intimacy of all possessiveness
(82–83, 228, 246). Admitting that Bloom, “no ultimate paragon” (22), regularly
fails to identify in himself those errors he attributes to others (90), Kiberd yet
joins many critics in refusing to interrogate that facile, wide sympathy Bloom
extends over the otherly abled, oppressed, and bereaved alike.
Closer examination reveals, however, that Bloom oscillates widely between
searching solicitude for his fellow Dubliners and reductive aesthetic appraisal.
His lauded empathy slides easily, and often, into condescending pity, and from
there into barely veiled disdain and disgust. A kind of peripatetic wallflower,
watching from afar the population he wishes to join more fully, the quiet Bloom
betrays a constellation of seemingly conflicting inclinations—the patternings
of which become traceable when juxtaposed against that ableist anxiety which
sways their movements. Bloom’s fundamental unwillingness to accept his
status as one of the “temporarily abled”—an individual whose position along a
continuum of physical and mental differences will necessarily change with age
and experience (Davis 1, 7)—generates an abiding, opaque fear that shapes the
weaving path of his desire, shadowing the halting kindheartedness for which
he has been celebrated. By sketching Bloom’s less blatant prejudices alongside
 The Ineluctable Modality of the Visibly Disabled 55

those of his louder, more demonstrative fellow citizens, Joyce insinuates a

critique of not only his own era’s ingrained bigotry but that of all modern,
occidental cultures which, “under the humanist guise of help or sympathy for
‘the unfortunate’ […] participat[e] in a normative science of eugenic origin”
(Snyder and Mitchell 4–5).

Ingrained Ableism on the Emerald Isle

The discriminatory, stratifying assessments Bloom silently performs as he

walks about Dublin actually align him with the jaundiced views of his Irish
contemporaries instead of setting him apart as a forward-thinking idealist.
Anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes explains in Saints, Scholars, and Schizo-
phrenics: Mental Illness in Rural Ireland (1977) that the rural Irish evinced a
robust prejudice against disfigurement, physical disability, and non-normative
cognitive modes well into the 1970s (25, 236). Such persistent discrimination
found fertile soil among those of the urbane literati contemporaneous with
Joyce who fed the Gaelic revival by resurrecting old Irish myths that carelessly
reinforced tired physiognomic formulae. Lady Gregory and P. W. Joyce, both
of whose works would feel the sting of Joyce’s wit in the broadside “Gas
from a Burner” (1912),1 helped translate and disseminate some of the more
problematic tales associated with that program of cultural revival from which
Joyce distanced himself as he moved toward the more innovative, synergetic
“mythical method” feted by T. S. Eliot (482–83). In P. W. Joyce’s iteration
of “The Giolla Dacker and His Horse,” a roguish Dedannan named Avarta
abruptly appears during a Fenian hunt, magically wearing the appearance of
an enormous Fomorian with the apparatus of idiotic gigantism written large
across his person. Large and clumsy—with crooked legs, flat feet which turn
inward, and an exaggerated tendency toward laziness—the Dedannan quickly
engages in a programme of mischief consonant with his assumed appearance
(154–85). The tales translated by Lady Gregory in Gods and Fighting Men (1904)
similarly link disfigurement and disability with questionable character. The
king of the Tuatha de Danaan, an ancient and revered fairy race, must remain
wholly “perfect in shape” to avoid disqualification as leader, the invading
army of the hated Fomor is constituted of dreadful warriors whose displeasing

1.  Joyce’s bitter “Gas from a Burner” (1912) takes aim at many Irish writers whose efforts to publish
their work met with fewer obstacles than his own, including “Gregory of the Golden Mouth” whose
“folklore from North and South” proved quite popular, and P. W. Joyce who published The Origin
and History of Irish Names of Places in addition to resurrected Gaelic myth (Critical 244).
56 Paul Marchbanks

facial features find a complement in physical deformity (usually a missing

appendage), and blindness telegraphs imminent treachery (31, 32, 33).
The prejudicial assumptions that informed Irish storytelling for centuries
predictably molded public policy as well: pervasive discomfort with an array of
disabling conditions had long prevented the establishment of appropriate care
and housing for citizens with extraordinary cognitive and physical differences.
By 1904, the year in which Ulysses is set, popular practice had established
Dublin as the country’s primary dumping ground for the unwanted “insane”
and “idiotic,” despite the creation of a district asylum system in the 1820s that
had intended to distribute responsibility for care across the country. Mentally
ill and cognitively disabled castaways squeezed into Dublin’s area asylums and
houses of industry, congregating primarily inside the workhouses that had
long collected those with extraordinary physical and mental differences. In the
March 1904 issue of The Dublin Journal of Medical Science, the President of State
Medicine in the Royal Academy of Medicine decried the present workhouse
system as a national disgrace. The universally lauded Local Government
Ireland Act of 1900 had apparently placed many well-intentioned but poorly
educated representatives into management positions all over the country
(Moore 184). Other managers simply abused their newfound power. Poor Law
Guardian Miss Emily Buchanan decried a system “unjust and distasteful to
the sick and helpless classes, and […] only too attractive to the undeserving
who thrive upon its corruptions” (Moore 185). Additional thousands unable
to find residence in the poorly funded, poorly managed, and overcrowded
workhouses ended up wandering the countryside or living off hand-outs in
major metropolitan areas. In the September 1904 edition of the Dublin medical
journal, Dr Connolly Norman, director of Dublin’s Richmond Asylum, added
his voice to the growing criticism of workhouse management. He highlighted
the large number of registered, so-called mental defectives, a percentage which
grew even as mass emigration continued contributing to population erosion
(162). Irish care of cognitively disabled people in particular trailed far behind
that of England, where asylums and schools created specifically for this subset
had begun appearing in the 1840s. The modest Irish institution for “idiotic”
and “imbecilic” children opened by Dr Henry H. Stewart in the late nineteenth
century provided an exception rather than a precedent; those who did join
Dr Norman’s cry for family and community care of “the idiot” fought against
popular opinion that would only begin to change significantly in the 1960s. The
rapid growth in various institutions of incarceration over the last two hundred
years had dulled many families’ sense of responsibility for family members
requiring ongoing care. Those profoundly cognitively disabled individuals not
 The Ineluctable Modality of the Visibly Disabled 57

mired in workhouses ended up on the streets, absorbed by other outcasts who

often constituted the only family they knew.

Imagining Neurodiversity

Before considering Bloom’s encounters with extraordinary bodies early on 16

June 1904—that single day in which the entire novel takes place—it makes sense
to examine those later chapters that disclose the biases which inform these
earlier encounters. The “Oxen of the Sun” episode (chp. 14), which infamously
mimics so as to mock six hundred years of literary evolution, implicitly
interrogates the insensitive medical students at the maternity hospital in
Holles Street who wile away the hours preceding the birth of Mrs Purefoy’s
eighth child in loud explorations of the social, religious, and medical issues
tied to sex and pregnancy. The interminable wait (Mrs Purefoy has been in
labor for three days) sanctions a flow of alcohol which carries away the young
men’s last inhibitions, leading to a crude and ill-timed listing of objectionable
parturitive outcomes. The many difficulties gleefully “eviscerated” amid this
“strife of tongues” include miscarriages, facial malformations like agnathia
and harelip, cases of conjoined twins in which one child dies prematurely, and
other “monstrous births conceived during the catamenic period or of consan-
guineous parents” (14.948–1005).
Though Bloom appears to censure the students’ bad behavior, his failed
attempts to quiet them (14.952–53) have more to do with rules of propriety than
any discomfort with that medical model which renders the non-normative
infant body “monstrous” and in need of intervention or elimination. Bloom
has, just moments earlier, silently applied similar principles to the bawdy
medical student Punch Costello, his antipathy having less to do with Punch’s
crassness than his morphology:
But the word of Mr Costello was an unwelcome language for him
for he nauseated the wretch that seemed to him a cropeared creature
of a misshapen gibbosity, born out of wedlock and thrust like a
crookback toothed and feet first into the world, which the dint of the
surgeon’s pliers in his skull lent indeed a colour to, so as to put him
in thought of that missing link of creation’s chain desiderated by the
late ingenious Mr Darwin.” (14.853–59)

Bloom’s silent depreciation leaves few elements of Costello’s body unremarked,

encompassing the shape of his head, the curve of his spine, and the color
of his skin—features Bloom’s imagination will embellish in the surrealistic
58 Paul Marchbanks

Circe episode (chp. 15) where Costello reappears as a “hobgoblin […] hipshot,

crookbacked, hydrocephalic, prognathic with receding forehead and Ally Sloper
nose” (15.2150–52). Apparently, Bloom would welcome a population divested of
such physical irregularities, as well as of mental dysfunction. He believes “to a
degree” in the perfection of human life through the removal of suffering caused
by various “conditions imposed by natural” law, including instances of “innate
lunacy and congenital criminality” (17.995–1002), and weighs the possible
benefits of “ritual murder” as a response to “the sporadic reappearance of
atavistic delinquency” (17.844–48). The “Circe” episode’s dream-like framework
frees Bloom to imagine a utopic “Bloomusalem,” an entirely new social order
that successfully unites individuals of all cultures and religions but which
expressly excludes mental illness and begging (15.1686–90)—ubiquitous, paired
conditions in turn-of-the-century Ireland.
The vision of an inclusive community missing from the medical students’
and Bloom’s imaginations appears, tantalizingly briefly, at the opening of the
“Circe” episode. The types of physical disability Joyce’s male characters would
prefer dissociating from the realm of feminine fecundity actually appear just
outside the city’s primary locus of illicit sexual activity, that very area they
visit after leaving the hospital. A panoply of figures wearing the accoutrement
of denigrated difference appear at the entrance to Dublin’s red-light district,
including a “pigmy woman” swinging on a rope drawn between two railings,
a “gnome” carrying a bag of rags and bones, a “bandy child, asquat on the
doorstep with a paper shuttlecock,” and a “deafmute idiot with goggle eyes”
who enters the play of street children Joyce likens to “stunted men and women”
(15.5–34). These pariahs, kin to their more visible brethren on the streets and
beaches of Dublin, move easily among one another outside the whorehouses to
which they have been drawn. Some have come perhaps with hopes of charity
from passing customers, while others have been pulled by possible blood ties to
the sex workers who, like the prostitute combing out the tatters of a scrofulous
child (15.40–41), birth diseased and disabled progeny for whom they lack the
means to provide. A few approach the piles of refuse rummaging for treasure.
Whatever the magnet that draws each of them, they together form a community
where the differences that brand them in the light of day dissolve into shadows
that transform their bodies and merge them in a shared, equalizing darkness.
Since Joyce blurs the lines between reality and fantasy throughout this
episode, challenging the reader to distinguish between incidents reified by
references elsewhere and those occurrences generated by Bloom’s imagination,
the reader is free to deny that these particular figures even exist as described,
instead dismissing them as fantastic elements in Joyce’s surrealistic apparatus.
 The Ineluctable Modality of the Visibly Disabled 59

Critic Weldon Thornton doubts “that such grotesques are actually present in
Mabbot street on this June night,” instead reading their presence as a “Freudian/
expressionistic representation of the motley crew of men and women who are
milling about at the entrance to Nighttown” (159).2 Such an interpretation
dodges the very real possibility of such figures residing in this northeast part
of Dublin—a poor and underdeveloped neighborhood well into the twentieth
century—a denial which discounts common knowledge about communities of
indigents in every major metropolis, and diverges from what we know about
the place of the “idiot” and his disabled brethren in Joyce’s Dublin.
By incorporating a drooling, goggle-eyed, and deaf-mute “idiot” inscribed
with an array of stigmatized traits, Joyce anticipates the neurodiverse
community inclusive of cognitive difference envisioned by musical theorist
Joseph Straus (460–83); that the glimpse Joyce affords is both fleeting and
imperfect underscores the vast distance yet to be traversed before the Irish
could even begin to accommodate and truly value radical mental difference.
The children, likely the offspring of society’s nearby outcasts, encircle and
parody the boy’s awkwardness, acts which include while excluding him.
Imprisoned in a chain of small, interlocked hands, he is yet the center of
attention, the mock command and question they toss at him he catches and
enthusiastically returns, attempting to mimic their words and follow their
instruction. And then he jerks on and is gone, disappearing into the shadows
that host his disfigured fellows, moving out of one circle and into another.
He only vanishes, however, after establishing a link with a world which both
needs and rejects him, making him the center of ridicule and the necessary,
somehow honored subject of play. In this way, Joyce subtly counters the rising
tide of contemporary, post-Galton eugenics, recalling the cognitively disabled
individual’s privileged, liminal position at the gates of the medieval town
(Foucault 11, 68) and gesturing toward a distant but desirable egalitarianism.
This cognitively disabled character’s appearance at the opening of “Circe”
positions him as a counterpoint to the vision of Bloom’s deceased son which
closes the episode, setting up an emblematic evocation of that dueling longing
and aversion which—as we will see—characterizes Bloom’s posture towards
otherly abled bodies and minds. The dead Rudy later appears as the mirage of
a “fairy boy of eleven, a changeling” dressed in an Eton uniform with diamond
and ruby buttons, silently reading a Jewish book from right to left, looking up
only to gaze at Bloom without recognition (15.4956–64). If the hearing-impaired

2.  Thornton questions the description of virtually everyone who appears prior to the entrance of
Stephen and Lynch in lines 62–63.
60 Paul Marchbanks

idiot represents the type of unacceptable drain on society’s mental and material
resources depreciated by Bloom, the attractively dressed and highly educated
carrier of his own genes epitomizes longed-for, unrealized potential, setting up
a contrast which allows the reader to imagine Bloom’s probable ambivalence
had his own son been disabled. Both boys stand beyond the pale of Bloom’s
compassion, Rudy doubly removed by not only his death but the likelihood
that a lengthened life would have similarly distanced him from his father. In
refusing to apprehend his parent, the ghostly Rudy conjures the uncertain
gaze his father may well have directed at him had the boy lived, for Rudy died
eleven days after his birth from unspecified medical complications (17.2281–82):
a Rudy who survived the condition that killed him would, in this period, have
likely emerged marked by physical and/or cognitive dysfunction, presenting
Bloom with (for him) overwhelming ideological and practical challenges.
The fantasy of the “Circe” episode might configure Bloom as a “bisexually
abnormal,” “finished example of the new womanly man” capable of bearing
children (15.1798–1832), but the real, fastidious Bloom would find it difficult
to “rewrite kinship” so thoroughly as to embrace the protracted caregiving
normally relegated to women, let alone publicly seek the community support
necessary to attend ably to the needs of a child with a disability (Ginsburg
and Rapp 190). The admixture of care and desire which drives Bloom to serve
his wife breakfast in bed and run errands for her in chapter four would not
translate easily into the call to care for one who lacked the autonomy, mobility,
and searching intellect he so values. After all, while affection for his wife Molly
has survived the absence of “complete carnal intercourse” since Rudy’s death
ten years earlier (12.2278–84), it has been sorely tested by not only infidelity but
that “deficient mental development” in Molly which he has found difficult to
amend (17.674–708).
Having traced Bloom’s discomfort with non-normative bodies and minds
alongside the contours of Ireland’s physiognomic prejudices in the period, we
are now equipped to dissect Bloom’s more conspicuous encounters with the
disenfranchised earlier in the day.

A Proximity Principle

The near-sightedness Joyce bestows on the two, central characters of his

novel has markedly different effects on their sociability. While Stephen
Dedalus’s worsening eyesight exacerbates his insularity, encouraging an
isolation that facilitates epistemological abstractions about the limits of human
 The Ineluctable Modality of the Visibly Disabled 61

perception and understanding, Leopold Bloom’s myopia provides an occasion

for sympathizing with a visually impaired individual. Both men imagine
briefly what blindness might entail, but their minds move them in diverging
directions. Stephen’s navigation of a beach with shut eyes leads him to ponder
the “[i]neluctable modality of the visible,” that unending flux of all visual
stimuli, as well as the navigational habits of the vision impaired—whom he
considers in the aggregate (3.1–28). By contrast, Bloom’s decision to assist the
blind stripling in crossing a street transports the middle-class Irishman into
the lower-class boy’s stained coat and places the tapping cane within his own
grasp (8.1096–97, 1110–11). The pity originally prompted by the boy’s trembling
movements at the curb (8.1078–82) quickly morphs into fascination, identi-
fication, and social critique. Bloom speculates about how such an individual
can sense nearby objects without touching them (8.1107–13), wonders whether
olfaction and gustation operate differently in the absence of vision (8.1121–24),
and considers whether the blind boy’s inability to see precludes shame during
sexual encounters (8.1125–31). Bloom then performs a simple experiment,
touching his own hair, cheek, and stomach—body parts he cannot currently
see—in an attempt to sensitize his fingers to specific textures and colors
(8.1135–42). Bloom also considers the common Dubliner’s assumptions about
individuals with disabilities, interrogating those prejudices that instinctively
assign a deficient intellect to someone with a visible deformity (8.1115–17) and
noting the questionable practice of labeling such individuals “dark men”
(8.1120).
Bloom’s altruism stumbles, however, when the reader turns from his
conspicuous kindness to some of the problematic observations crowded behind
his actions; his thoughts disqualify Bloom from the position of model empath
assigned him by Declan Kiberd (135), aligning him instead with those masses
whose pernicious brand of pity will decades later spawn disability rights
activism in the West (Shapiro 12, 20–24). Bloom’s determination to speak
to the blind stripling as an equal—he mentions the weather casually as they
cross the street (8.1092–93)—trips over his silent practice of appending the
modifier “poor” to “fellow” (8.1107, 1144), a seemingly innocuous convention
which betrays a substrate of condescension shifting uneasily beneath Bloom’s
manifest tender-heartedness. This unstable layer erupts into view with Bloom’s
wondering whether the young man actually has a name (8.1098–99), and his
bizarre speculation that the boy might have no dreams (8.1144–45), suppositions
rooted in a larger belief that blindness might very well disqualify one from
membership in the human race. The discomfort with the boy’s position
which initially appeared preoccupied with the injustices of a prejudiced
62 Paul Marchbanks

society slowly dissolves into abhorrence of a life Bloom determines must be

“terrible,” a tragedy akin to the experience of being burned alive (8.1144–47).
His concluding thought on the matter, “Pity, of course: but somehow you can’t
cotton on to them someway” (8.1149–50), confirms the collapse of the bridge he
haphazardly attempted to build between himself and this novel “other.”
One likely explanation for Bloom’s aversion lies in the uncomfortable similarity
of the boy’s condition to Bloom’s own. There may be “much kindness in the jew
[sic]” (10.980), as character John Wyse Nolan suggests, but the apparently deep
wellspring of sympathy upon which Bloom draws throughout this long day
tends to run dry whenever he encounters a pitiable situation that reminds him
of his own vulnerability or inadequacy. In this particular situation, Bloom’s
myopia—signaled earlier when he brought a newspaper page close to his face
in order to read it (4.157–58) and again when he considered whether increased
moisture in the air allowed him to see more clearly than normal (5.110–13)—
grants him an uncomfortably close glimpse of what blindness might actually be
like, and infuses a large measure of aversion into his store of pity. This proximity
principle shapes his responses to the poor, women, the physically disabled, and
those whose cognitive powers have been seriously compromised. As long as he
succeeds at holding the perceived problem at arm’s length, Bloom’s sympathy
remains relatively intact and his imagination maintains a virtual connection
with the object of his pitying gaze. When someone else’s predicament touches
too close to home, anxiety retracts the open hand.
His imperfect sight notwithstanding, our amateur sociologist absorbs data
aplenty as he moves among his fellow citizens and the newspaper headlines
which front him during his circumambulations, his imagination extrapo-
lating horrors only hinted at by face and fact. Bloom envisions, for instance,
loaded guns which “go off” far too often (13.1193–94), a bloody feast in which
“everybody [is] eating everyone else” (7.214), and, more generally, a cycle of
life which chews people up as rapidly as it spits them into being (8.477–83).
Dismayed by the violent scrabble for a finite and fragile existence, Bloom
swings between the despairing conclusion that “No one is anything” (8.493)
and a humane, forceful resentment of “violence and intolerance in any shape
or form” (16.1098–1103). Somehow, Bloom manages to regularly rediscover the
conviction that life is of great value, a conviction which generates varying
degrees of sympathy toward everyone and everything in a difficult position,
including scavenging birds and trembling calves on their way to the slaugh-
terhouse (8.73–76, 722–24).
Comfortably middle-class and gainfully employed, Bloom painlessly begets
a sympathy for the destitute which proves as uncomplicated as the one-word
 The Ineluctable Modality of the Visibly Disabled 63

modifier with which he stamps them. The word poor predictably launches
observations concerning a former crown solicitor for Waterford who now
sells four bootlaces for a penny (6.229–36); one of Simon Dedalus’s emaciated
and poorly dressed daughters (8.28–43); and Paddy Dignam, whose death
leaves behind a family struggling to pay the bills (6.815). Bloom also pities
sandwichmen who barely manage to “keep skin and bone together” on three
bob a day (8.123–30), cabmen serving others in all weather with “no will of
their own” (5.223–26), and a barefoot Arab “deaden[ing] the gnaw of hunger”
by inhaling fumes from a diner (8.235–38). The sharpening pangs of pity
occasionally spark not only indignation but action, as when Bloom’s discomfort
with lavish expenditures on the dead (6.928–33) prompts him to contribute five
shillings to Martin Cunningham’s fundraising efforts for the grieving Dignam
family (10.956–80), but more often Bloom’s sympathy remains unexpressed.3

Unlooked for Intersections of Disability and Desire

Bloom’s pity for women extends from a similarly distant and secure position,
financial stability joining his privileged status as a middle-aged man to
enable easy sympathy for young women forced to become nuns due to their
families’ poverty (8.144–52), and for competent midwives who must wait
months to receive remuneration from ungrateful clients (8.398–400). Similarly,
his inability to bear a child frees him to feel compassion for Mina Purefoy,
currently experiencing her third day of labor pains at the lying-in hospital
(8.281–90), and casually to reflect on the necessity of new methods that might
ease the pain of delivery (8.373–88, 14.1251–56). Mrs Purefoy’s suffering is “no
fault of hers” (14.882–84), Bloom asserts, and he points an accusing finger
toward not the complicit male libido but the Catholic Church’s proscription
against contraception (8.28–39). Though Bloom’s prurience admittedly peppers
his musings on the discomfort of both childbirth and breast feeding with
recollections of the pleasure associated with intercourse and rounded female
breasts (8.358–66, 11.1101–03), the absence of any attraction to the absent-present
Mina Purefoy allows his sympathy for her—identified repeatedly throughout
the day (8.358, 10.589–90, 11.1101–03, 14.111–22)—to remain relatively unadul-
terated by personal considerations.
That condescending pity which sharpens indignation and innovation does

3.  Even Bloom’s apparent kindness toward the troubled Stephen Dedalus is arguably adulterated by
repeat, mercenary considerations about Stephen’s singing professionally with Bloom’s wife, Molly
(16.1652-61, 16.1803-65).
64 Paul Marchbanks

not appear, at first glance, to either galvanize or depress sexual desire. Within
the space of a few hours, Bloom’s wandering gaze, set in motion by frustration
born of disappointing marital relations and an unconsummated epistolary
affair, fixes itself on the “moving hams” of a nubile neighbor (4.145–51, 162–64),
the tantalizing curves of a barmaid’s cleavage (11.154, 1106, etc.), and the barely
perceptible silk stockings of a proud lady whom he imagines yielding to his
purposeful touch (5.101–105, 130). Bloom pities none of these women: as with
those who will appear to accuse him of lecherous actions in the surrealistic
Circe chapter, these more tangible and immediately present women signal
little more than their sexuality before unwittingly winning the fixed gaze of
the appreciative Bloom. His libidinous gaze is, arguably, less delimiting than it
is celebratory. Though Bloom clearly limits his attention to certain, corporeal
attributes of these attractive women, their bodies receive his uncomplicated, if
ephemeral, praise.
These particular women exit Bloom’s appreciative ken as smoothly as they
enter it, gliding past Venus-like on the wave of their own beauty, unaware of
the approving gaze tracking their movements. The young and alluring Gerty
MacDowell, however, on whom Bloom’s eyes settle at twilight, disrupts this
pattern in two ways. She responds to Bloom’s gaze by stepping willfully into
his fantasy and melding it with her own, then abruptly, unwittingly spoils their
joint vision of relational perfection by announcing her mobility impairment.
As Weldon Thornton has suggested, the sentimental monologue contained
by the first 765 lines of the “Nausicaa” episode (chp. 13) appears to represent
Gerty’s actual thoughts (102–03)—reflections that weave a fantasy of shared
love and desire akin to that envisioned by Bloom. The look he initially directs at
Gerty does not deserve to be classed with the delimiting stares and aggressive
behavior of the “male pests” who brazenly accosted the newly mobile urban
women of the period, as some have suggested (Teets Schwarze 84–85, 163–64).
Instead, Bloom’s imagination sets up the type of reciprocal exchange which the
“Penelope” episode (chp. 18) suggests once characterized his relationship with
Molly (18.1572–82). Gerty appears to realize she has “raised the devil” in her
observer by swinging her buckled shoe ever faster, and flushes with pleasure
(13.513–20). Left to her own devices, her friends having moved down the beach,
Gerty titillates the masturbating Bloom still further by catching her knee and
leaning back to reveal her underwear. He, in turn, grants her the gallant image
of masculinity for which she has been pining throughout the episode. Fronting
her from only yards away, and carefully preventing her from seeing his stout
body in profile (13.836–37), Bloom allows Gerty to read his quiet face and
funereal attire as those of a sad and lonely gentleman, perhaps one mourning
 The Ineluctable Modality of the Visibly Disabled 65

an old lover (13.656–67). She reaches out to this mysterious figure and, in
their mutually constructed fantasy, reads onto his entranced face “Whitehot
passion” mixed with “inflexible honour” (13.691, 694). The wordless exchange
appears, for the moment, to benefit both.
While the fantasy lasts, the gaze each character directs at the other resembles
more a shared, admiring regard than it does objectifying gawking. Once,
however, Bloom realizes that Gerty is mobility impaired—a fact thrust upon
him when she rises and begins to walk haltingly back to her friends (13.766–71)—
pity and disgust quickly dethrone desire, and what Rosemary-Garland
Thompson calls “the stare” so often cast at the disabled body (26) replaces the
yearning gaze. Joyce positions this revelation immediately following Bloom’s
orgasm, creating the definitive post-masturbatory deflation, and exposing in
the process the power dynamic hidden beneath Bloom’s egalitarian fantasies.
As long as Bloom’s imagination remains free to build his ideal female atop the
limited visual data wrested from this seated, unspeaking woman, the illusion
holds and his desire (like hers, presumably) intensifies. This beatific vision
proves, however, as delicate as that extolled in Byron’s poem “She walks in
Beauty” (1815), in which the reader learns that “one shade the more, one ray
the less” (l.7) would significantly impair the grace of the perambulating female
subject. Once Gerty herself rises from the rocky platform on the strand to
which her friends and a past, debilitating bicycle accident (13.650–51) have
relegated her—a cinematic setting lit by the flattering rays of sunset and scored
by the dramatic crash of the surf—Bloom no longer withholds the impulse to
assess critically. Just as he earlier disparaged one of George Russell’s female
groupies for wearing loose stockings (8.542–44), and will later censure the
stye he locates on the prostitute Florry (15.2369), Bloom applies his fastidious
aesthetic standards to Gerty and finds her wanting.
Passing a mobile Gerty on the streets of Dublin earlier in the day might have
yielded the same drop of pity with which the blind stripling was christened,
perhaps an even sweeter vintage since a mobility impairment—unlike a
profound vision impairment—lies comfortably outside the reach of Bloom’s
own experience. His actual, relatively uncharitable response proceeds from
a complex admixture of lingering desire, newly introduced pity, distaste, and
veiled anxiety that he has somehow been emasculated by this encounter:
Mr Bloom watched her as she limped away. Poor girl! That’s why
she’s left on the shelf and the others did a sprint. Thought something
was wrong by the cut of her jib. Jilted beauty. A defect is ten times
worse in a woman. But makes them polite. Glad I didn’t know it
when she was on show. Hot little devil all the same. I wouldn’t mind. (13.772–76)
66 Paul Marchbanks

Bloom’s sympathy and assertion that he “wouldn’t mind” a sexual tryst with
such a disabled beauty are forcibly undercut by the claim that such a “defect”
is far “worse in a woman” and his relief that he did not know she was crippled
while masturbating, observations that register a profound discomfort with this
unlooked for intersection of disability and desire. His thoughts undermine his
later claim that autoeroticism creates “a kind of language” (13.944) between
oneself and the object of one’s fantasy, a viable and intimate alternative to
impregnating coition: “Saves them. Keeps them out of harm’s way” (13.955).
Bloom’s recent experience suggests that successful masturbation relies less on
dynamic, two-way communication than sustained, hierarchical control of a
silent and relatively immobile desired subject. The reflections captured in this
passage also betray distress about being hoodwinked into fictive fornication with
someone Bloom does not consider completely feminine, a sense of injury which
informs his subsequent declaration, “Sad about her lame of course but must be
on your guard not to feel too much pity. They take advantage” (13.1095–96).

Not All There

In the same way that anxiety about sexual virility poisons Bloom’s fleeting act
of masturbatory masculation on the strand, compromising the pity generated
by awareness of Gerty’s difference, a more deeply rooted fear about losing his
mind weakens the compassion Bloom feels for those managing mental illness
or cognitive disability. Bloom decides immediately upon bumping into the
harried Mrs Josie Breen to exchange sympathies with her, allowing Josie to pity
him for the loss of his deceased acquaintance Paddy Dignam (8.213–20), and
responding to the description of her mentally ill husband’s increasingly erratic
behavior by gifting her with his full attention: “Let her speak. Look straight into
her eyes. I believe you. Trust me” (8.250). Despite being buttressed by former
affection for Mrs Breen (15.428–93), Bloom’s pity falters as he takes in the lined
face and unkempt appearance that signal long, difficult hours spent caring for
the unbalanced Denis Breen—the sort of hours he might have spent caring
for a disabled son had Rudy survived infancy. Bloom continues to look into
her eyes, but struggles to “[hold] back behind his look his discontent” (8.270).
He then worsens matters when he attempts to lift Mrs Breen’s spirits: smiling
conspiratorially while pointing out the odd behavior of the itinerant madman
Cashel Boyle O’Connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell (8.293–303) merely reminds
her that Denis may resemble Cashel one day, and sends her running to catch
up with her husband (8.304–313).
 The Ineluctable Modality of the Visibly Disabled 67

Bloom’s impulsively making an unnecessary, comic spectacle out of Cashel

Boyle appears less random once episodes 15–17 have illuminated Bloom’s
concern about his own mind’s limitations and its future, possible decay. In
the dream-like Circe episode, Bloom earns recognition as “the world’s greatest
reformer” (15.1459), secures the political power to lead Ireland into a new era
(15.1542–45), and receives praise for his “classic face! […] the forehead of a
thinker” (15.1468). Unfortunately for Bloom, this ephemeral, fantastic vision of
intellectual prowess provides no real counter to the deep-seated suspicion that
he can do nothing to make a difference—to “amend many social conditions,
the product[s] of inequality and avarice and international animosity”—nor to
counteract those laws of nature complicit in human suffering (17.989–1001).
His vision also reveals fault lines running down the middle of his egalitarian
ethos. Notably, while the leader of the “new Bloomusalem” (15.1544) deigns to
shake hands with the blind stripling (15.1600) and “takes part in a stomach race
with elderly male and female cripples” (15.1613–14), his utopic state stands atop
the violent elimination of political enemies (15.1525–30) and, as noted before,
the equally troubling removal of mendicants and “lunatics” (15.1685–93). This
discomfort with mental illness reemerges when Bloom returns to his house
and manages finally to “desist from speculation,” convinced that he lacks the
“superior intelligence” necessary to generate “more acceptable phenomena
in the place of the less acceptable phenomena to be removed” (17.1007–10)—
phenomena including “innate lunacy” (17.1002). Bloom anticipates gradually
declining into senility like his “paternal procreator” (17.1355–56), fearing mental
disintegration not because he anticipates for himself the suicide that ended his
father’s life (6.359–64), but because his high valuation of human intellect and
disbelief in a separate and eternal soul shrink at the prospect of diminished
cognitive powers: to lose his mind would be to lose his life.
The “partially idiotic,” syphilitic streetwalker who pops her head into the
cabman’s shelter in the “Eumaeus” episode (chp. 16), then, presents more than
one clear and present danger: her presence activates a host of established
anxieties for Bloom, though he attempts to veil these from himself with his
customary blanket of social concern. He loudly pities this “[u]nfortunate
creature,” voices concern about those who sleep with one “not licensed
and medically inspected by the proper authorities,” and faults the “man
[…] ultimately responsible for her condition” (16.731–47). That he is himself
partially culpable for her situation we know from a brief encounter earlier
in the day that sparked recollections of a time when loneliness drove him to
procure her services, desire trumping that familiar aesthetic fastidiousness
which in daylight drives him to “damn her” for being “a fright” with a “[f]ace
68 Paul Marchbanks

like dip” (11.1253–59). As such, she reminds him that his wife’s painful infidelity
mirrors his own—fear that Molly would find him out had limited his original
association with this sex worker (11.1256–59), and only hours earlier he had
strategically avoided making eye contact with her so as to forestall any
attempts at renewed intimacy (11.1261–89). Concern about his own health
complicates matters further: the prostitute carries a transmittable disease
that appears to have deteriorated her own cognitive faculties, presenting the
lascivious Bloom with the opportunity to become that “aged impotent disfran-
chised r­ atesupported moribund lunatic pauper” which he considers the “nadir
of misery” (17.1946–47).
Bloom’s decision dismissively to read this woman’s “demented glassy grin” as
evidence that she is “not exactly all there” (16.724–25)—instead of envisioning
the struggles of a destitute and diseased prostitute who must counterfeit delight
in order to survive—constitutes one more failure of imagination, betraying his
preoccupation with the mind’s powers and their susceptibility to decay. Once
again, another’s vulnerability has reminded Bloom of his own, compromising
his compassion and underscoring the essentially solipsistic, defensive nature of
all pitying sympathy which, as another modernist once observed, “is a form of
fear” enlisted to protect the self from the debilitating awareness of one’s own
finitude (Conrad 65). Bloom’s repeat failure to “cotton on” to those he voyeur-
istically pities is a compelling reminder, then as now, of the woeful tendency to
overdetermine others’ needs, denying “our own similar needs in our assertions
of independence and competence” (McDonagh 5).

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