“Dark Men in Mien and Movement”

The blind stripling in James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) has long been a figure of great interest to Joycean scholarship. His visual impairment has been allied autobiographically to Joyce’s own eye troubles, and his character has been said to represent the critical symbolic link between Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus. This essay follows recent scholarship on embodiment and disability to investigate the further import of the stripling in Joyce’s “epic of the body.” In particular, this essay argues that when read in a disability studies context the stripling adds to an understanding of the novel’s formal characteristics and the ways Joyce links physical disfigurement and racial oppression in colonial Ireland. Reading the stripling in two different episodes draws attention to how narrative structure shapes representations of one of Ulysses’s most notable disabled characters. The stripling’s central and highly visual appearance in Ulysses’s “Lestrygonians” episode rehearses racializing rhetorics that work to “other” disabled people not unlike those historically levied against the Irish themselves; here, the stripling is notably subject of and to Bloom’s ableist gaze. In contrast, his largely peripheral and uniquely aural representation in the “Sirens” episode complicates his earlier depiction in “Lestrygonians.” In “Sirens,” the stripling’s peripheral location paradoxically centralizes him in a position of power in the chapter’s narrative matrix; here, the stripling is maestro and metronome of “Sirens’” orchestral cacophony. At once a tightly surveilled object and elusive subject, the stripling draws attention to the body and its modes of being in the world and the novel alike; his presence in the novel destabilizes our understanding of normative bodies and narrative form and shows how the pathologized body as ostensible aberration is both a disruptive and generative force in Joyce’s work.