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Joyce Writing Disability
The Florida James Joyce Series
University Press of Florida
Florida A&M University, Tallahassee

Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton
Florida Gulf Coast University, Ft. Myers
Florida International University, Miami
Florida State University, Tallahassee
New College of Florida, Sarasota
University of Central Florida, Orlando
University of Florida, Gainesville
University of North Florida, Jacksonville
University of South Florida, Tampa
University of West Florida, Pensacola
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349-99188_Rothfels_ch01_3P.indd 6
JOYCE
WRITING
DISABILIT Y
ED I TED BY J ER E MY CO L A N GELO
Foreword by Maren Linett

Gainesville / Tallahassee / Tampa / Boca Raton
Pensacola / Orlando / Miami / Jacksonville / Ft. Myers / Sarasota
Copyright 2022 by Jeremy Colangelo
All rights reserved
Published in the United States of America
27 26 25 24 23 22 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Colangelo, Jeremy, 1990– editor. | Linett, Maren Tova, author of foreword.
Title: Joyce writing disability / edited by Jeremy Colangelo; foreword by Maren Linett
Other titles: Florida James Joyce series.
Description: Gainesville : University Press of Florida, 2022. | Series: Florida James Joyce
Series | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “In this book, the
first to explore the role of disability in the writings of James Joyce, contributors examine
the varying ways in which Joyce’s texts represent disability and the environmental
conditions of his time that stigmatized, isolated, and othered individuals with
disabilities”—Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021040679 (print) | LCCN 2021040680 (ebook) | ISBN
9780813069135 (hardback) | ISBN 9780813057989 (pdf)
Subjects: LCSH: Joyce, James, 1882–1941—Criticism and interpretation. | People with
disabilities in literature. | Disabilities in literature. | Literature, Modern—20th century—
History and criticism. | BISAC: LITERARY CRITICISM / European / English, Irish,
Scottish, Welsh | LITERARY CRITICISM / Subjects & Themes / General
Classification: LCC PR6019.O9 Z66946 2022 (print) | LCC PR6019.O9 (ebook) | DDC
823/.912—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021040679
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021040680
The University Press of Florida is the scholarly publishing agency for the State
University System of Florida, comprising Florida A&M University, Florida Atlantic
University, Florida Gulf Coast University, Florida International University, Florida State
University, New College of Florida, University of Central Florida, University of Florida,
University of North Florida, University of South Florida, and University of West Florida.

2046 NE Waldo Road
Suite 2100
Gainesville, FL 32609
http://upress.ufl.edu
Contents
Foreword vii
Maren Linett
List of Abbreviations xiii
Introduction: Disability Writing Joyce 1

Jeremy Colangelo
1. Two Sides of Hemiplegia: On the Affect of Paralysis in Dubliners 25

Jeremy Colangelo
2. “Limping and Devious”: The Disabled Male Body in “A Mother” 45

Casey Lawrence
3. When the Personal Becomes Historical: Portrait and the Textual

Memory of Childhood Trauma 66
Boriana Alexandrova
4. Debility as Disability: Disorderly Eating in A Portrait of the Artist as a

Young Man 91
Kathleen Morrissey
5. “Dark Men in Mien and Movement”: Blindness and the Body in Ulysses
106
Rafael Hernandez
6. Degeneration, Decadence, and Joyce’s Modernist Disability Aesthetics

131
Marion Quirici
7. Boulez, Cage, and the Disabled Wake 156
John Morey
8. Joyce, Swift, and the “Creep o’er Skull” of the Gods 181
Giovanna Vincenti
9. The Anti-Erasure of Lucia Joyce: Resignification of Mad Histories in

Finnegans Wake 200
Jennifer Marchisotto
List of Contributors 223

Index 225
Foreword
Joyce Writing Disability demonstrates the considerable extent to which ideas

about nonnormative bodies and minds shape James Joyce’s work. Indeed,
modernism more broadly was acutely sensitive to the varieties of bodies and
minds that move through the world. The expansive outlook of much modern-
ist writing meant that these myriad types would be welcomed into fictional
worlds as well. As Bernard boasts in Virginia Woolf ’s The Waves, he plans
to write a book that will “run to many volumes embracing every known va-
riety of man and woman.”1 This humorous nod to the encyclopedic sweep
of Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage, Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps
perdu, and Joyce’s Ulysses demonstrates modernism’s capacious, perhaps even
accepting, awareness of bodily and mental variety. Modernism is a literature
of “broken sequence[s]”2 and broken norms—of nonnormative bodies and
minds that serve as interesting fictional material not merely, and not always,
as foils but also as rounded characters with whom we can align ourselves as
readers. Moreover, on a formal level, as Janet Lyon puts it, modernist aesthet-
ics are “tied to the generative powers” of bodily and mental “disproportion.”3
This is not to say that modernists in general or Joyce in particular quite
understood disability as a sociopolitical category, or that modernist fiction
eschewed the eugenic norms so widespread in the early twentieth century.
Instead, modernism, as can be seen in Joyce, grappled with disability as a
question of human identity. What did disability mean? How did it affect one’s
perceptions of the world? How did it determine one’s sense of self and one’s re-
lations with others? Modernist fiction refused the pathos ascribed to disability
in Victorian literature such as Wilkie Collins’s Hide and Seek and Charles
Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. This refusal can be seen in the blind stripling’s
inversion of Tiny Tim’s blessing: whereas Tiny Tim calls out “God bless us,
viii Maren Linett
every one!” the stripling calls out to Farrell when his coat brushes his cane:
“God’s curse on you . . . you bitch’s bastard!” (U 10.1119–20). Such an inversion
demonstrates a conscious awareness of the roles disability can be made to play
in fiction, and an interest in manipulating its power for literary ends.
Joyce was the great manipulator, and his representations of disabled char-
acters are among the most varied and complex of modernist literature. As the
essays collected here show, he could ask readers to rethink their assumptions
about bodily and mental norms and then turn (textually) around and draw
on eugenic perspectives to evoke disdain for nonnormative bodies or minds.
Rafael Hernandez, for example, explores the ways Ulysses employs the strip-
ling in the “commanding role” of “a maestro and a metronome” whose tapping
cane organizes the musical “Sirens” chapter. On the other hand, Hernandez
also argues that Ulysses racializes disability and makes a spectacle of the strip-
ling. And Casey Lawrence shows the ways Joyce depicts “Hoppy Holohan” of
“A Mother” as morally corrupt by giving him a “game leg” while also render-
ing him symbolically impotent through the connotations of “limp,” a word
played on similarly in Ulysses. This type of representation of physical disability
as a sign of moral decay well predates eugenics,4 but was reinvigorated by
eugenic science’s lumping together of physical, mental, and moral “defects.”5
Joyce could also insist on the usefulness or applicability of bodily condi-
tions to textual ones, as he does in using hemiplegia (paralysis of one side of
the body) as a structuring device for Dubliners, as Jeremy Colangelo demon-
strates in his essay. Similarly, when he retaliates against criticisms of Work in
Progress as deformed and degenerate by mockingly literalizing the claims,
portraying Shem as deformed, dysgenic, and disabled, as discussed in Marion
Quirici’s piece, Joyce is textualizing bodies, or embodying textuality, in a way
that exceeds and transforms the more common literary technique of using
disability as metaphor. This transformation carries over, as John Morey ar-
gues, to the ways Finnegans Wake and musical pieces by Pierre Boulez and
John Cage inspired by it are formally disabled, refusing “corporeal eugeny.”
And as Giovanna Vincenti points out, Joyce made use of his own reliance on
amanuenses by depicting Shem taking dictation from ALP, emphasizing the
Wake’s identity as a product of many voices.
Joyce’s interventions in our understandings of disability are not limited to
the physical. In three essays of the collection we learn about the complex ways
Joyce wove madness, trauma, and “disorderly eating” into his work, challeng-
Foreword ix
ing the certainties of diagnosis and, as Jennifer Marchisotto argues, disman-

tling the binary of sane/insane. Kathleen Morrissey shows Joyce contesting
the individualizing medical model of mental health when she reads Stephen
Dedalus’s ascetic relationship to food as part of a response to both personal
and cultural/national trauma (the Famine). Marchisotto explores the ways
Joyce similarly resists diagnostic definitiveness in favor of the multiplicity of
experience in his representations of mad women in Finnegans Wake. Mad-
ness has long been used metaphorically in literature, but Joyce queers that
tradition, neither rendering madness or trauma wholly metaphorical nor rep-
resenting it realistically so as to normalize it. Instead, drawing on his deep af-
finity with his “mad” daughter, Lucia, he makes madness a part of the texture
of his literary worlds, allowing its presence to destabilize norms of sanity and
propriety and blending metaphor and materiality in ways that—as Boriana
Alexandrova describes in her essay about childhood trauma—demonstrate
“a willingness to host a potentially painful and destabilizing otherness within
our own landscapes” (this volume, 70).
As Joyce famously noted, Ulysses is a book of the day, and Finnegans Wake
is a book of the night, and it is “natural things should not be so clear at night”
(qtd. in JJ 603). Accordingly, most of the disabilities included in Ulysses are
realistically portrayed, even as they are colored by the style, tone, and affect
of the chapter in which they appear. Gerty MacDowell’s limp, for example,
is hidden in accordance with the norms of the romance-novel style of the
first half of the “Nausicaa” episode—the “tumescence” (as Joyce noted in the
schema he sent to Stuart Gilbert)—but revealed in the realistic deflation (“de-
tumescence”) of the episode’s second half. The disabilities described in “Oxen
of the Sun,” such as the deformities of “Punch” Costello (U 14.854–59), are laid
out as though to be examined under a microscope and couched in eugenic
discourse, in line with the episode’s medical setting, while those mentioned
in “Ithaca,” such as “innate lunacy and congenital criminality” (U 17.1002), are
included in catalogues of “mental or physical disorders” (U 17.850) to match
the catechismal format.
But the “Circe” episode leaves the semirealism of the “day” book behind
and serves as a sort of precursor to Finnegans Wake. As the “Nighttown” epi-
sode, it is dreamlike, surreal, and swiftly changing. The collection of disabled
characters who appear at the opening of the episode are fantastical, from
the “stunted men and women” who fade into children (U 15.5) to the “pigmy
x Maren Linett
woman” swinging on a rope and the “gnome” shouldering “a sack of rags and
bones” (U 15.25, 15.28–29). The “deafmute idiot” whom the children imprison
with their hands at the beginning of the episode prefigures Shem of “Shem
the Penman” (FW 1.7) in his plethora of disabilities. In addition to deafness,
muteness, and “idiocy,” the Idiot has a palsied arm, he drools, and he shakes
from Saint Vitus dance, a movement disorder. He appears before Bloom’s or
Stephen’s subconscious has begun to shape the episode, but his representation
is certainly not realistic; instead, it launches the episode’s dreamlike tone, in-
viting readers into a sort of cultural subconscious. As Rebecah Pulsifer points
out in this context, “idiot” and “idiom” share the same root, the Greek idios,
meaning “private”; the Idiot’s unusual speech, his idiom, signals the Circean
realm of private realities into which readers are plunging.6 As Pulsifer notes,
his jerky movements prefigure the lurching movements of the drunk charac-
ters later in the episode but also initiate the drunken character of the episode
itself: Joyce described Circe’s “rhythm” as “the rhythm of locomotor ataxia,”
or the inability to control movement.7 Disability emerges from the shadows
of Nighttown as the symbol of all that is uncontrolled, of illicit sexuality, and
of all else that is suppressed in the “day” narrative of the rest of Ulysses.
This sinister mood is indicated not only by the disabled characters who
open the episode but by the labeling of the Idiot as “Kithogue,” or lefty.8 Left-
handedness, associated with the sinister, “sets the spirit of the Circe episode
where the upsidedown and perverse dominate the universe.”9 When the
children ask the Idiot “Where’s the great light?” and he answers “(gobbling)
Ghaghahest” they release him, satisfied (U 15.22–25). As Norman Silverstein
pointed out in 1964, by “the great light” the children mean the sun, and the
Idiot’s answer is a garbled rendering of “in the west.”10 This exchange, then,
locates the Nighttown episode in time—it is night—while also setting readers’
expectations for a narrative / film script infused with dreamlike confusion
and instability. The text uses the Idiot as a timepiece, but a timepiece that,
like Salvador Dalí’s melting clocks nearly a decade later, cannot be read in the
usual straightforward way, that instead of telling the usual hours and minutes,
points to a temporal experience, an extreme form of Bergsonian durée.
The Idiot’s disabilities, in line with the litany of Shem’s deformities, are
multiplied and exaggerated precisely to pull readers into this netherworld of
experience, and this demonstrates the extent to which Joyce was attuned to
(and willing to exploit) embedded cultural fears of disability and the resulting
Foreword xi
widespread need to suppress it. Much as he plays with ideas about sight, hear-
ing, and knowledge in his representation of the blind stripling,11 Joyce neither
merely replicates cultural attitudes toward disability nor wholly rejects them.
That is, Joyce was not a disability activist avant le mouvement, but he does
display an acceptance of human variation. His awareness of the ways disability
means in literature and culture doesn’t necessarily lead to his resisting those
meanings. Instead, he employs them self-consciously and, one might say (es-
pecially after reading this volume), voraciously, toward his artistic ends.
Joyce’s avid pursuit of the meanings of human difference, his attention to
both individual and collective forms of embodied living, makes his work fer-
tile ground for continued inquiry into disability’s role in modernist literature.
This volume moves Joycean disability studies in important directions, includ-
ing through its insistence on the material reality of madness and mad women’s
lived experience, its insight into the racialization of disability, and its explora-
tion of the ways gender and disability can be played against each other. Doug-
las Baynton has shown that liberation movements in American history often
rejected ascriptions of disability to argue for the fitness of a given group—set-
ting themselves apart from disabled people—instead of challenging the pre-
sumption that disability is sufficient ground for denying rights to its mem-
bers.12 Parallel dynamics often appear in literature, as when “Hoppy Holohan”
is able to mitigate the social deficits stemming from ableist responses to his
limp by exercising patriarchal control over Mrs. Kearney in “A Mother,” as
Lawrence demonstrates. Such a dynamic could also be said to structure “Nau-
sicaa,” where Bloom shores up his sense of masculinity after his thrashing in
the “Cyclops” episode by first ogling and then pitying Gerty MacDowell for
her limp. It will be useful to continue to explore, to put it more generally, the
intersectional character of disability in Joyce’s work and in modernism, the
ways reactions to other marginalized identities can reinforce ableist exclusion,
while keeping in mind that categories of difference are sometimes leveraged
against one another by normalizing forces.
Disability studies contributes to modernist studies an awareness not only
of particular disabilities and their roles in the thematic and formal machina-
tions of texts, but also an awareness of the norms that govern bodies and
minds, speech and movement, and the ways human beings are constantly in
dialogue with these norms, enacting or diverging from performances—in the
Butlerian sense—of normality. Joyce’s genius for depicting human life in the
xii Maren Linett
fullness of its range and variety makes his work a potent site for analyzing this
dialogue with the norms that regulate our existence as embodied beings in
community.
Maren Linett
Notes
1. Virginia Woolf, The Waves (New York: Harcourt Press, 1959), 67–68.
2. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, annotated and with an introduction by Susan
Gubar (New York: Harcourt, 2005), 80.
3. Janet Lyon, roundtable presentation (Modernist Studies Association Roundtable on
Modernism, Feminism, and Disability, Modern Language Association Conference, Vancou-
ver, BC, January 10, 2015).
4. See Ato Quayson, Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 41–42.
5. Douglas Baynton, Defectives in the Land: Disability and Immigration in the Age of Eugen-
ics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 8.
6. Rebecah Pulsifer, “James Joyce’s ‘Deafmute Idiot’” (paper, joint conference of the Space
Between Society and the Feminist inter/Modernist Association, Greeley, CO, 2018).
7. Frank Budgen, James Joyce and the Making of “Ulysses” (Bloomington: Indiana Univer-
sity Press, 1960), 228.
8. Don Gifford and Robert J. Seidman, Ulysses Annotated (Berkeley: University of Cali-
fornia Press, 2008), 453.
9. Norman Silverstein, “Magic on the Notesheets of the Circe Episode,” James Joyce Quar-
terly 1, no. 4 (Summer 1964): 24.
10. Silverstein, 25.
11. See Maren Linett, Bodies of Modernism: Physical Disability in Transatlantic Modernist
Literature (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017), chap. 4.
12. Douglas Baynton, “Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American History,”
in Disability Studies Reader, ed. Lennard Davis, 4th ed. (New York: Routledge, 2013), 17–33.
Abbreviations
D James Joyce, Dubliners, ed. Jeri Johnson (1914; Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 2000)
FW James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, ed. Finn Fordham, Robbert-Jan
Henkes, and Erik Bindervoet (1939; Oxford: Oxford World’s
Classics, 2012)
JJ Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1989)
JJA Michael Groden et al., eds., The James Joyce Archive (New
York: Garland, 1978)
LI, LII, LIII James Joyce, The Letters of James Joyce, ed. Stuart Gilbert (vol.
1) and Richard Ellmann (vols. 2–3), 3 vols. (New York: Viking,
1957–66)
P James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ed. Jeri
Johnson (1916; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000)
SL James Joyce, The Selected Letters of James Joyce, ed. Richard
Ellmann (New York: Viking, 1975)
U James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. Hans Walter Gabler et al. (1920; New
York: Vintage, 1986)
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349-99188_Rothfels_ch01_3P.indd 6
Introduction
Disability Writing Joyce
JEREMY COLANGELO
Ulysses, James Joyce once said to Frank Budgen, is “the epic of the human
body”—a necessity because if a person “had no body they would have no
mind. . . . It’s all one.”1 In this he echoes Friedrich Nietzsche, who in Thus
Spoke Zarathustra writes,
“Body am I and soul”—thus talks the child. And why should some not
talk like children?
But the awakened one, the one who knows, says: Body am I through
and through, and nothing besides; and soul is merely a word for some-
thing about the body.2
There has never been any need to take Joyce simply at his word, for bodies and
embodiment—and more importantly the influence of the body on the mind
and vice versa, their mutual intertwining—are everywhere present and every-
where important, not just in Ulysses but in all of Joyce’s major works. Indeed,
scholarship on this topic is plentiful. Yet that same work, with some notable
exceptions, tends to take the singularity, the finality, of “the human body”
too much for granted. His comment to Budgen aside, there is little evidence
that Joyce did so. His bodies (which, following Nietzsche, we could take to
include the mind) are varied and complex; Leopold Bloom himself is, physi-
cally, no everyman, but is typical only insofar as he like all of Joyce’s characters
is unique in appearance and psychology. It is not merely the case that these
2 Jeremy Colangelo
characters are individuated and distinguished from one another—as one

might distinguish two classical Greek statues—they also resist idealization. In
Ulysses, the milkwoman of “Telemachus” can be, perhaps, a messenger from
the gods even with her “old sunken paps” (U 1.398), and early in A Portrait the
young Stephen is careful to note that “Nasty Roache had big hands” in addi-
tion to his being “a stink” (P 6). All of Joyce’s characters attain their humanity
in part through avoidance of a sedimented ideal of personhood.
It therefore makes perfect sense that disability would be overwhelmingly
common in Joyce’s works, and it is likewise perplexing that the topic has only
recently become of serious interest to Joyce scholars. This essay collection is
the first book-length treatment of disability’s role in Joyce, and by necessity
has been constructed as an entry point to the topic rather than a final word. Its
primary goal is to bring literary disability studies and its attendant concepts
and methods to the attention of the many Joyceans who would benefit from
reading this literature. Its secondary goal is to establish disability as a known
and legible topic in Joyce studies, for little of what I have said so far will be sur-
prising or notable to experienced readers, and disability has often been a topic
of study under different paradigms and different names. Whether under the
rubric of “the body,” of psychoanalysis and its diagnostic logic, of illness and
disease (either in general or in relation to specific illnesses like syphilis),3 of
the role of madness in Finnegans Wake and elsewhere,4 of Joyce’s eye problems
and their effect on his composition practices,5 or of the role of specific char-
acters like Gerty MacDowell, Issy, the one-legged sailor, or the blind stripling,
disability (though not disability studies) has been a part of Joyce studies for
almost as long as the field has existed. It has also been a part of the rhetoric of
Joyce studies for just as long, as we see in Samuel Beckett’s “Dante . . . Bruno
. Vico . . Joyce,” where he writes that for Vico, “the figurative character of the
oldest poetry” evidenced “a disability to achieve abstraction.”6 “Disability,”
writes Michael Bérubé, “has a funny way of popping up everywhere without
announcing itself as disability,”7 and Joyce criticism has been no exception to
this rule.
The above passage from Beckett shows not only how notions of disability
have long been wedded to aesthetics in Joyce scholarship, but also what the
effect is of not reading and analyzing disability on its own terms. As I have
written elsewhere, analyses of Gerty, whose appearance in the “Nausicaa” epi-
sode of Ulysses make her one of the most prominent disabled characters in
Joyce’s works, habitually invoke or discuss her “lame” (U 13.771) leg and its im-
plications without properly centering disability in their analyses.8 The result
is much the same as we see in Beckett’s essay, where disability serves a purely
metaphorical function, as a sort of conceptual glue that holds the rest of an
idea together. Such is the danger of talking about disability by talking around
disability: words like “lame,” “disabled,” “sickly,” or what have you, when not
properly contextualized, serve as logical clichés, transitioning an argument
from one abstraction to another without contributing any new thought—
what David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder have referred to as “metaphoric
opportunism.”9
Many of the essays in this collection have to do with disability meta-
phors: their use, function, and relation to actual experiences of disability.
If one were to analyze, for instance, Leopold Bloom’s encounter with the
blind stripling in “Lestrygonians,” one might notice, accurately, his difficulty
imagining what the subjectivity of a blind person amounts to—what having
no or low vision is like—and the resulting manner in which he resorts to
clichés and magical thinking to overcome this imaginative gap: “How on
earth did he know that van was there? Must have felt it. See things in their
forehead perhaps” (U 8.1107–8). But if one were then to write that “the strip-
ling’s physical blindness is mirrored in Bloom’s imaginative blindness,” they
would be missing out on a great deal of conceptual depth that a grounded
and specific understanding of blindness provides. Take the matter of how
the stripling notices the van. While the popular understanding has it that
blindness results in an increase in one’s other senses, hearing most notably,
David Bolt writes that blindness actually forces one to practice greater at-
tention and care in how they listen so as to compensate for not being able to
see.10 The “imaginative blindness” metaphor equates Bloom and the strip-
ling through their lack of perception and insight, yet it misses the way in
which the stripling has responded to and compensated for this lack—not
through some sensory magic, but through his own work and effort. Unlike
Bloom, he is aware of his unawareness and so reacts accordingly, and this
effort produces an effect that to some can appear magical. But this element
of the comparison is only available if one reads blindness as blindness, and
not as a generic designator of lack or inability. It is one example of how
reading disability at a figurative level only, or without sufficient attention to
disability as such, in addition to being demeaning and insulting to disabled
4 Jeremy Colangelo
people, also robs one of many useful critical tools, and generally diminishes
the insight of a reading.
The function of disability terms in much academic discourse—literary crit-
icism and Joyce scholarship included—is similar to a situation that Jacques
Lacan comments on. In one of his seminars, he paraphrases (without full
citation) “Mallarmé’s remark, in which he compares the common use of lan-
guage to the exchange of a coin whose obverse and reverse no longer bear but
eroded faces, and which people pass from hand to hand ‘in silence.’”11 Lacan’s
citation is not entirely accurate, in that it seems to conflate a passage by Sté-
phane Mallarmé with one by Nietzsche.12 But this conflation is fortuitous, for
it creates a new metaphor that encapsulates the problem, wherein the “coin”
of language is stripped of its significance through overuse and forgetfulness,
through the propagation of dead metaphors, but instead of becoming useless
remains in circulation, having been scrubbed of any meaning other than its
status as a medium of exchange. The coin, no longer able to communicate
its monetary value and thus useless even as a signifier of wealth, serves as
the physical medium that makes an exchange possible. Yet “even if it com-
municates nothing, discourse represents the existence of communication.”13
We must ask what disability terms, as the effaced coins of critical discourse,
represent through their exchange. The answer, I believe, lies with the disability
theorist Tobin Siebers’s observation that “disability operates symbolically as
an othering other,” which “represents a diacritical marker of difference that
secures inferior, marginal, or minority status, while not having its presence
as a marker acknowledged in the process.”14 The use of disability terms as
dead metaphors, then, retains the functional meaning—like a faceless coin
still passed silently between hands—of the “othering other.” It is because of
this functional definition that disability terms remain common as metaphors
even when the terms have been fully extracted from their material or narra-
tive origins, as we see in the Beckett remark. The result of this carelessness is
a discursive marginalization of disabled people.
None of the above should be taken to suggest that Joyce did not engage
in disability metaphors himself. As Mark Mossman has written, in Dubliners
“Joyce unfolds the disabled body in modern Irish culture, [and] transforms
it completely into a metaphoric vehicle of political commentary so that it be-
comes the location of cross-cultural interconnection and a . . . way out of the
binaries of paralysis and volition.”15 Many essays here take Joyce’s disability
metaphors as their central foci, which is why it is important here to address

the matter of how one invokes or makes note of literal and metaphoric dis-
ability, and to avoid simply treating disability metaphors as easy markers of
some type of lack. One need only look at the opening line of “Araby” and its
“blind” North Richmond Street (D 19). But even in that case, attentiveness
to the specificity of the metaphor’s usage and the relationship between the
“blindness” of the street and actual low vision can produce useful critical in-
sight. A blind street is a street with a dead end (itself another worn-out meta-
phor in need of an autopsy), as indeed the actual North Richmond Street in
Dublin is. The street is rarely traveled, then, because it does not go anywhere:
nobody passes through it to some other destination, so the only visitors are
people with explicit business there. Blindness might be taken as a metaphor
for inward-looking solipsism, as the discussion of sight later in the first para-
graph would indicate: “An uninhabited house of two storeys stood at the blind
end, detached from its neighbours in a square ground, The other houses of
the street, conscious of decent lives within them, gazed at one another with
brown imperturbable faces” (D 19). The blind house at the blind end does not
look out at anything, but instead stands “detached” (again both literally and
figuratively) and separate from the world.
The metaphor, then, is not a fully effaced coin, but instead betrays an at-
titude toward blindness as such, and by extension toward sight. For Aristotle,
a great influence on Joyce’s thought, vision is inherently tied to the capacity
to be affected by something exterior,16 and so in “Araby” the lack of vision is
tied to detachment and inaffectability. This comparison then brings us back to
the blind stripling, who unlike Gerty is never given a chance to turn his gaze
back on Bloom. The only time he breaks this narratively imposed solipsism is
in “Wandering Rocks,” where, when he is carelessly bumped into, he responds
“sourly,” “God’s curse on you . . . whoever you are! You’re blinder nor I am, you
bitch’s bastard!” (U 10.1119–20), an accusation that itself aligns blindness with
inwardness, in this case with a lack of attention when one walks. For it remains
the case that the stripling’s inability to return Bloom’s “gaze”—an ocularcen-
tric term for a process that need not include vision—strips him of agency. In
“Nausicaa,” Bloom looks and is looked at; Gerty looks and is looked at. For all
the real differentials in power represented in that chapter, in this sense at least
there is reciprocity. The stripling’s blindness need not rob him of a capacity
to “look,” and indeed Ulysses relies on the other senses so thoroughly that a
6 Jeremy Colangelo
visionless passage would not be out of place. What instead robs the stripling of
his reciprocal gaze is precisely that alignment between vision and affectability,
between blindness and solipsism, that we saw already in “Araby.” In this way
we can see the value of taking disability metaphors seriously, of linking the
figural to the literal even when the text resists our doing so: for in a textual
world as complex as Joyce’s, such metaphors cannot help but reveal networks
of associations as deep and complex as any Homeric parallel, showing logics
of ability and disability to be embedded in these works at their foundations.
Joyce occasionally uses disability or disability metaphors in a marginal-
izing or disparaging way—“Hoppy” Holohan of “A Mother” being one ex-
ample—while at other times he represents disabled characters as complex and
realistically embodied. That is to say, his usage is inconsistent, though it can
be seen to grow in complexity and depth as his career goes on. Joyce scholars
have also occasionally used thoughtless disability metaphors in their work.
The point here is not to imply a strict taxonomy of “good” or “bad” disability
representation along the rubric of metaphor, but rather to bring attention to
a salient issue both in Joyce’s work and in the scholarship thereon. Several
essays in this collection concern themselves with Joyce’s use of disability as
metaphor, and they are attentive to this usage to differing extents depending
on the nature of the usage and the relationship between the metaphor and its
referents. The question of how these metaphors, where they arise, contrast
with the lived experience of disabled people is a complex matter with much
room for further exploration, such that this collection can only represent one
stage in the discourse.
The matter of how disability functions narratively and semiotically in con-
trast to the physical realities of specific disabled people has been a subject of
much interest among scholars in disability studies in general and literary dis-
ability studies in particular. Since it took form in the 1980s, disability studies
has benefited from what has been called the “social model” of disability (de-
fined in greater detail below), wherein disability is not located in the ontology
of a particular person, but rather arises from a disjunction in the relationship
between that person’s body and mind on the one hand and their social and
physical environments on the other, such that “the person is disabled by social
practices, norms, or material structures.”17 This model, especially in its more
simplistic applications, is not without limits or detractors, but it is a clear im-
provement on the earlier medical model of disability, in that it forces us to look
beyond the disabled person’s ontology, breaking the isolating function of the
medical gaze and transforming disability studies into a much more socially
and culturally aware academic discipline. Following this lead, literary disability
studies, at its best, focuses less on cataloguing or describing specific represen-
tations of disabled characters in literary texts, and more on ascertaining the
patterns and tropes by which disability and ability construct, alter, and modify
texts or groups of texts. Indeed, as Bérubé argues, “disability in the relation be-
tween text and reader need not involve any character with disabilities at all” but
“can involve ideas about disability,”18 as we saw above with the issue of disability
metaphors. And likewise Ato Quayson, in his important Aesthetic Nervousness,
points out that “the disabled body sharply recalls to the nondisabled the provi-
sional and temporary nature of able-bodiedness.”19 Notions of what counts as
“abled,” what counts as “disabled,” how the differences in those categories are
signified, and how the simplistic binarism grates against the infinite variety of
real human beings, influence, and are influenced by, the ways in which bodies
and minds are narrated. The question of how ability and disability are repre-
sented, then, feeds back into the ways these categories help construct texts on
a formal level. At the center of this dialectic is where literary disability stud-
ies is situated. It is also an area where Joyce studies has a great opportunity
to contribute to disability studies generally. His work contains, after all, deep
and involuted reflections on the relationship not only between the body and
consciousness but between embodied cognition and the act of literary repre-
sentation. Analyses of the role of disability in Joyce thus have the potential to
illuminate matters that are fundamental to literary disability studies as a result
of how many such questions were themselves fundamental to his work.
Because of this discursive location, disability studies has historically been
open to intersectional approaches to study, in which disability is read as but
one nodal point in a complex dynamic of marginalization. For example, in
Extraordinary Bodies, one of the first major works of literary disability studies,
Rosemarie Garland-Thomson argues that disabled people “are often imagined
as unable to be productive, direct their own lives, participate in the commu-
nity, or establish meaningful personal relations,”20 which produces a narrative
of disempowerment that meshes easily with other stereotypes of inability and
clearly relates to disability’s “diacritical” status in Siebers’s description. In her
book, Garland-Thomson develops the concept of what she calls the “normate”
subject position, which designates the “nondisabled” identity created through
8 Jeremy Colangelo
the stigmatization and exclusion of disabled people. As she writes, “when one
person has a visible disability . . . it almost always dominates and skews the
normate’s process of sorting out perceptions and forming a reaction” and
contributes to “the normate’s frequent assumption that a disability cancels
out other qualities, reducing the complex person to a single attribute.”21 The
diacritical function of disability is such that its signification blocks out and
overwrites the complexity and specificity of the stigmatized person, leading
to their being further marginalized. In fiction, this process leads to characters’
being reduced to stereotypes and simple narrative functions. As Mitchell and
Snyder note in their influential Narrative Prosthesis, the disabled body’s status
as a deviation from acceptable normalcy often leads to a reduction of the
disabled character’s narrative complexity through an attempt to fit them back
into a structure of acceptable embodiment. “The effort to narrate disability’s
myriad deviations,” they write, “is an attempt to bring the body’s unruliness
under control.”22 One trait that makes Joyce’s works so interesting, both in
general and from a disability studies perspective specifically, is how they resist
this tendency (though not always successfully), producing instead a Diony-
sian tableau of unruly bodies and minds that refuse to be corralled.
In the broader realm of literary disability studies, the role of the normate
and regimes of embodied normalcy have produced many studies that ex-
amine the overlap between disability and other vectors of marginalization.23
Recent (post-2010) examples include Sami Schalk’s Bodyminds Reimagined,
Alison Kafer’s Feminist, Queer, Crip, Robert McRuer’s Crip Times, and Gili
Hammer’s Blindness through the Looking Glass, as well as important work by
Jasbir K. Puar on disability, race, and postcoloniality in The Right to Maim
and on disability and the rights of transgender people in the inaugural issue
of the Transgender Studies Quarterly.24 What these studies demonstrate is that
disability cannot be read on its own, cut off from other foci of oppression, or
from other forms of identification; rather, its status in ableist discourses as an
index of individual worth and worthiness, and its function as a mode of ostra-
cism and stigmatization, means that it is constantly in discursive proximity to
other identity groups that are undervalued and excluded by dominant regimes
of power. By necessity, Joyce Writing Disability can only approximate the vast
range of possible topics a disability studies reading of Joyce can pursue.
The collection also picks up from an already vibrant, though limited, dis-
course on disability in Joyce studies. Though this is the first book-length
examination of disability in Joyce, several essays and book chapters already

probe the topic. Most significantly, Maren Linett, who contributes a foreword
to this collection and edited a special issue of Modern Fiction Studies on dis-
ability and literature, dedicates the larger part of three chapters of her mono-
graph Bodies of Modernism to an analysis of Joyce: focusing on Gerty exten-
sively in a chapter on disability and mobility, turning to Shem and Shaun in
a chapter on deformity, and then dedicating an entire chapter to Ulysses and
its depiction of sensory disability.25 Bodies of Modernism therefore represents
the most extensive engagement with the question of disability’s role in Joyce’s
work published prior to this collection and is an indispensable resource for
any scholar interested in the topic. Michael Davidson likewise has excellent
work on Joyce and his relationship to larger trends in disability representation
in modernism in his Invalid Modernism, which, however, does not dedicate as
much attention to Joyce as it does to the several others under its capable mi-
croscope.26 Most recently, my Diaphanous Bodies devotes a chapter to Ulysses,
developing a reading of the “Proteus” chapter into an argument about dis-
ability’s relation to narrative and Joyce’s critique of literary realism.27 Notable
articles on Joyce and disability include work by Andre Cormier (an influen-
tial disability studies reading of the blind stripling), Angela Lee Nemecek (an
excellent analysis of Gerty in “Nausicaa”), Paul Marchbanks (a reading that
picks up from Cormier in analyzing visual impairment in Ulysses), Dominika
Bednarska (an analysis of the intersection of gender and disability in Joyce),
and Robert Volpicelli (an analysis of visual impairment in Joyce through a
comparison with Joseph Conrad).28 As the above list suggests, Gerty Mac-
Dowell, the blind stripling, Shem, and Issy have tended to be the main foci
of research on Joyce and disability. This collection includes analyses of these
characters, but also extends the discourse to include less obvious choices, such
as the role of eating disorders in A Portrait and that of limping in “A Mother,”
or Joyce’s interest in the “madness” of Jonathan Swift. In that sense, Joyce Writ-
ing Disability both develops from the foci of already-existing disability Joyce
scholarship and charts new paths that these inquiries could take in the future.
Disability Studies: Key Concepts for This Book
Though much important work has already been done on disability in the work
of James Joyce, the topic remains relatively new. Thus, the expected audience
10 Jeremy Colangelo
for this collection includes a great many scholars who are coming in already
very knowledgeable about Joyce’s work, but who have read relatively little dis-
ability theory. It therefore seems useful to write a brief summary of some key
concepts that appear in this book (an exhaustive account of disability studies
concepts being far beyond the scope of this text), both to make the essays
easier to follow and to introduce some valuable ideas into the mainstream of
Joyce criticism. That effort makes up the present section.
It is vital, however, not to give the impression that disability studies is a
static field, the key terms of which have been set in stone for all time. The op-
posite is the case. Every term discussed here is the subject of a great quantity
of debate and theorization, often within the bounds of this volume. The fixed
nature of a book, then, works somewhat against this collection’s goals, for it is
in the nature of a summary of ongoing scholarship to be out of date as soon
as it is published, and certainly someone reading this book decades after its
release will stand to gain much less from this section than will someone read-
ing it right off the presses. Thus, while I define several terms used by other
contributors and at times draw on their insights for these definitions, I have
also left room in my summaries for each essay to speak for itself and to delin-
eate its key concepts in its own terms. For certainly readers of Joyce will know
that stasis is the first lie of any definition, and that the signifying power of a
word derives precisely from the ways it has evaded being grasped.
Disability
The concept of disability has a long and complicated history; Henri-Jacques
Stiker, for example, begins his History of Disability with the Bible and ancient
Greece. That said, disability studies as most commonly practiced in the hu-
manities today recognizes three historically relevant approaches to defining
disability:
1. The Tragic or Charitable Model. Consider Tiny Tim of Charles Dick-

ens’s A Christmas Carol, an example Linett cites both in the foreword
to this volume and in her book Bodies of Modernism. He is a figure de-
fined entirely by his tragedy, existing to “squeez[e] pity from Scrooge’s
stony heart.”29 Unlike Ebenezer Scrooge, Tiny Tim has minimal inte-
riority or complexity. Rather, he exists to highlight, and metonymize,
the desperation of the Cratchit family, and by extension all the poor
people that Scrooge has left deprived. As with the above discussion
of disability metaphors, Tiny Tim’s disability exists to serve a func-
tion within his text; it is more of a symbol for the abstract notion of a
tragedy. This framework centers the producer of charity—Scrooge ar-
riving on Christmas with his lavish gifts—and so tends to understand
disability in relation to and through that charity. Joyce was clearly
aware of this approach to disability, and we can see him chiding it
in his depictions of the blind stripling, Gerty MacDowell, and many
others.
2. The Medical Model. As the name suggests, the medical model of dis-
ability treats all instances of disablement as bodily illnesses or injuries
that can, or should, be cured by medical science. As with the tragic
model, this approach has long been the target of disability theory and
disability activism, which criticize it for its rigid and often inaccu-
rate definitions, lack of interest in the actual experience of disabled
people, and eliminationist approach to disability. As Siebers writes,
“the medical model defines disability as an individual defect lodged
in the person, a defect that must be cured or eliminated if the person
is to achieve full capacity as a human being.”30 This strategy leads to
many problems. First, an emphasis on individualized approaches to
disability has often led to an ignorance of social, structural, or en-
vironmental barriers to the disabled person’s flourishing: an autistic
person is told to imitate neurotypical socialization and avoid “stim-
ming” instead of being assisted in terms of their specific wants and
needs; someone suffering nutritional problems due to living in a food
desert is told to go on a diet though their circumstances make that
impossible; a person whose joints are sore from climbing the stairs
to their apartment is given pain killers and occupational therapy in-
stead of access to a working elevator, and so on. By and large, disabil-
ity theorists write in opposition to the medical model, rather than to
medicine in general: they oppose the model as a way of conceptual-
izing disability and promote attention to nonindividualist approaches
to understanding and responding to it.31
3. The Social Model. This model is the current dominant lens through
which disability theorists understand what disability is and how it
works. Disability, according to the social model, arises from an inter-
12 Jeremy Colangelo
action between bodies and the social and physical environments in

which they live. A person with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder
(ADHD), for example, would be understood as disabled not because
of some medical defect, but rather due to an incongruence between
their mind’s approach to processing the world around them and a
lived environment constructed for the sole benefit of neurotypical
people. A person in a wheelchair who cannot enter a building is dis-
abled not so much by their impaired mobility as they are by the lack of
a ramp. Disability activists who employ the social model, then, often
focus on changing or ameliorating the environmental or structural
causes of disability. The term was coined in 1983 by Michael Oliver
and Bob Sapey in their book Social Work with Disabled People and has
since that time grown in complexity, proving an extremely valuable
framework for disability research.32 Nevertheless, it is not without
its criticisms or limitations, most of which stem from what Melanie
Yergeau describes as “its refusal to engage thoroughly the materiality
of disabled embodiment or emindment.”33 The experience of chronic
pain is one of the most common disabilities used to critique the so-
cial model: the subjectivism of pain, resembling the subjectivity of
the Cartesian cogito, can seem to enforce what Siebers calls “a myth
of hyperindividuality,”34 while expressions of pain can nevertheless
retain great political or interconnective force, drawing attention to the
injustices that have inflicted it. Yet the matter is not so simple. As Pe-
ter Schwenger, for instance, writes in his analysis of Edvard Munch’s
The Scream, “it is, quite unconsciously perhaps, a desire not to be in
the world: not to have to see this unendurable scene of horror, not to
have to suffer this unendurable pain in one’s own body, a body that
one cannot escape.”35 A call to the other, even an unseen other, to
negate the cause of such distress would seem to be an escape hatch
for pain’s individualism. Such complex and, in many cases, inconclu-
sive analyses have led to the present situation, where the social model
remains dominant despite its acknowledged limitations. It remains a
powerful lens for social and literary analysis—as several essays in this
collection attest—as well as a pragmatically useful tool for disability
activists while nevertheless, through its imperfection, calling out for
something better.36
Norms and the Normate

All three approaches to understanding disability likewise come with their own
epistemological presumptions as to how one might determine what disability is
and whether a person is disabled. In many cases, disability is defined in relation
to some conception of the norm, whether by way of the “normal” (i.e., Gauss-
ian) distribution of statistics, or through some more colloquial or common-
sense idea of normalcy. While the social model strives to decenter the abled
“normal” person in its approach to understanding disability, earlier approaches,
in addition to identifying disability with the ontology of the disabled person,
also tend to ground themselves on some idea of the nondisabled person from
whom the disabled person deviates. The medical model, as one might expect,
approaches the matter through the logic of diagnosis. But the problem of di-
agnostic naming is that it leaves its norm undefined: categories of illness will
proliferate, with the healthy body arising through a process of negation, having
no positive qualities of its own.37 As Lennard J. Davis describes, “in the process
of disabling people with disabilities, ableist society creates the absolute category
of disability,” the function of which is to other disabled people despite the mass
proliferation of bodily limitation.38 To name this process, the scholar Rosema-
rie Garland-Thomson, in her book Extraordinary Bodies, describes what she
refers to as the “normate,” or “the veiled subject position of cultural self, the
figure outlined by the array of deviant others whose marked bodies shore [its]
boundaries,” and which is defined “by peeling away all the marked traits within
the social order” through which disability is identified.39 The usefulness of this
term suggests that there may well be no coherent and rigorous concept of ability
at all that is not simply a rejection of some idea of disability.
Debility and Impairment

Debility is a term closely related to disability and has been employed most
notably by Jasbir K. Puar in her book The Right to Maim. Debility arises from
the combination of disabling social and environmental processes with biopo-
litical structures of control and/or colonial exploitation. Kathleen Morrissey’s
essay, which investigates Stephen Dedalus’s disordered eating in relation to
British colonialism and the long-term effects of the Famine, is the most ex-
tensive investigation of debility in this collection, showing how Britain’s many
efforts to control and wear down its colonial possessions left lingering marks
14 Jeremy Colangelo
on the bodies of the people who lived through and after the Famine, marks
that in Stephen’s case emerge through his difficult relationship with food and
consumption. Useful in this context is the distinction that the social model
draws between disability and impairment, the latter designating a “physical or
biological lack (a missing arm, the experience of blindness),” while the former
concerns how that lack is transformed into an “obstacle” to disabled people’s
integration with society through social or environment factors.40 To debilitate
is not just to disable, but to force a subject, via impairment, into a subordinate,
subaltern state; it is the strategic leveraging of the process of disablement to
further states of inequality. The mental and physical effects of impairment,
then, are both a means and an end, serving the goal of political domination by
incapacitating the very people who would have resisted it, and then producing
more incapacitation through the ill effects of living in such a harsh and unfor-
giving environment. As Puar, writing on more recent atrocities, goes on to say,
“in the context whereby four-fifths of the world’s people with disabilities are lo-
cated in what was once hailed as the ‘global south,’ liberal interventions are in-
variably infused with certitude that disability should be reclaimed as a valuable
difference . . . rather than addressing how much debilitation is caused by global
injustice and the war machines of colonialism, occupation, and U.S. imperial-
ism.”41 For a great many disabled people, the environmental and social causes
of disability ultimately lie in these vast “war machines” of “global injustice.” It is
for this reason among others that disability studies benefits tremendously from
an intersectional and anti-imperialist approach to theorization and praxis.
Aesthetic Nervousness
First defined in Ato Quayson’s 2007 Aesthetic Nervousness, the concept of aes-
thetic nervousness is extremely useful in literary disability studies. The term
designates the disruption of a text’s dominant mode of representation by the
appearance or invocation of disability. As Quayson writes, “the disabled body
sharply recalls to the nondisabled the provisional and temporary nature of
able-bodiedness and indeed of the social frameworks that undergird the sup-
positions of bodily normativity.”42 The recollection of the finitude of ability, a
disruptive memory arising like Marcel Proust’s madeleine, halts the preestab-
lished forms of normativity and forces the text to “repair” itself, if only tempo-
rarily or provisionally. The result is a process of iterated avoidance leading to
a variety of contradictions regarding how disabled characters are represented

and understood in a piece of literature.
Madness and Mad Studies
Going beyond the medical model of disability implies going beyond medi-
cal terminology and frameworks for different varieties of disability, as mad
studies has demonstrated. Mad studies has its roots in such texts as Michel
Foucault’s 1961 History of Madness, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s 1972/80
Capitalism and Schizophrenia, and Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s 1979
The Madwoman in the Attic.43 Recent work in mad studies seeks to extract
notions of madness from their purely medical histories and definitions (as
well as related terms such as “mental illness”) and instead study them in their
social, cultural, and historical contexts. As Giovanna Vincenti, a contribu-
tor to this volume, elsewhere writes, modern notions of madness have their
origin in nineteenth-century theories of degeneration (discussed below) as
promoted by the likes of Max Nordau and Cesare Lombroso, the latter of
whom argued in 1891 that “artistic genius was a form of hereditary insanity,”44
an accusation that would persist and evolve into such terrible forms as the
Nazi Party’s Degenerate Art Exhibition of 1937. Notions of madness persist as
vectors of marginalization and invalidation, and as an avenue of attack against
an already disadvantaged person’s ability to testify to their own experience, as
for example Douglas C. Baynton has explored in his research on disability in
American immigration history,45 or as Yergeau describes in relation to trans
and gender-nonconforming autistic people, who often have the legitimacy of
their gender questioned by medical professionals.46 Madness in these situa-
tions appears often as a way of undermining some claims to objectivity while
shoring up others, specifically situating a usually white, male, cisheteronor-
mative subject as ipso facto sane and abled, as opposed to subjects from out-
side those categories, who are cast as terminally unreliable. Yet many scholars
have also explored madness’s potential as a liminal, perhaps liberatory, space.
Therí Alyce Pickens, for example, in her book on madness and race compares
madness to the Deleuzian “fold”—“a space that creates and sustains possibil-
ity” and a point from where one can “interpret and understand the various
critical and creative possibilities available”—while also studying how in racist
discourses Blackness, through an association with madness, “appears as the
16 Jeremy Colangelo
antithesis of history . . . whereas whiteness stands in for progression, being

in time.”47 Less recent, but still pertinent, is Louis Sass’s major study Madness
and Modernism, which traces the role of madness (especially schizophrenia)
in numerous strains of high modernist aesthetic practice.48
Degeneration and Decadence

Notions of degeneration and decadence, which began to proliferate in the
nineteenth century, reached their peak under Nazism, and have persisted to
the present day, are especially relevant to modernist studies in general and, as
Marion Quirici shows in her contribution to this volume, to Joyce in particu-
lar: the concept of degeneration and the accusation that Joyce was himself a
degenerate artist appear throughout Finnegans Wake. The popularization of
the term “degeneracy” among right-wing authors derives from the work of
Max Nordau, who published, in German, his book Degeneration (Entartung)
in 1892, arguing that the artistic and cultural developments of what scholars
would now call early modernism constituted evidence of significant mental
and physical decline on the part of Europeans and the fall into decadence of
Western culture. As Quirici explains in her contribution to this book, “the the-
ory lent scientific credence to the conflation of biological deviation and moral
deviance” (this volume, 133). Nordau and the authors who followed him linked
degeneration and decadence to a whole array of perceived ills—from madness
to homosexuality to nonrepresentational art—and his theories were eventually
integrated into the already established eugenics movement, stemming from
the work of British social Darwinist thinker Francis Galton. Anti-Semitism
and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories also frequently appear as part of this clus-
ter of ideas. “Degeneracy” eventually became a catch-all term used to identify
modernist aesthetics with any trait or characteristic the critic considered bad
or unsavory, with disability and nonnormative bodily configurations being a
common target. As Linett writes, “while modernist artists and critics saw de-
formity as a rhetorical tool that could describe their transformation of past
forms, antimodernist and Nazi critics used the murderous ableism of eugenic
thought to express their scorn for avant-garde artworks.”49
While the above is not a definitive glossary of disability studies terms,
it should serve well to introduce a number of concepts useful not only in
reading this collection but also in accessing disability studies more generally.
Other notions will of course be introduced in the essays that follow. Some,
such as trauma and trauma studies (important especially in Boriana Alexan-

drova’s contribution), already have rich usage elsewhere in Joyce studies and
so need not be defined here.50 Others, while important to their specific essays,
simply did not rise, in their usage in this collection, to the level that warranted
addressing and defining in this introduction. These summaries should never-
theless provide readers with ample background for the essays that follow.
Outline of the Book
These chapters have been arranged in chronological order according to the

text they are chiefly concerned with, with essays on the same text placed
in such a way that they will best complement each other. This arrangement
should allow readers to follow Joyce’s developing interest in nonnormative
embodiment and enmindment over the course of his career, and the vary-
ing, often inconsistent, but almost always fascinating ways in which he rep-
resented disability and disabled people. The complex and involuted disability
aesthetics of Finnegans Wake, we can see, did not evolve overnight, but are in
fact the product of a lifetime spent trying to understand embodiment more
deeply and more complexly.
The essay collection begins with a foreword by Maren Linett, which con-
textualizes Joyce’s engagement with disability in terms of modernist disability
aesthetics more generally. As she cautions, it is not simply the case that Joyce,
or other modernists for whom disability is a central element, understood dis-
ability as a “sociopolitical category,” nor that said authors were immune from
the eugenic thinking prevalent among many twentieth-century intellectuals.
Rather, for Joyce, disability became a central element of his writing by way of
his interest in the complexities of human existence more generally. Disability
is inescapable in Joyce, this reading suggests, because it is inescapable in life.
In the first two essays, both about Dubliners, the chapter authors integrate
Joyce’s use of disability metaphors with their broader narrative contexts. To
begin, in “Two Sides of Hemiplegia,” I argue that paralysis in Joyce’s story
collection functions not as a form of stasis but rather through an affective
interplay between stillness and movement. Central to this argument is Joyce’s
use in his letters of the phrase “hemiplegia,” which describes a type of partial
paralysis occurring most often in people who have suffered strokes, where
one side of the body is paralyzed but the other remains mobile, and which is
18 Jeremy Colangelo
usually accompanied by aphasia, a type of speech impediment. This is the type

of paralysis suffered by Father Flynn of “The Sisters,” which has its most likely
historical analogue in Louis Pasteur, who like Flynn was partially paralyzed,
and later died, due to a series of three strokes. Next, Casey Lawrence zeroes in
on Joyce’s story “A Mother,” and in particular the character of Hoppy Holohan,
to investigate the troubled relationship between disability and masculinity in
Joyce’s writing. As she writes, disability has often been used as a metaphor for
emasculation and sexual impotence, a pattern to which Holohan closely re-
lates. Yet in his relations to Mrs. Kearney, his authority within Irish patriarchy
remains firmly established, or perhaps is reestablished, such that in mistreat-
ing her he escapes some of the stigma of his “game” leg.
The third and fourth essays in the book turn to A Portrait of the Artist as a
Young Man. First, Boriana Alexandrova puts the characters Stephen and Issy
into a broader context of the role of sexual violence and trauma in Joyce’s work
through an analysis of depictions of child abuse. Though several studies of the
role of incest in the Wake have touched on the role of abusive parent-child
relationships, she links these to the important role of trauma in A Portrait.
The essay also draws fruitful comparisons between Joyce and the Irish author
Eimear McBride, whose work, and depiction of childhood trauma, shows
extensive Joycean influence. The following chapter, by Kathleen Morrissey,
draws attention to a lesser-studied disability in Joyce criticism: eating disor-
ders. In particular, Morrissey examines the role of intergenerational trauma
relating to the Irish potato famine, and Stephen Dedalus’s almost nonexistent
diet in A Portrait and Ulysses. Morrissey is highly attentive to the ideological
and philosophical modality of consumption, the way that in Joyce attitudes
or belief systems become linked to dietary habits. The chapter shows how the
legacy of the Famine is prevalent throughout Joyce’s work, in this case trans-
lated into a troubled relationship to food and hunger. Just as eating disorders
are often invisibilized, so too, here, are their historical and narrative origins,
the prevailing belief (expressed by Terry Eagleton) that the Famine is absent
from Joyce’s writings having all along been an illusion created by the very
form of debility that famine inflicted.
The next essay addresses the question of blindness and low vision in Ulysses.
Rafael Hernandez focuses specifically on the blind stripling—perhaps the
most frequently analyzed disabled character in Joyce’s fiction—and the way
that blindness might relate not only to Joyce’s own iritis, but also to notions of
physical disfigurement and racial oppression. Crucially, Hernandez sketches a

link between disability representation and the colonization of Ireland, finding
in Bloom’s encounter with the stripling a mirror image of other, more explicit
colonial encounters elsewhere in the novel. Through these comparisons, he
finds in the stripling a form of radical potentiality, a new way of relating to
the city of Dublin and, perhaps, Irish identity more broadly, which permits an
escape from the well-trodden paths of this long-colonized city.
The final four essays of the book turn to Finnegans Wake. First, in the essay
“Degeneration, Decadence, and Joyce’s Modernist Disability Aesthetics,” here
reprinted from the Joyce Studies Annual, author Marion Quirici analyzes the
role of degeneration theory in the Wake. Developed by the likes of Bénédict
Morel, Cesare Lombroso, and Max Nordau, degeneration theory was a histori-
cal metanarrative that understood physical and mental disability and impair-
ment (categories that to these writers applied extremely widely) to be evidence
of moral and psychological disintegration, on both a personal and a cultural
level. Frequently invoked by eugenicists and the Nazis, degeneration theory
was used, especially after the Oscar Wilde trial, to attack artists and writers
whose work was deemed insufficiently conservative. Joyce, dogged by such as-
criptions since his earliest works, reintegrated the logic of degeneration theory
into the Wake, particularly through the figure of Shem, whose artistic talent is
expressed through the very same traits that people like Nordau so despised.
Next, John Morey in his essay examines the related disability aesthetics of
Joyce and the musicians John Cage and Pierre Boulez. Both musicians created
several works inspired, directly or indirectly, by Finnegans Wake. As do sev-
eral other authors in this collection, Morey focuses on the metaphoric invoca-
tion of disability in the Wake’s musicality and in Cage and Boulez’s composi-
tions. In particular, Morey explores the use of atonal and serialist music and
Joyce’s lexical disruptions to eschew normative structures of representation
and create what might be considered (as we see in Quirici) disturbed or de-
formed aesthetic practices. Indeed, both Morey and Quirici point, in different
ways, to the use of normate aesthetic practices—the well-wroughtness of the
“well-wrought urn”—to constrain and rigidify potentially disruptive forms of
aesthetic practice. In this sense, Joyce’s use of disability metaphor in the Wake
and elsewhere can be seen as highly productive.
The next essay in the collection, by Giovanna Vincenti, examines Joyce’s
1928 fragment “Twilight of Blindness Madness Descends on Swift,” which was
20 Jeremy Colangelo
originally written to be part of Finnegans Wake but was never incorporated

into it. Vincenti reads the fragment as a dialogue between Joyce and Swift on
the subject of “madness,” which arises from a combination of fame and over-
work, as a cost of artistic success. For Joyce, this dialogue comes in the context
of many other medical ailments and stresses—such as a cancer scare with
Nora and Joyce’s own numerous ailments—while Swift had long dealt with
a disorder now referred to as Ménière’s disease, which affects the inner ear
and can cause bouts of dizziness, giddiness, and vertigo. Vincenti shows that
though the fragment never became part of the Wake, its concerns pervade
the text, with many Swiftian ailments and attributes becoming attached to the
character Shem, and with deafness arising as a perennial concern through-
out. Though a minor text in the scope of Joyce’s writing, “Twilight of Blind-
ness” proves to be an essential reference point in the discourse on madness in
Finnegans Wake.
In the last chapter in the book, Jennifer Marchisotto reads representations
of disability as aesthetically liberating by focusing on the Wake’s use of the no-
tion of madness. As Marchisotto argues, the “fluidity” of mental illness, hid-
den behind the rigid categories of medical diagnoses, permits it to function
as a disruptor of strict definitions and narrative prescriptivism. In particular,
Marchisotto focuses on the dialogic relation, through Issy, of Lucia Joyce and
Shakespeare’s Ophelia, another figure of “mad” femininity who in the Wake
appears at times as a highly productive force.
“If Ulysses isn’t fit to read,” Joyce himself once argued, “life isn’t fit to live”
(JJ 537). Contra to the fascist discourses of “useless life” so prevalent in his
era, which would sweep so many disabled people up not only into the Ho-
locaust but also into forced sterilization and lifelong institutionalization, for
Joyce “life” is invariably constructed from those so-called degenerate elements
of disability, debility, and weakness. To reject these elements is to reject the
world that disability helps create, to reject life itself. It is, as Nietzsche argues,
childish, fantastical, fundamentally the embrace of an illusion. What Joyce
means by “life” being “fit to live” here is not a fatuous generalization, but
rather something both simple and serious: that any serious reckoning of the
human subject requires an acceptance of that subject’s many variations, no
matter its rarity or apparent usefulness. “Life” in Ulysses is not the sanitized
image of life stripped of crassness, violence, or sexuality, nor a fascist image
of life stripped of (among other things) disability. Joyce resists the impulse
to make an ableist fantasia and call it encyclopedic, to lay claim to complete-

ness without first earning it, and so it was inevitable that disability would be
plentiful throughout his work. By resisting the inherently violent imperative
to force an illusion on the world, Joyce produced some of the most complex
engagements with disability in all of English literature—and some of the most
rewarding to read.
· · ·
Production of this book was supported by Canada’s Social Sciences and Hu-
manities Research Council (SSHRC). The section of this introduction con-
cerning the definitions of key terms also benefited, in an earlier draft, from
the commentary and criticism of Dr. Hannah Simpson.
Notes
1. Frank Budgen, James Joyce and the Making of “Ulysses” (Bloomington: Indiana Univer-
sity Press, 1973), 21.
2. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everybody and Nobody, trans.
Graham Parkes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 30. Richard Brown likewise notes
the similarity of this passage to Joyce’s use of the body in his writing. See Richard Brown,
“Body Words,” European Joyce Studies 17 (2006): 110.
3. For illness in general, see Vike Martina Plock, Joyce, Medicine, and Modernity (Gaines-
ville: University Press of Florida, 2010). The question of whether Joyce had syphilis has been
a persistent controversy in Joyce studies. For relatively recent texts that argue that he did, see
Kevin Birmingham, The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s “Ulysses” (New
York: Penguin, 2015), and Erik Holmes Schneider, Zois in Nighttown: Prostitution and Syphilis
in the Trieste of James Joyce and Italo Svevo (1880–1920) (Trieste: Comunicarte Edizioni, 2012).
Studies of the role of syphilis in Joyce’s work are varied, and include: Michael Timins, “‘The
Sisters’: Their Disease,” James Joyce Quarterly 49, no. 3/4 (2012): 441–54; Vernon Hall and
Burton A. Waisbren, “Syphilis as a Major Theme in James Joyce’s Ulysses,” Archives of Internal
Medicine 140, no. 7 (1980): 963–65; J. B. Lyons, James Joyce and Medicine (Dublin: Dolmen
Press, 1973).
4. See, for example, Tracey Teets Schwarze, Joyce and the Victorians (Gainesville: Univer-
sity Press of Florida, 2002), chap. 6.
5. There are likely a great number of angles from which one could investigate the question
of how Joyce’s eye troubles affected and changed his composition practices. One possibility
I have long considered comes by way of the genetic critic Michael Groden, who, during a
graduate seminar on Finnegans Wake I had the good fortune to be a student in, speculated
that the long, thin, winding columns of text in the Wake notebooks, which turn the pages
into an almost unreadable collage, would for Joyce have been perfectly legible due to his
narrowed field of vision cutting out all the excess visual noise, allowing him to focus on just
22 Jeremy Colangelo
the small snippet of text in front of him. If this speculation is accurate, it would serve as an
excellent reminder of how the simplistic ability/disability axis on which people typically judge
human capacity often occludes more than it reveals. Groden makes a similar point during
his discussion of Joyce’s eyesight and the composition of “Cyclops” in his “Ulysses” in Focus:
Genetic, Textual, and Personal Views (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2012), 134–37.
As Georgina Kleege asks in Sight Unseen (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999)—an
account of her experience with blindness—“what do sighted people do with all this visual
detail?” (2). It is a question that one should have in mind when facing the visual excess and
complexity of Joyce’s manuscripts.
6. Samuel Beckett, “Dante . . . Bruno . Vico . . Joyce,” in James Joyce/Finnegans Wake: A
Symposium (New York: New Directions, 1972), 10.
7. Michael Bérubé, The Secret Life of Stories: From Don Quixote to Harry Potter, How Un-
derstanding Intellectual Disability Transforms the Way We Read (New York: New York Uni-
versity Press, 2016), 1 (emphasis in original).
8. See Jeremy Colangelo, “Punctuations of the Virtual: Spectating Sex and Disability in
Joyce’s ‘Nausicaa,’” Modern Fiction Studies 65, no. 1 (2019): 111–31. For a summary of the schol-
arly work on Gerty and its use, or misuse, of disability metaphors, see pp. 112–14.
9. David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the De-
pendencies of Discourse (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 18. The basic point
about the problems of un-thought-through disability metaphors I take from Leonard Kriegel,
“Disability as Metaphor in Literature,” in Images of the Disabled, Disabling Images, ed. Alan
Gartner and Tom Joe (New York: Praeger, 1987), 31–46.
10. David Bolt, The Metanarrative of Blindness: A Re-Reading of Twentieth-Century Anglo-
phone Literature (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014), 67.
11. Jacques Lacan, “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis,” in
Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2006), 209.
12. The passage Lacan refers to is Mallarmé’s preface to René Ghil’s Traité du verbe, though
Lacan’s description seems to resemble better a similar passage in Nietzsche’s “On Truth and
Falsehood in the Extra-Moral Sense.” For an analysis of the similarity between these two pas-
sages, see Robert McGahey, The Orphic Moment: Shaman to Poet-Thinker in Plato, Nietzsche,
and Mallarmé (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 59–60.
13. Lacan, “The Function and Field of Speech,” 209.
14. Tobin Siebers, Disability Theory (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008), 6.
15. Mark Mossman, Disability, Representation and the Body in Irish Writing, 1800–1922
(London: Palgrave, 2009), 151.
16. “For seeing comes about because the part that can perceive is affected by something.”
Aristotle, De Anima, trans. C. D. C. Reeve (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2017), 34.
17. Josh Dohmen, “Disability as Abject: Kristeva, Disability, and Resistance,” Hypatia 31,
no. 4 (2016): 763 (emphasis in original).
18. Bérubé, The Secret Life of Stories, 19 (emphasis in original).
19. Ato Quayson, Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 14.
20. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in
American Culture and Literature (1997; New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 46.
21. Garland-Thomson, 12.

22. Mitchell and Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis, 6.
23. For an analysis of these processes, see Alison Kafer and Eunjung Kim, “Disability and
the Edges of Intersectionality,” in The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Disability,
ed. Clare Barker and Stuart Murray (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 123–38.
24. Sami Schalk, Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)Ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women’s
Speculative Fiction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018); Alison Kafer, Feminist, Queer,
Crip (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013); Robert McRuer, Crip Times: Disability,
Globalization, and Resistance (New York: New York University Press, 2018); Gili Hammer,
Blindness through the Looking Glass: The Performance of Blindness, Gender, and the Sensory
Body (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2019), Jasbir K. Puar, The Right to Maim:
Debility, Capacity, Disability (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017); Jasbir K. Puar, “Dis-
ability,” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 1, no. 1/2 (2014): 77–81. Additionally, though not
central to this book, Jian Neo Chen’s Trans Exploits: Trans of Color Cultures and Technologies
in Movement (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019) contains valuable insights on the
intersections of disabled and trans identities.
25. Maren Linett, ed., “Cripping Modernism,” special issue, Modern Fiction Studies 65,
no. 1 (Spring 2019); Maren Linett, Bodies of Modernism: Physical Disability in Transatlantic
Modernist Literature (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017).
26. Michael Davidson, Invalid Modernism: Disability and the Missing Body of the Aesthetic
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).
27. Jeremy Colangelo, Diaphanous Bodies: Ability, Disability, and Modernist Irish Literature
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2021).
28. Andre Cormier, “‘Our Eyes Demand Their Turn. Let Them Be Seen!’: The Transcen-
dental Blind Stripling,” Joyce Studies Annual, 2008, 203–25; Angela Lee Nemecek, “Read-
ing the Disabled Woman: Gerty MacDowell and the Stigmaphilic Space of ‘Nausicaa,’” Joyce
Studies Annual, 2010, 173–202; Paul Marchbanks, “The Ineluctable Modality of the Visibly
Disabled in James Joyce’s Ulysses,” Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies 12, no.
1 (2018): 53–69; Dominika Bednarska, “A Cripped Erotic: Gender and Disability in James
Joyce’s ‘Nausicaa,’” James Joyce Quarterly 49, no. 1 (2011): 73–89; Robert Volpicelli, “Modernist
Low Vision: Visual Impairment and Weak Narrative in Conrad and Joyce,” Novel: A Forum
for Fiction 51, no. 1 (2018): 60–78.
29. Linett, Bodies of Modernism, 30.
30. Siebers, Disability Theory, 3.
31. It is worth mentioning, though, curative approaches to disability have been criticized
and rejected by some theorists, such as Eli Clare. See his Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with
Cure (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017).
32. Michael Oliver and Bob Sapey, Social Work with Disabled People (London: Macmillan,
1983).
33. Melanie Yergeau, Authoring Autism: On Rhetoric and Neurological Queerness (Dur-
ham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 107.
34. Siebers, Disability Theory, 60.
35. Peter Schwenger, “Phenomenology of the Scream,” Critical Inquiry 40, no. 2 (2014): 393.
36. For a text that attempts to theorize beyond the social model and account for its prob-
24 Jeremy Colangelo
lems, see Tom Shakespeare, Disability Rights and Wrongs Revisited (London: Routledge, 2013).
For Tobin Siebers’s proposal of an alternative approach called “complex embodiment,” see his
“Returning the Social to the Social Model,” in The Matter of Disability: Materiality, Biopolitics,
Crip Affect, ed. David T. Mitchell, Susan Antebi, and Sharon L. Snyder (Ann Arbor: Univer-
sity of Michigan Press, 2019), 39–47. The essay is a fascinating engagement with many of the
problems outlined above, unfortunately cut short by the author’s untimely death.
37. For an analysis of the literary effects of this evacuation of definite qualities from the
notion of ability, see Jeremy Colangelo, “Clear Indistinct Ideas: Disability, Vision, and the
Diaphanous Body in Joyce’s Ulysses,” Genre 53, no. 1 (2020): 1–25. See also Colangelo, Diapha-
nous Bodies.
38. Lennard J. Davis, Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body (London:
Verso, 1995), 7.
39. Garland-Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies, 8.
40. Michael Ralph, “Impairment,” in Keywords for Disability Studies, ed. Rachel Adams,
Benjamin Reiss, and David Serlin (New York: New York University Press, 2015), 107.
41. Puar, The Right to Maim, xvii.
42. Quayson, Aesthetic Nervousness, 14.
43. Michel Foucault, History of Madness (1961; London: Routledge, 2006); Gilles Deleuze
and Félix Guattari, Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 2 vols. (1972/80; London, Bloomsbury,
2019); Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1979).
44. Giovanna Vincenti, “The Discourse of Madness in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and
Samuel Beckett’s Early English Prose” (PhD diss., University of Reading, 2018), 17–18.
45. Douglas C. Baynton, Defectives in the Land: Disability and Immigration in the Age of
Eugenics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). See especially pp. 71–78 and 128–29.
46. See Yergeau, Authoring Autism, 70–71.
47. Therí Alyce Pickens, Black Madness :: Mad Blackness (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2019), 15, 29.
48. Louis Sass, Madness and Modernism: Insanity in the Light of Modern Art, Literature,
and Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).
49. Linett, Bodies of Modernism, 147.
50. For analyses of Joyce’s work in the context of trauma, see Christine van Boheemen,
Joyce, Derrida, Lacan and the Trauma of History: Reading, Narrative, and Postcolonialism
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Paul K. Saint-Amour, Tense Future: Modern-
ism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); Christy L. Burns,
“Nostalgia, Mourning, and Désistance in James Joyce’s Ulysses,” in Modernism and Nostalgia:
Bodies, Locations, Aesthetics, ed. Tammy Clewell (London: Palgrave, 2013), 216–36.
1
Two Sides of Hemiplegia

On the Affect of Paralysis in Dubliners
JEREMY COLANGELO
I can see plainly that there are two sides to the matter
but unfortunately I can occupy only one of them.
James Joyce, LII 134
There was no hope for them this time, or ever: the diagnosis is quite clear.
Paralysis, brought on by an overexertion of the critical body, has gripped
Joyce criticism, emanating from that fatal text called Dubliners. I know it, you
know it, everybody with even a passing knowledge of Joyce criticism knows
it: regardless of applicability or usefulness, any recent treatment of the issue
of “paralysis in Dubliners” is more likely to dwell on its outmodedness than
on its use as a critical lens. Richard Greaves, for example, has argued that
“the paralysis approach . . . has been used in an oversimplified way that in
turn oversimplifies the stories,”1 and Cóilín Owens has likewise held that “the
battle-weary clichés about the ‘paralysis’ and ‘hemiplegia’ [of Dubliners] . . .
have performed their duty and exhausted their watch.”2 Bernard Benstock,
meanwhile, makes the excellent point that “the exalted prominence of this
threesome [i.e., paralysis/simony/gnomon] tends to conceal various other
such devices.”3 As a guiding metaphor and organizing principle for the book,
paralysis seems to have gone long past the point of diminishing returns, ceas-
ing to be a way to corral a strange and alien text into something interpretable
26 Jeremy Colangelo
and becoming a process by which a complex, supple text becomes a limited

one, just one more overused “skeleton key” on the Joycean key chain.
These readings have a great deal of truth to them: of course there is more
to the book than just the three key terms at the start of “The Sisters.” This
is Joyce we’re talking about: there is always more. For instance, it would
seem as though in metaphorizing paralysis into a recurrent theme, Joyce
has participated unselfconsciously in what David T. Mitchell and Sharon L.
Snyder call the “metaphoric opportunism of literature,”4 which is willing to
take up disability only insofar as it can be used to represent something else,
with no care or attention to the actual material reality of disabled people.
To a point this reading is accurate, though not to the extent and not in the
way that it would first appear; if the cardinal sin of metaphorization is its
lack of specificity and concreteness and the effacement of the particularity
of the situation, then the greatest sinner here is not Joyce, but his readers.
Joyce discusses the role of paralysis extensively in his letters to his pub-
lishers during the long process of bringing Dubliners to print, and many
scholars have (justifiably) argued that such exhortations must be read in
light of the fact that Joyce was trying to pitch his collection to skeptical and
censorious editors, and so was motivated to oversimplify and exaggerate
the book’s thematic coherence. For that reason I cite here Joyce’s letter to
his friend Constantine Curran, written in 1904 and well before the later
publication fights were even a twinkle (or perhaps a splinter) in Joyce’s eye:
“I call the series Dubliners to betray the soul of that hemiplegia or paralysis
which many consider a city” (LI 55).
My goal is to refigure the role of paralysis in Dubliners not as a state of
nonmotion, but rather as an instance of affective arrest, rising from and de-
pending on the extreme mobility of bodies, minds, and affects all through-
out the stories. By way of readings of some exemplary stories—“The Sisters,
“An Encounter,” “Eveline,” “Araby,” “A Little Cloud,” and “The Dead”—and
through a combination of a historicized reading of the word “hemiplegia”
with an understanding of the affective dimension of paralysis as it functions
in Dubliners and relates to the keywords “simony” and “gnomon,” I revise and
advance the current understanding of what paralysis is for Joyce and how it
functions in his text. It seems that, perhaps, there is a bit of life left in this old
term yet, a bit of movement both within and around it, constituted by the af-
fective push and pull of the collection’s other key themes.
Two Sides of Hemiplegia: On the Affect of Paralysis in Dubliners 27
The Pasteurization of Ireland
Hemiplegia is not merely a synonym for “paralysis,” but rather a specific type of
paralysis, one that affects only one side of the body, left or right. It is most often
caused by strokes, where the paralyzed side of the body is the one opposite the
damaged side of the brain. We can see already the appropriateness of the spe-
cific type of paralysis to “The Sisters,” where the famous keywords appear and
which was published in the same year that Joyce’s letter to Constantine Curran
was written. As the story begins: “There was no hope for him this time: it was
the third stroke” (D 3). The potential historical significance of it being the third
stroke that does in the priest I will address in a moment, but first I must address
the question of where this particular term even derives from. As Luke Gibbons
argues, the idea of characterizing Dublin in terms of paralysis at all, an approach
“so notably absent from the earliest publication of the stories,” came from the
writings of journalist Filson Young, who it so happens was also the reader the
publisher Grant Richards used to vet the early Dubliners manuscript.5 Yet that
leaves open the matter of what the origin of “hemiplegia” specifically is.
I would put forward here that the term derives from Joyce’s brief and di-
sastrous stints as a Parisian medical student, which occurred sporadically
throughout 1902 and 1903. Joyce at this time was almost the Platonic ideal
of a student who has chosen the wrong major. Though he made an early ac-
quaintance of Dr. Joseph Rivière, a physical therapist, Joyce was pressed by ex-
penses, an insufficient grasp of French, and the difficulty of the material, and
he ceased attending his classes almost as soon as he started them (JJ 112–13).
Any argument that tries to connect a detail in Joyce’s writing with something
he would have learned in medical school therefore has to address the fact
that he hardly learned anything in medical school at all. That being said, he
was still nominally a medical student in Paris, which was at the time the very
center of medical research in Europe, such that, as Vike Martina Plock points
out, had Joyce completed his studies, “his professional training would have
been both solid and cutting edge.”6 And the person who took the most credit
for bringing Paris to such heights, a figure whose shadow Joyce would have
found inescapable, was also perhaps the most famous sufferer of hemiplegia
in the world: the bacteriologist Louis Pasteur.
As Bruno Latour describes in The Pasteurization of France, there was for
much of the nineteenth century “the impression that a revolution was emerg-
28 Jeremy Colangelo
ing from Pasteur’s laboratory and spreading into society, which it then turned
upside down.”7 By the time Joyce arrived in Paris, Pasteur had been dead for
about seven years, but during his life he had become, in the words of his biog-
rapher Patrice Debré, “a living symbol, embodying both science and France.”8
As overblown as such descriptions are, they do suggest the inescapability of
Pasteur’s fame, which Joyce would undoubtably have encountered regardless
of his poor attendance in school. Indeed, Joyce does refer to Pasteur by name
once in Ulysses (U 15.1849) and obliquely mentions him in the Wake via the
word “pastureuration” (FW 356.24), and Joyce would definitely have learned
about Pasteur’s research, if not by reputation in Paris, then through his active
interest in germ theory, which Martin Bock extensively chronicles.9 And Pas-
teur, like Father Flynn of “The Sisters,” was afflicted three times with serious
strokes, two of which left him with hemiplegia, and the last of which finally
killed him.10 After the first stroke, in 1868, “he was no longer able to speak or
to move the limbs on his left side,” and from that point on he depended on
assistants to perform his most delicate experiments.11 Both of his two nonfatal
strokes, in 1868 and 1887, also left him with aphasia, or an inability to speak.12
Aphasia was found to be comorbid with hemiplegia in the 1860s, with the
severity depending on which side of the brain was affected.13
The coincidence of aphasia with hemiplegia, as well as the similarities be-
tween the three strokes that killed Pasteur and the three that killed Father Flynn,
provides a useful lens of interpretation, both for “The Sisters” and for the “gno-
monic” elisions throughout Dubliners. While it would be too much of a stretch
to say that Father Flynn’s difficulties speaking were unambiguously based on
what Pasteur suffered, it is a perfectly consistent symptom of someone suffering
paralysis due to a stroke, and clearly the aphasia that Father Flynn suffered has
become displaced onto the other adult characters in the story, whose speech is
often cut off and ellipses ridden. The Oxford Concise Medical Dictionary defines
aphasia as “a disorder of language affecting the generation and content of speech
and its understanding,” which “is caused by damage to the language-dominant
half of the brain, which is usually the left hemisphere in a right-handed per-
son.”14 Aphasia need not be total, and can take the form of forgotten words,
cut-off sentences, or vague trailings off—or precisely the textual elisions often
read in “The Sisters” in terms of the “gnomon in the Euclid” (D 3), taken often
as the collection’s master term for incompleteness.15
Paralysis and the gnomon are very closely related, and indeed their struc-
Two Sides of Hemiplegia: On the Affect of Paralysis in Dubliners 29
ture is similar in ways that points to the larger function of hemiplegia in Dub-
liners. One reason why it is important to home in on hemiplegia specifically
is that many scholars often erroneously (though understandably) read “pa-
ralysis” to mean “total paralysis.” John Hobbs, for instance, reads Farrington’s
abusive rage at the end of “Counterparts” as evidence against the applicability
of paralysis,16 Cóilín Owens argues that the Dublin of Joyce’s early life was “far
from paralysed” and points to the numerous protests that roused its people
in that time,17 and Claire A. Culleton has pointed out (with good reason) that
“even when it has been argued that the characters are at their most paralytic,
they are still doing something.”18 Indeed, it is quite common for the stories
to put motion and stasis side by side, or to show characters exerting great
effort to little end. For instance, as Casey Lawrence notes in her contribu-
tion to this collection, “Hoppy” Holohan of “A Mother” “has the spectacular
ability to appear busy without actually doing anything,” such that “despite all
his motion, Holohan, like many of Joyce’s Dubliners, goes nowhere and does
nothing” (this volume, 47)—a reading that seems in line with the hemiplegia
found elsewhere. There is a tendency in many readings to interpret “paralysis”
in purely formal and metaphorized terms, an approach that tends to ideal-
ize it as total paralysis, restricting the whole body. Yet the term “hemiplegia”
necessarily refers to a paralysis that coexists with the capacity to move, the
paralyzed and nonparalyzed halves of the body forming each other’s mirror
image. Indeed, the matter unites not only paralysis and the gnomon, but also
that third keyword, “simony,” or the trading of holy rituals for material gain.
Critics of Dubliners often point to the ending of “Araby” as the exemplary
instance of the dangers of simonizing, with the young narrator having been
lured by the mystical and symbolic resonances of the bazaar only to find the
dregs of crass commercialism instead. Yet a much more concise instance of
this type of image, and an excellent conflation of the paralysis/gnomon/si-
mony trifecta, comes at the very end of “An Encounter”:
—Murphy!
My voice had the accent of forced bravery in it and I was ashamed
of my paltry stratagem. I had to call the name again before Mahony saw
me and hallooed in answer. How my heart beat as he came running
across the field to me! He ran as if to bring me aid. And I was penitent;
for in my heart I had always despised him a little. (D 18)
30 Jeremy Colangelo
That last line is one of the more brutal moments in the tale, indicating the nar-
rator’s realization that despite the trappings of their favorite adventure stories
that the two boys drape around their journey and encounter with the strange
man, and despite the affective buildup at the story’s end to what in said stories
would be a joyous reunion, he doesn’t even really like Mahony and would pre-
fer not to be near him. There is a distance between what is implied and what
is given, what moves and what holds still, what has been bought dearly and
what has been sold cheaply. In this way we see the two boys of “An Encounter”
embody Dublin’s hemiplegia, with one holding perfectly still while the other
runs to him, like a knight of his stories, at full tilt.
The plot of “An Encounter” depicts a familiar pattern, wherein characters,
motivated by possibilities or ideals (real or imagined), build up tremendous
expectations only to have those expectations crushed by their own personal
failings, the stultifying atmosphere of Dublin, or more often both. Such mo-
ments of seizure (or perhaps we should call them strokes) often coincide
with the instances of “epiphany” around which the stories of Dubliners are
structured. This combination of movement and seizing, motility and stasis,
which is characteristic of hemiplegia, is thus key not only to the relationship
between paralysis and the other two keywords, but also to the book’s larger
scheme of affect.
Stopping Going
As Brian Massumi describes, affect often develops in relation to possibility

and virtuality. As he says in an interview published in Politics of Affect, “a
power to affect and be affected governs a transition where a body passes from
one state of capacitation to a diminished or augmented state of capacitation.”19
Though I have criticized above some readers for overmetaphorizing paraly-
sis in their treatments of Dubliners, Joyce nevertheless develops the medical
specificity of hemiplegia into a powerful metaphorical structure for the re-
stricted affective landscape of Dublin life. To have a capacity for movement on
one side of the body that has been taken away from the other, to know what
one wishes to say but be (owing to the effects of aphasia or the enforced eu-
phemism of propriety) utterly incapable of saying it—such is the paralysis we
see Joyce’s characters terminally gripped with. The combination of movement
and stasis is neither counter to paralytic readings nor incidental to paralysis
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Joyce Writing Disability 1st Edition

Jeremy Colangelo (Editor)

International Disability Rights Advocacy

Ulysses James Joyce

Babysitter 1st Edition Joyce Carol Oates

Alpha Wolf 1st Edition Sammie Joyce

Java Programming Eigth Edition Joyce Farrell

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Foreword by Maren Linett

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

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List of Abbreviations xiii

Introduction: Disability Writing Joyce 1

1. Two Sides of Hemiplegia: On the Affect of Paralysis in Dubliners 25

2. “Limping and Devious”: The Disabled Male Body in “A Mother” 45

3. When the Personal Becomes Historical: Portrait and the Textual

4. Debility as Disability: Disorderly Eating in A Portrait of the Artist as a

6. Degeneration, Decadence, and Joyce’s Modernist Disability Aesthetics

9. The Anti-Erasure of Lucia Joyce: Resignification of Mad Histories in

List of Contributors 223

Joyce Writing Disability demonstrates the considerable extent to which ideas

ing the certainties of diagnosis and, as Jennifer Marchisotto argues, disman-

D James Joyce, Dubliners, ed. Jeri Johnson (1914; Oxford: Oxford

characters are individuated and distinguished from one another—as one

metaphors as their central foci, which is why it is important here to address

examination of disability in Joyce, several essays and book chapters already

Disability Studies: Key Concepts for This Book

1. The Tragic or Charitable Model. Consider Tiny Tim of Charles Dick-

action between bodies and the social and physical environments in

Norms and the Normate

Debility and Impairment

a variety of contradictions regarding how disabled characters are represented

Madness and Mad Studies

antithesis of history . . . whereas whiteness stands in for progression, being

Degeneration and Decadence

such as trauma and trauma studies (important especially in Boriana Alexan-

Outline of the Book

These chapters have been arranged in chronological order according to the

usually accompanied by aphasia, a type of speech impediment. This is the type

physical disfigurement and racial oppression. Crucially, Hernandez sketches a

originally written to be part of Finnegans Wake but was never incorporated

to make an ableist fantasia and call it encyclopedic, to lay claim to complete-

21. Garland-Thomson, 12.

Two Sides of Hemiplegia

James Joyce, LII 134

and becoming a process by which a complex, supple text becomes a limited

The Pasteurization of Ireland

As Brian Massumi describes, affect often develops in relation to possibility

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