Ashplant

Lamos, Colleen. "Signatures of the Invisible: Homosexual Secrecy and Knowledge in ‘Ulysses.’" James Joyce Quarterly 31, no. 3 (April 1, 1994): 337–55.

Related topics:

Sexuality
Touch and Feeling
Union and Division
The Unspoken

Link to citation page: https://www.worldcat.org/title/signatures-of-the-invisible-homosexual-secrecy-and-knowledge-in-ulysses/oclc/5557166227&referer=brief_results

Link to full text:

Many critics have hinted at possible "homosexual tinges" (Lamos 337) in Ulysses, especially among the three major characters: Molly, Stephen, and Bloom. These are mere hints, however, and rarely are explicit enough to label any relationships or characters as homosexual. In the discourse on Ulysses and sexuality, critics have continued to see homosexuality as a "tint within the multicolored fabric" (337) of the novel. As the critic Brown has noted, "fully homosexual feeling" is absent from the reader's perception (Lamos 338); the homosexual tints in the novel have been understood and discussed as normal deviations within the larger spectrum of sexual desire. In the failed search for clear "homosexual signs" (338), Lamos concludes that we find only an absence, undergirded by these hints that imply strongly some kind of homosexual relations between characters.

Part of doing a queer reading of this text, Lamos argues, involves the perceiver's knowledge or subjective intuition to sense homosexual tension. Buck Mulligan is one of the most avid "readers" of homosexuality in other characters, and he can serve us as a stepping stone for conducting a queer reading. But Buck is only a bystander, and he specifically others himself to homosexuality, so we cannot presume his accounts to be accurate, insider information. Instead, silence, according to Lamos, is the primary way in which homosexuality reveals its presence in the novel. She cites D. A. Miller, who comments on the social function of secrecy, which "is not to conceal knowledge so much as to conceal the knowledge of knowledge" (Lamos 339). Significantly, this article was written shortly after the installment of the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy, which publicized the military's disacknowledgement of existence of homosexual soldiers. By enforcing silence, an institution shirks the responsibility to distinguish indecent homosexual activity from friendly, manly, no-homo bro-ness. Lamos' premise suggests a parallel between the military's blurring approach to homosexuality and the indistinct hints and possibilities presented by Joyce in Ulysses.

One problem with locating instances that are specifically homosexual in the novel is that the classification implies non-heterosexuality. His sexual relationship with Molly, for example, often counters a homosexual reading of Bloom. Since finding explicit references is next to, if not totally, impossible, especially in context of the explicitly heterosexual references, a queer reading of Ulysses requires significant speculation. The reader's subjective intuition, like Mulligan's, must do a great deal of the work in drawing distinctions between friends and lovers. Lamos points out that Harold Beaver's observation about the "homosexual reader" is equally valid for the "homophobic interpreter" (339): "Every sign [for him] becomes duplicitous, slipping back and forth across a wavering line, once the heterosexual antithesis between love and friendship has been breached" (Lamos 339). According to Lamos, if homosexuality is interwoven throughout other elements of sociality and sexuality in the text—such as same-sex friendships and rivalries, bisexuality, and cross-generational bonds—we cannot draw a clean line between any of these categories.

Citations and Related Sources