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White, Siân E. "‘O, Despise Not My Youth!’: Senses, Sympathy, and an Intimate Aesthetics in Ulysses." Texas Studies in Literature and Language 51, no. 4 (2009): 503–36.

Related topics:

Narration
Paternity
Thought and Action
Touch and Feeling
Union and Division

Link to citation page: https://www.worldcat.org/title/o-despise-not-my-youth-senses-sympathy-and-an-intimate-aesthetics-in-ulysses/oclc/472442003&referer=brief_results

Link to full text: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/texas_studies_in_literature_and_language/v051/51.4.white.html

In this article, White conceives of different forms of intimacy and how Joyce employs them in Ulysses. Defining intimacy broadly, as a communication or collaboration, she finds that it takes three key forms. The first key form of intimacy in the novel is a collaboration between an individual's mind and body, the second describes a connection between two individuals, and the third is an aesthetic practice that concerns communication between narrator and reader—an "intimate aesthetics," wherein a writer must attempt to translate characters' firsthand experiences through the distancing lens of narrative, and thus "portray intimacy secondhand" (504). Using the passage in "Lestrygonians" (U 8) with Bloom and the blind stripling, White examines how Joyce employs all three forms of intimacy to posit a critique of imperialism, nationalism, militarism, and masculinity. In the scene, what begins as a gesture of sympathetic pity becomes a more empathetic response, catalyzed by the intimacy of touch. As he holds the stripling's hand, Bloom meditates on how the stripling's senses must operate in the absence of sight, conceiving of an empathetic and extra-sensory "psychic consciousness" wherein "to touch the other is to see the other" (508). Physically perceiving the stripling leads Bloom in turn to imagine how the stripling physically perceives, establishing inter-individual intimacy through a consideration of intra-individual intimacy between mind and body.

Through Joyce's textual allusion to a Coleridge poem which critiques a masculinity founded in military imperialism, White draws a close association between the blind stripling and Stephen, both of whom are young, disgruntled men alienated from their environments and contemptuous of the nationalist conception of masculinity that demands the subordination of the individual to the paternal instrument of the state. They resist the material world as a reluctant soldier resists his country, struggling to retain subjectivity and establish masculine identity within a system that demands one as payment for the other. White proposes two contrary, simultaneous functions for this dichotomy. Joyce at once mocks the impotence of the young men's stubborn individualism and the Irish nationalism which alienates them, while also finding in Bloom's guidance of both men the possibility for a new masculinity, founded not on the cold paternalism of the state, but on a father-son relationship, which bears masculinity through individual intimacy.

Joyce's characters seek intimacy not by obliterating subjectivity, but by mediating and communicating between conflicting subjectivities—self and other, mind and body. Joyce uses the same principles in constructing his "intimate aesthetics," favoring a strategy that uses third-person omniscient narration to describe a limited first-person experience, mixing both with free, indirect discourse. By lacking a "totalizing omniscient view" of its world, the novel "denies the reader or narrator the ability to assume a position of objectivity," enacting a textual intimacy through the same brand of mediation that creates intimacy between people (520). Thus, both the reader of the novel and the characters the novel experience intimacy as a process of "achieving wholeness through the self's experience of the other" (522).

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