In the Company of Strangers

1. My own analysis is complementary to Said’s in a number of respects, but his claim that horizontal relationships displace vertical ones does not account for the modernists’ intense focus on questions of precedence and paternity (Edward Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method [New York: Columbia University Press, 1985]). Moreover, the Recherche and Ulysses (though not Finnegans Wake) are remarkable for their lack of interest in sibling relationships, especially given the heavy emphasis on these in nineteenth-century French and English fiction. The function of adjacency is taken over from siblings by random encounters in the world outside the family. Almost no sibling pairs feature among the thousands of characters in the Recherche, and the one figure from his own life to whom Proust does not give a fictional role is his brother, Robert. No siblings of Bloom or Molly appear in Ulysses, and when Stephen is finally confronted with the reality of his sister, Dilly, in “Wandering Rocks,” his conscious decision that she cannot fit in the worldview he is constructing for himself seems to reflect a choice on the part of Ulysses too.

2. Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009), in particular, analyzes the connection between feelings of sadness and shame and queer time. “I see the art of losing as a particularly queer art” (24). Love’s work accepts and examines the loss necessarily inherent in queer time. Particularly relevant here is her suggestion that the aesthetic modernist commitment to novelty is always bound up with a melancholy “backwardness,” which she connects to queer sexuality. The narratological argument of In the Company of Strangers involves a distinct but analogous association of retrospection, queerness, and loss: the articulation of a queer, non-genealogical model of narrative structure is accompanied, as we shall see in Ulysses and the Recherche, by an enormous sorrow at the break it entails with the biological family and its securities. For ideas of queer temporality more generally, see the essays collected in the special edition of GLQ (13, no. 2/3 [2007]).

3. The most exemplary instance of this poststructurally influenced approach is probably Colleen Lamos, Deviant Modernism: Sexual and Textual Errancy in T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Marcel Proust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). According to Lamos, disavowed homoerotic energies in Joyce, Proust, and Eliot are bound up with an inherent tendency to errancy and instability in their writings. In seeking to understand the subliminal role that homoerotic desire plays in canonical male modernism, Lamos offers a “critique targeted at the interior dehiscence of canonical modernist texts” (5), looking not to overarching structures but to “error, conceived as a multifaceted figure that connects moral, perceptual, cognitive, scribal, and hermeneutic lapses” (15–16); also see Joseph Allen Boone, Libidinal Currents: Sexuality and the Shaping of Modernism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), which uses psychoanalysis to elaborate a modernist “poetics and politics of the perverse”; or Anne Herrmann’s account of different forms of personal queerness in Queering the Moderns: Poses/Portraits/Performances (New York: Palgrave, 2000).

4. Anny Sadrin, Parentage and Inheritance in the Novels of Charles Dickens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) writes: “Modern literature is not concerned with such matters any more. Families have been banished from most works of fiction, except from the novels of Ivy Compton-Burnett and some few other belated Victorians. Houses have no heads and stories have no plots. … The modern hero is a solitary man, an ‘outsider’, a ‘Mr. K’, a man with no past, no name, no family” (24–25).

5. Tony Tanner, Adultery in the Novel: Contract and Transgression (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981).

6. Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (New York : Knopf, 1984 For a thorough account of the meaning of legitimacy in the eighteenth-century British novel and for the relationship between the picaresque foundling novel and the family romance, see Lisa Zunshine, Bastards and Foundlings: Illegitimacy in Eighteenth-Century England (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2005).

7. Carlo Ginzburg conjectures that the first story might be that of the hunter who sees tracks in the ground and surmises that something, not visible to him, must have “passed this way.” “Morelli, Freud, and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and the Scientific Method,” in The Sign of Three (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), 89.

8. According to Patricia Drechsel Tobin, Time and the Novel: The Genealogical Imperative (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978), 7, narrative “causes events … to be perceived as begetting other events within a line of causality similar to the line of generations, with the prior event earning a special prestige as it is seen to originate, control, and predict future events.”

9. Quoted in Teresa De Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 108.

10. Judith Roof, Come as You Are: Sexuality and Narrative (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), shows how narrative, as we find it in its “natural” state, is foundationally heterosexual. D. A. Miller, Bringing Out Roland Barthes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 44, states that “outside the heterosexual themes of marriage and oedipalized family (the former linked to the latter as its means of transmission), the plots of bourgeois life … would all be pretty much unthinkable.” Also see Annamarie Jagose, Inconsequence: Lesbian Representation and the Logic of Sexual Sequence (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2002). Jagose’s central claim is that heterosexuality naturalizes itself as “original and preeminent” through a logic of sequence, of origins and secondary derivations, and that those logics “produce the lesbian as the figure most comprehensively worked over by sequence, secondary and inconsequential in all senses” (ix–x).

11. See, for example, Carla Freccero, Queer/Early/Modern (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006).

12. Philip Pettit, The Concept of Structuralism (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1975), 84. Another reader of Lévi-Strauss remarks that his theory of the Oedipus myth amounts to the following: “If society is to go on daughters must be disloyal to their parents and sons must destroy (replace) their fathers” (E. Leach, quoted in Pettit, Concept, 89), a remark that quite succinctly points to the queerness required for genealogical movement.

13. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1957).

14. Feminist analysis of structuralist narratology has shown how in the “deep structure” it describes, the hero must, by definition, be male. As Teresa de Lauretis explains, the “fundamental opposition” upon which narrative is founded is boundary and passage; the narrative hero is one who leaves a bounded, timeless world to cross into the space outside. For de Lauretis, this bounded world corresponds to the womb and to a realm of stasis, obstacles, and inaction that can be categorized as female (Alice Doesn’t, 116–20).

15. Sigmund Freud, “Family Romances,” in The Standard Edition of the Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey, vol. 9 (London: Hogarth, 1957), 235–41.

16. See The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England, 1500–1800 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1977). Alan Dundes and Robert Darnton maintain that fairytale variants often tell a somewhat different story. See Dundes, “The Psychoanalytic Study of the Grimms’ Tales,” in Folklore Matters (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989); and Darnton, “Peasants Tell Tales: The Meaning of Mother Goose,” in The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Basic Books, 1984). Other scholars see a great deal of continuity between variants.

17. For Freud, these events are prefigured by the “family romance” of early childhood, in which the child fantasizes that he is adopted and really the child of more glamorous parents.

18. Maria Tatar, The Hard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990), 71: “Fairytales habitually trace a trajectory from rags to riches, from feeble dependence to royal autonomy, from the dissolution of one nuclear family to the formation of a new one.”

19. Tatar, The Hard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales, 153.

21. Judith Halberstam, “Theorizing Queer Temporalities: A Roundtable Discussion” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 13, no. 2–3 (2007), for example, writes, “Queer time for me is the dark nightclub, the perverse turn away from the narrative coherence of adolescence—early adulthood—marriage—reproduction—child rearing—retirement—death, the embrace of late childhood in place of early adulthood or immaturity in place of responsibility.” Halberstam’s vision is appealing and familiar, but queer people age and die, too. The exaltation of the queer time as a mode of endless deferral avoids the urgent and fascinating question of what a gay model of growing older, a queer system of endings, not just beginnings and middles, might look like.

22. David Halperin expresses reservations about the way the term “queer” has been extended, cautioning that queer theory is now “often abstracted from the quotidian realities of lesbian and gay male life” (“The Normalization of Queer Theory,” Journal of Homosexuality 45, no 2 [2003]: 343).

23. Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004). For a critique of the refusal of the logic of futurity as a queer ideal, see Elizabeth Grosz, The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004).

24. Georg Simmel, “The Stranger,” in The Sociology of George Simmel, trans. Kurt Wolff (New York: Free Press, 1950), 402.

25. In essay on queer modernism, Heather Love defines queer as “the uninvited guest, unexpected but not totally unwelcome, that shows up without visible relations or ties” (“Modernism at Night,” PMLA 124, no. 3 [May 2009]: 744).

26. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 165.

27. Terry Eagleton The English Novel: An Introduction (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2005).

28. For an account of Dickens’s representation of London’s effects on human life and consciousness, see Williams, The Country and the City, 153–64.

29. Sharon Marcus, Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007), shows how relationships between women in Dickens serve to undermine the narrative “closure.” In a comprehensive account of homo erotic desire in Dickens, Holly Furneaux similarly shows how sibling pairs allow homo erotic attachments to survive marriage (Queer Dickens: Erotics, Families, Masculinities [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010]).

30. Even though they are brought up as siblings, Heathcliff is never a brother to Hindley; the attraction between him and Catherine is never considered incestuous. The great number of such couples in nineteenth-century English fiction—Catherine and Heathcliff, Richard Carstone and Ada Clare in Bleak House, Fanny Price and Edmund Bertram in Mansfield Park (or later, in a weirder post-Victorian version, the Stapletons in Hound of the Baskervilles)—stems from the uneasy insistence that the “village” model still prevails, that the chaos of the city is a temporary green world that genealogy will bring to a close, that true identities are born, not created. For an account view of how these quasi-sibling couples queer the family plots of Dickens, see Furneaux, Queer Dickens.

31. Williams, The Country and the City, 9–13.

32. Even though demographic statistics can give us a picture of urban development, the dating of the mass psychological shift from village to city is common and yet varied enough to question its usefulness as anything other than a recurrent idea. Both Robert Alter (Imagined Cities: Urban Experience and the Language of the Novel [New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2005]) and Lawrence Schehr (French Gay Modernism [Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2004]) locate this moment in the mid- to late nineteenth century, for example, while Paul J. Hunter takes it as a commonplace that “if the 1690s represent the cultural moment when England admitted that its cultural allegiance had shifted from the country village to urban sprawl, there was as well a powerful conservative, reactionary, and nostalgic force operating in the city, even among those thoroughly committed to urbanness and modernity” (Before Novels [London: Norton, 1992], 149).

33. Alter acknowledges the fact that Dublin is “not one of the great European cities,” noting that the population, at 300,000, was a twentieth of London’s and that “there is at least a vestigial feeling of villagelike community in this Irish urban space.” He makes a reasonable case for the metropolitan qualities of Dublin in wider terms, however, arguing that elements such as the city’s rapid growth, its public transportation system, and the importance of advertising, journalism, and the telegraph “make this Dublin feel, despite its relatively small size, like a big modern city” (Imagined Cities, 122–23). Declan Kiberd, Ulysses and Us (London: Faber and Faber, 2009), makes a somewhat subtler and more compelling case for the city’s particularities instead of London- or Paris-like qualities. Kiberd emphasizes how the bourgeois culture that defined early-twentieth-century Dublin created a particular sense of a shared public space in the streets and institutions of the city, which is crucial to the style and shape of Ulysses. Of course, it is important to keep in mind, as John McCourt and others point out, that Ulysses was actually written at a later historical moment and in quite different continental cities, all of which, Trieste especially, left their mark on the Dublin of Joyce’s imagination. See McCourt, The Years of Bloom: James Joyce in Trieste, 1904– 1920 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000). For an account of the social, demographic, economic, and cultural conditions of Dublin in 1904, see F. S. L. Lyons, “James Joyce’s Dublin,” Twentieth-Century Studies 4 (November 1970): 6–25. Lyons says that Joyce’s Dublin was characterized by “tension” more than “paralysis” and demonstrates, moreover, that Joyce himself was keenly aware of this tension.

34. For a persuasive study of how Joyce’s Dublin is modeled on a similarly villagelike Trieste, see McCourt, The Years of Bloom.

1. Frank Budgen, James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), for example, maintains that “of all the great nineteenth century masters of fiction Joyce held Flaubert in highest esteem” (184). Joyce wrote an essay on Dickens for an exam in Italy that contained a mixture of criticism and praise (see Richard Ellman, James Joyce [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982], 320). Also see Hugh Kenner, The Stoic Comedians: Flaubert, Joyce and Beckett (London: W. H. Allen, 1964); Richard K. Cross, Flaubert and Joyce: The Rite of Fiction (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1971); Claude Jacquet and André Topia, eds., ‘Scribble’ 2: Joyce et Flaubert (Paris: Minard, 1990); Scarlett Baron ‘Strandentwining Cable’: Joyce, Flaubert, and Intertextuality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). Proust was a great admirer of George Eliot (see William Carter, Marcel Proust: A Life [New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002], 79).

2. Northrop Frye, “Dickens and the Comedy of Humors,” in Experience in the Novel, ed. Ray Harvey Pearce (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968), 63.

3. An early reviewer in Fraser’s Magazine praised his “reverence for the household sanctities, his enthusiastic worship of the household gods.” Margaret Oliphant wrote that “nowhere … does the household hearth burn brighter—nowhere is family love more warm” (quoted in Helena Michie, “From Blood to Law: The Embarrassments of Family in Dickens,” in Palgrave Advances in Charles Dickens Studies, ed. Robert Patten and John Bowen [New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005], 133).

4. A number of recent critics, such as Sally Ledger, Sharon Marcus, Helena Michie, and Catherine Waters, have questioned the fundamental presumption that Dickens offers a positive account of the heterosexual family.

5. Mary Jean Corbett, Family Likeness: Sex, Marriage, and Incest from Jane Austen to Virginia Woolf (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2008), xi, suggests something similar at work in the case of Charlotte Brontö: “In Jane Eyre (1847) and Villette (1853), Brontö recasts the drama of the female English orphan as a search for affinities, both biological and spiritual. … Jane’s plot in particular, over-determined by the rivalries and hostilities of her parents’ generation, hinges on constituting equitable intragenerational relationships that will undo the harm of earlier family settlements.”

6. Freud, “Family Romances,” in The Standard Edition of the Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey, vol. 9 (London: Hogarth, 1957), 235–42.

7. For an account of Dickens’s relationship to the eighteenth-century English novel, see Monica Fludernik, “The Eighteenth-Century Legacy,” in A Companion to Charles Dickens, ed. David Paroissien (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 65–80.

8. Holly Furneaux, the critic who, along with Helena Michie, has perhaps done most to overturn the conventional understanding of Dickens’s novels as implacably devoted to the heterosexual family, sees a queer model of kinship already in The Pickwick Papers. See “Charles Dickens’ Families of Choice: Elective Affinities, Sibling Substitution, and Homoerotic Desire,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 62, no. 2 (September 2007): 153– 92. Furneaux takes issue with such critics as Mara H. Fein, for whom the novel is really a domestic marriage plot (“The Politics of Family in The Pickwick Papers,” ELH 61 [1994]: 374). For a similar view see, Gina Marlene Dorré, “Handling the ‘Iron Horse’: Dickens, Travel, and Derailed Masculinity in The Pickwick Papers,” Nineteenth-Century Studies 16 (2002): 10. On the other hand, Brian McCuskey, “‘Your Love-Sick Pickwick’: The Erotics of Service,” Dickens Studies Annual 25 (1996): 263, gives an account of the novel’s resistance to heterosexuality, though he does not make a wider argument for alternative kinship as a structural characteristic in Dickens.

9. See Furneaux, “Charles Dickens’ Families of Choice,” 169.

10. Helena Michie’s description of Nicholas Nickleby holds for Oliver Twist as well: “Nicholas Nickleby is something of a hybrid—a domestic picaresque—in which the end of the journey is as important (and as meticulously represented) as the adventures that endings lay to rest” (“From Blood to Law,” 132).

11. Lazarillo de Tormes, trans. Michael Alpert (London: Penguin, 2003), 7; Lazarillo de Tormes, ed. Víctor García de la Concha (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1987), 69.

12. This is what happens in Roman Polanksi’s 2004 film version, in which Brownlow is just any old kindly stranger; the apparently slight change to the plot has a great effect on how the story and its understanding of society feel.

13. J. Hillis Miller, Charles Dickens: The World of His Novels (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958), 43.

14. Sally Ledger, Dickens and the Popular Radical Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 66, demonstrates exhaustively how “in Oliver Twist Dickens was characteristically responding to, as well as magnificently reshaping, existing popular crime narratives,” and offers a fascinating set of possible intertexts for the criminal aspects of the novel.

15. For account of relationship between Dickens and Freud see Ned Lukacher, “Dialectical Images: Benjamin/Dickens/Freud” in Primal Scenes: Literature, Philosophy, Psychoanalysis (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986), 275–336.

16. “Apparently displacing the family from the central position it was supposed to assume in Victorian society, the novel centres instead upon marginal figures such as the orphan, pauper and criminal, and the alien world they inhabit. These outcasts form parodic images of the family, establishing a model of deviance that contributes to the normative effect of familial ideology in the novel, while yet remaining as evidence of the underlying failure of the family” (Catherine Waters, Dickens and the Politics of the Family [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997], 32).

17. It is important to remember that Fagin is not simply an ersatz parent and that the world he represents is not a queer utopia but a violent and frightening place. His queerness in this sense can be related to Heathcliff’s. Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 52, points to a similar connection between Wuthering Heights and Oliver Twist: “Fagin’s true villainous nature is initially cloaked behind a maternal exterior of sizzling sausages, schoolroom games, and terms of endearment. But his simulation of benign authority disintegrates as the profit motive comes into conflict with his feminine virtues and cancels them out. … Heathcliff’s features change in a way remarkably similar to Fagin’s as his romantic qualities give way in the second half of the novel to the ‘besetting sin’ of ‘avarice.’”

18. See especially the mysterious fourth tractado.

19. Waters, Dickens and the Politics of the Family, 35, views the relationship between the thieves and the Bronlow-Maylies as a specular rather than antagonistic one; for Waters, Fagin is not an antifamily agent but a “grotesque embodiment” of the mixed gender roles defined by the Victorian middleclass ideology of the family. Waters emphasizes the symbolic echoes between Fagin and the family, while I focus on their narratological functions.

20. This accords with the idea expressed by the historian Philippe Ariès that the family may be seen as a reaction to the modern experience of industrialization and urbanization rather than a victim of it. See L’Enfant et la vie familiale sous l’Ancien Régime, translated into English by Robert Baldick as Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life (New York: Vintage, 1962).

21. David A. H. Hirsch gives the fullest account of how Fagin’s Jewishness and queerness are interrelated in the family values of the novel. See “Dickens’s Queer ‘Jew’ and Anglo-Christian Identity Politics: The Contradictions of Victorian Family Values,” in Queer Theory and the Jewish Question, ed. Daniel Boyarin, Daniel Itzkovitz, and Ann Pellegrini (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 311–33.

22. Terry Eagleton writes: “No-one would invite Little Nell to dinner if they could swing an acceptance from Quilp or Silas Wegg, just as nobody would chat up Oliver Twist if they could share a pipe with the Artful Dodger. … One would not pass up a tête-à-tête with Miss Haversham [sic] for an evening with David Copperfield” (The English Novel: An Introduction [Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Pub., 2005], 149).

23. For Oliver’s passivity, see J. Hillis Miller, Dickens: The World of His Novels, 36–84.

24. It also allows us to see in Oliver an antecedent of Stephen Dedalus, first named in Ulysses by his own Mr. Bumble, Buck Mulligan, whose name is oddly redolent of Bumble’s. Both names are built around the letters B and M, which signify paternity and maternity, respectively, two letters taken up in this precise key by Joyce in his naming of Bloom and Molly; Oliver’s nonbiological parents are Mr. Bumble and a Mrs. Mann.

25. Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist, or, The parish boy’s progress (London: Penguin Classics, 2003), 10.

26. Ledger, Dickens and the Popular Radical Imagination, 99–100, sees Oliver as moving through a series of different “homes,” including the Baby Farm, the workhouse, and the undertakers, and a series of surrogate parents, including Mrs. Mann, Mr. Sowerberry, and Bill Sikes. Nonetheless, it seems to me that the main family forces can still be divided in two: queer, criminal strangers and the legitimate family.

27. For possible literary models for the character of Dick, see Ledger, Dickens and the Popular Radical Imagination, 104.

28. As Waters puts it: “The hero’s pedigree, like his natural innocence, it seems, can never be entirely covered over by the narratives of social experience, and its revelation enables him to recover the inheritance of which he has been fraudulently deprived” (Dickens and the Politics of the Family, 31).

29. For a fascinating study of speech and language in the novel, see Michal Peled Ginsburg, “Truth and Persuasion: the Language of Realism and of Ideology in Oliver Twist,” Novel 20 (1987): 220–36.

30. Waters: “None of the painful social experiences of life in the workhouse or in Fagin’s den has been able to cover over the evidence of nature written in his face: Oliver belongs to the world of Mr Brownlow, both by virtue of his goodness and by virtue of his birth” (Dickens and the Politics of the Family, 30).

31. The name obviously connotes non-reproductive sexuality. For a provocative if excessive exploration of the implications of this pun in what he sees as a web of near-constant references to onanism in Dickens, see William A. Cohen, Sex and Scandal: The Private Parts of Victorian Fiction (Durham: Duke University Press 1996), 27–29

32. Ledger analyzes the final fates of all the novel’s characters, concluding that the happy ending is designed to uphold “the paternalistic structure that was a feature common to early nineteenth-century melodrama” (Dickens and the Popular Radical Imagination, 103–5).

33. Although she means it in a somewhat different context, Waters’s conclusion that “Oliver’s story provides the site where two competing conceptions of the family are brought into play as part of a larger struggle for cultural hegemony in the Victorian period” is strikingly apposite here (Dickens and the Politics of the Family, 32).

34. Goldie Morgentaler, Dickens and Heredity: When Like Begets Like (New York: St. Martin’s, 2000), says that “Oliver Twist is a fairy tale in which the magical element is located within the domain of heredity. It is his biological inheritance which protects Oliver from the corrupting effects of his surroundings, and it is this same biological inheritance which ensures his happy ending, safely ensconced within the middle-class milieu of his parents” (37). Morgentaler does not address the psychic landscape of family in the novel, but her analysis of heredity in Dickens is illuminating. She suggests, inter alia, that for Dickens positive qualities are hereditary, whereas negative ones are sui generis.

35. Oliver! (1960), the musical version of the novel for stage and screen, written by Lionel Bart (himself a Jewish East End native) brings this muted strain very much to the fore, portraying Fagin’s den as a colorful, chaotic, and mostly benign and warm-hearted alternative home, in part as a lament for the vanishing Cockney culture of the old East End.

36. Eagleton, The English Novel, 150.

37. As Eagleton colorfully puts it: “Oliver Twist, though brought up in a workhouse and pitched among East End whores and pickpockets, has a preternatural goodness which nothing could apparently contaminate. Where he got this saintly innocence from is as much a mystery as the origin of his impeccable Standard English” (The English Novel, 151).

38. For the relationship of this striking aspect of the novel’s imagination with its eighteenth-century precursors, see Waters, Dickens and the Politics of the Family, 29–30.

39. Philip Horne, introduction to Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist, ed. Horne (London: Penguin. 2002), xxxviii.

40. The one exception to this is the coincidence not listed by Horne, which is that when Noah Claypole arrives in London, the first person he meets is Fagin. It is telling that this single nongenealogical coincidence has no bearing on the development of the plot.

41. Roman Polanski’s 2004 film adaptation of the novel, which removes the paternity plot, is proof that the meaning and feeling of the story change utterly without the family romance.

42. See Lisa Zunshine, Bastards and Foundlings: Illegitimacy in Eighteenth-Century England (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2005), 50–60.

43. The one fascinating exception to this is Master Bates, who is dispatched, like Oliver, to a village. The lengthy explanation of Charley’s fate, which broods quite significantly on its exceptionality, as a lone farmer in Northampton, seems to be included, like little Dick, as a kind of significant remainder to the dynamics of the genealogical dénouement.

44. Waters, Dickens and the Politics of the Family, 31–32. The Brownlow-Grimwig bachelor duo is a faint first glimpse of one of the forms of the queer city household that will really start to rival the genealogical family: Dupin and his roommate, Pip and Herbert Pocket, Mortimer Lightwood and Eugene Wrayburn in Our Mutual Friend, Jack and Algernon in The Importance of Being Earnest, Holmes and Watson, Stephen Dedalus and Buck Mulligan.

45. See, for example, Anny Sadrin, Parentage and Inheritance in the Novels of Charles Dickens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

46. Helena Michie writes: “Like American situation comedies of the 1970s, Dickens’s novels are full of households made up of people unrelated by blood or marriage. This is true, not only of his many lodging houses where characters connected only by physical proximity come to care for each other and to form contingent communities, but also of his more stable homes. … Often [Dickens’s families] are bound together, not by metaphoric relations that depend on similarity and blood, but by metonymy, contiguity, and chance. A child met on the streets or in the course of charitable work is rescued and brought to the home of someone at least slightly better off; workers live or seem to live with their masters. … A fact of Dickensian life is that people move from home to home in ways other than those proposed by the dictates of the marriage plot. While many novels trace a heroine’s journey from the home of her father to that of her husband with its carefully calibrated rise in class, Dickens’ novels tend to trace more chaotic movements for their heroines—and even for their heroines who eventually marry into, and whose eventual fates celebrate, the nuclear family” (“From Blood to Law,” 134). Furneaux, in a similar vein, contends that “Dickens’s many adoptive and fostering households, which offer security to figures as diverse as the orphaned Oliver Twist and Ada Clare’s baby Richard, similarly denaturalize that other imaginatively overdetermined activity of the heterosexual family: parenting” (“Charles Dickens’ Families of Choice,” 154).

47. Mr. Micawber in David Copperfield is another character in Dickens who simultaneously embodies and problematizes one of his narrative devices. Micawber’s faith in his future expectations, that “something will turn up” is to be compared with Mr. Brownlow’s prediction that Oliver will come back. In Micawber’s case, however, the one thing that is always certain to turn up, when least expected, is himself. Micawber’s narrative returns are initially random in the sense that they are not subtended by any greater system of connection, but with repetition they start to congeal into form.

48.Horne, introduction, xl–xli.

49. David L. Gold argues that the name Fagin has no Jewish connection and that Bob Fagin was not Jewish: “Despite Popular Belief, the Name Fagin in Charles Dickens’s The Adventures of Oliver Twist Has No Jewish Connection,” Beitrage zur Namenforschung 40, no. 4 (2005): 382–423. Peter Rowland claims that he used the spelling Fagan: “No Sich a Person? The Hunt for Fagin,” The Dickensian part 2, no. 466 (Summer 2005): 132–33. (If Rowland is correct, then Dickens’s Jew bears a common Irish surname).

50. Horne, introduction, xxi

51. Robert Alter, Imagined Cities: Urban Experience and the Language of the Novel (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2005), 65, suggests that in Bleak House Dickens uses London to portray a “troubled panoramic vision of human existence.”

52. In Dickens Redressed: The Art of Bleak House and Hard Times (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 132–33, 141, Alexander Welsh takes issue with J. Hillis Miller’s suggestion that Bleak House is postmodernist. Welsh sees evidence, however, of “modernist initiative” in the novel, which he usefully compares to Ulysses.

53. D. A. Miller, The Novel and the Police (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 80, sees Bucket as questioning the separation between the private space of the family and the public life of streets and institutions in his public investigation of private family matters and especially his insinuation into the Bagnets’ home.

54. For a rich analysis of Krook’s fate, see Welsh, Dickens Redressed, 129.

55. I owe this insight to Maria DiBattista.

56. See D. A. Miller, The Novel and the Police.

57. See D. A. Miller, The Novel and the Police, 98–100.

58. For J. Hillis Miller, the suit shows that Bleak House “has exactly the same structure as the society it exposes” (introduction to Bleak House, by Charles Dickens [London: Penguin, 1971], 29). D. A. Miller, on the other hand, thinks that the novel “is involved in an effort to distinguish its own enormous length from the protractedness of the Chancery suit” (The Novel and the Police, 85).

59. While D. A. Miller believes that the proliferation of documents and paper in Bleak House is commentary on its own status as a text and highlights the undecidability of interpretation (D. A. Miller, “Discipline in Different Voices: Bureaucracy, Police, Family, and Bleak House,” Representations, no. 1 [February 1983]: 64), Welsh points out that who will get possession of certain letters is of real importance in the plot—a corrective to the mass of worthless paperwork generated by Jarndyce and Jarndyce (Dickens Redressed, 134–35).

60. D. A. Miller and J. Hillis Miller agree that Bleak House is a novel that struggles and fails to achieve closure, attempting to distinguish itself from the systems it satirizes but never quite managing to do so. See Welsh, Dickens Redressed, 140.

61. This claim is partly supported by the psychoanalytic interpretation by Lynn Cain linking the collapse of symbolic systems and institutions in the novel to matricide. See Dickens, Family, Authorship: Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Kinship and Creativity (London: Ashgate, 2008),

62. For Miss Flite’s association with Chancery, see Welsh, Dickens Redressed, 122.

63. For Krook’s shop see Welsh, Dickens Redressed, 108–9.

64. See Welsh, Dickens Redressed, 112–18.

65. Catherine Waters, “Gender, Family, and Domestic Ideology,” in The Cambridge Companion to Charles Dickens, ed. John O. Jordan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 129, draws a connection between the death of Lady Dedlock and the collapse of the lawsuit: “If the Court of Chancery serves in Bleak House as a sign of the family’s failure to regulate itself, the story of Lady Dedlock’s fall is another exemplary instance of familial breakdown.”

66. D. A. Miller, Bringing Out Roland Barthes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 45.

67. For an account of Pip’s sister and Miss Havisham as deviant maternal figures, see Waters, Dickens and the Politics of the Family, 153–57.

68. Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (1861; London: Penguin, 1996, 2003), 3.

69. Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (New York : Knopf, 1984).

70. Susan Walsh, “Bodies of Capital: Great Expectations and the Climacteric Economy,” Victorian Studies 37, no. 1 (1993): 73–98, shows how the Satis House fantasy is a romance in the model of the Märchen, in which Pip is the Dummling and Miss Havisham the fairy godmother. But she goes on to show how the novel maps these elements onto local historical and economic contexts. Satis House—a former brewery—is, according to Walsh, “an important index to the local economics beneath the more ahistorical fairy tale motifs,” and in his relationship with Miss Havisham, Pip also “draws upon an established nineteenth-century pattern of advancement in which young men’s economic agency is partially underwritten by female relatives expected to invest annuities, legacies, and independent funds in manufacturing and trade” (74).

71. Miss Havisham’s actual role in the formation of Pip really comes down to two bindings: the first, her paying for his apprenticeship to Joe, which turns out in the novel to be almost a symbol of failed attempts to control the future, and second, her binding of Pip to Estella, which in its own way also comes to nothing. My queer reading has something in common with Sharon Marcus’s suggestion that Pip becomes a “consummate Dickensian daughter to Magwitch,” a replacement for the “antisentimental” mother-daughter couple of Estella and Miss Havisham (Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007], 187).

72. In an argument that in ways parallels my own, Sharon Marcus makes a case for the importance of female bonds in Great Expectations. See Between Women, 166–90.

73. In Dickens and the Politics of the Family, Waters contends that Great Expectations is a bleaker novel than David Copperfield because Pip “cannot” marry Biddy the way David can marry Agnes (169). But if we look at Pip’s relationship with Magwitch and the total narrative outcome he generates, the relationship with the convict replaces this hypothetical marriage.

74. It is in this vein that Waters, Dickens and the Politics of the Family, 171, also draws similarities between Magwitch and Miss Havisham as failed versions of parenthood.

75. Waters, Dickens and the Politics of the Family, 168.

76. The original ending to the novel is clearer in this regard than the alternative version, but the latter ending is at the very least ambiguous and could not be said to close on a note of promise or futurity. For details on the variant endings and the pressures behind them, see Edgar Rosenberg, “Putting an End to Great Expectations,” in his critical edition of Great Expectations (New York: Norton, 1999), 491–527; and Rosenberg, “Last Words on Great Expectations: A Textual Brief on the Six Endings,” Dickens Studies Annual 9 (1981): 87–115.

77. Marcus writes that “the conclusion’s eloquent obscurity suggests that marriage between a man and a woman has never been the narrator’s goal” (Between Women, 189). In some respects, this is in agreement with my analysis here. However, it is important to remember that Pip himself is the narrator, and thus that marriage (to Estella or Biddy) is, at different moments, his ostensible goal. Marcus is gesturing towards the truly important fact, however, that marriage has never been the narrative’s goal—the novel’s expectations confound those of the readers.

1. See, for example, Rosemary Jahn, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: Detecting Social Order (New York: Twayne, 1995), 71–102.

2. For Michael Skovmand, the Sherlock Holmes stories are a particularly representative example of late-Victorian male-romance narrative. Skovmand perceives in the Holmes stories and the novels of Wilde and Stevenson a clear general decline of interest in women in favor of a fascination with encounters between men. See “The Mystique of the Bachelor Gentleman in Late Victorian Masculine Romance,” in English and Cultural Studies: Broadening the Context, ed. Michael Green (London: John Murray, 1987), 48, 55, 56.

3. Linda J. Holland-Toll, in an entertaining analysis of Holmes’s class background (part of the squirearchy, in her view) and political attitudes in the context of his times, notes that “Holmes has turned his back on the family position, such as it is. Evidently, he does not expect to live off his father’s acres, nor does he accept a sinecure with the government as does his brother Mycroft. … He does not marry the neighboring squire’s daughter and settle down to raise bees” (“Holmes the Prole, or a Marxist, Definitely Manqué,” Clues 20, no. 1 [Spring/Summer 1999]: 42).

4. Graham Robb, Strangers: Homosexual Love in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Norton, 2005), 260–66.

5. This view is in disagreement with a large body of criticism that sees Holmes—and the detective generally—as an upholder of family or social norms. Catherine Wynne, “Arthur Conan Doyle’s Domestic Desires: Mesmerism, Mediumship, and Femmes Fatales,” in Victorian Literary Mesmerism, ed. Martin Willis and Catherine Wynne (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), 236, for example, maintains that “the detective … preserves the home, chastens female desire and re-establishes the boundaries of class.”

6. Stephen Arata, Fictions of Loss in the Victorian Fin de Siècle: Identity and Empire (Cambridge University Press, 1996), 145–46, concludes that part of what readers find pleasurable about the Holmes stories is what he characterizes as the “homosocial” currents of the Holmes-Watson partnership. He notes that the stories offer almost no “positive examples of bourgeois family life” and that the bachelor quarters at 221B is the only “sanctified” domestic space. Arata’s conclusion is that “Doyle does not so much reject bourgeois notions of domesticity as reimagine them along homosocial lines.” This argument begins to show the limits of the concept of “homosociality” for understanding the function of queerness in the Holmes stories. Homosociality, according to Sedgwick’s definition, is a fundamental component of the heterosexual monopoly on social structures and intelligibility, whereas Holmes incarnates a radical alternative to it.

7. Wynne, “Doyle’s Domestic Desires,” 225, says that “the home is central to almost all of Doyle’s work, within which the safe containment of middle-class domesticity is a predominant theme.”

8. Doyle’s use of gypsies is part of a common Victorian iconography. For an account of the particular symbolic values of gypsies in the period, see Katie Trumpener, “The Time of the Gypsies: A ‘People Without History’ in the Narratives of the West,” Critical Inquiry 18, no. 4 (Summer 1992): 843–84; or Deborah Epstein Nord, Gypsies and the British Imagination, 1807–1930 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006).

9. Arata, for example, notes that while England is the scene of the crime, its origin is elsewhere. But according to Arata, the action moves to London in stories such as A Study in Scarlet or The Sign of the Four, “in order to make criminal deviance visible by placing it against a backdrop of ‘normal’ English life,” and that “the tension between individual guilt and systemic wrong is felt even in the tales that focus solely on English life,” that is, even in the tales that do not move away from England. There is much to recommend this analysis, not least the sense that whatever opposition the stories set up between England and abroad also operates within England itself. At the same time, Arata’s argument highlights a problem with interpretation of the Holmes stories in general: the insistent focus on ideas of guilt and innocence, when these, it seems to me, are not the primary emotional keys either for the reader or for the characters within them. In the final analysis, the role of the colonies and the New World in the Holmes stories may in certain respects be more fully explained in terms of queer theory rather than postcolonialism. A contrary view can be found in the work of Joseph McLaughlin, who asserts, in contrast, that the Holmes stories are “about two phenomena in the late nineteenth century: the recognition of urban blight and its connection to an awareness of the colonies as an invasive source of new and even more menacing dangers” (Writing the Urban Jungle: Reading Empire in London from Doyle to Eliot [Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000], 29).

10. For an account of how Doyle’s spiritualist writings involved a process of “putting the house in order,” see Wynne, “Doyle’s Domestic Desires.”

11. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Complete Sherlock Holmes (New York: Gramercy, 2002), 104.

12. Peter Thoms, Detection and Its Designs: Narrative and Power in Nineteenth-Century Detective Fiction (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1998), 134.

13. Kestner writes that Conan Doyle “is asserting that bourgeois security and identity rest on secret criminality” (Joseph A. Kestner. Sherlock’s Men: Masculinity, Conan Doyle, and Cultural History [Brookfield, Vt.: Ashgate, 1997], 67). Arata calls this “the pathology of bourgeois life,” which Holmes proves “surprisingly powerless to address” (143).

14. Michael Atkinson, The Secret Marriage of Sherlock Holmes and Other Eccentric Readings (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 112, gives a full and convincing reading of “A Case of Identity” on a similarly Freudian basis. The story, he writes, “like many fairytales … has at its center a slightly skewed family” and could be read as “an incest fantasy, flowing from the desires of either father or daughter, or both.” In a similar vein, he relates the story of “The Copper Beeches” to the tale of Blue-beard (123–37).

15. See, for example, Christine Ferguson, “Eugenics and the Afterlife: Lombroso, Doyle, and the Spiritual Purification of the Race,” Journal of Victorian Culture 12, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 64–85.

16. Ronald R. Thomas, Detective Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science, Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 226, for example, writes that “Holmes’ use of fingerprint evidence … anticipates Galton’s analysis of the individual criminal signature and Ellis’s articulation of the typical criminal body … like them, the political and the personal are incorporated together by associating the criminal with the foreign body.” For a longer account of Lombroso and the alleged application of scientific notions of race and evolution by Holmes see the same volume, 235–39.

17. This is not to say the stories are not also partly the products of the scientific concerns of their age. In a post-Darwinian context, the aristocracy’s attachment to hereditary transmission also brings up the specter of things other than wealth and status that are perpetuated by genealogical continuity: perversion, illness, madness, or criminality. Writing about The Hound of the Baskervilles, for example, Lawrence Frank, surmises that “as followers of nineteenth-century science … [Doyle’s readers] could well have recognized the figurative rendering of a generalized evolutionary perspective in the description of the Man on the Tor” (Victorian Detective Fiction and the Nature of Evidence: The Scientific Investigations of Poe, Dickens, and Doyle, Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture [London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009], 180).

18. See Thomas, Detective Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science, 22. Thomas’s view is comprehensively rebutted by Gita Panjabu Trelease, who argues that Holmes’s skill and training as a storyteller outweigh his forensic knowledge in the story. See “Time’s Hand: Fingerprints, Empire, and Victorian Narratives,” in Victorian Crime, Madness, and Sensation, ed. Andrew Maunder and Grace Moore (London: Ashgate, 2004), 203.

19. As Catherine Wynne puts it: “the problem is that when the etiology of a crime is finally exposed, the trail often leads not outward to some aboriginal savage, but home, to a crime committed by one or more Englishmen while in service to the building and maintenance of the empire” (“Foreign Matter: Imperial Filth,” in Filth: Dirt, Disgust, and Modern Life, ed. William A. Cohen and Ryan Johnson. [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005], 208).

20. Frank, Victorian Detective Fiction, 306, extrapolates a great deal of interesting conclusions about Holmes from this hole in the plot. He convincingly links it, for example, to Watson’s elegiac narrative tone, and, significantly, to questions of heredity and evolution: “Without a consideration of [Stapleton’s] motives, Holmes’s chain of cause and effect, his web of meaning, remain unsatisfying. Perhaps that explains the elegiac tone pervading Watson’s narrative, an acknowledgment that the fictional detective offers no satisfactory resolutions to the mysteries that he confronts, just as there is no end to the debates swirling about evolutionary hypotheses, then and now.”

21. Including descriptions of the landscape, as Frank, Victorian Detective Fiction, 188–89, shows.

22. Frank, Victorian Detective Fiction, 193, spells it out clearly: “Watson’s account has implicitly rejected the biological determinism of Cesare Lombroso, for whom the reversion to the savage remains a purely hereditary phenomenon.”

23. The interpenetration of London and the colonies is often noted by post-colonial critics. McLaughlin, Writing the Urban Jungle, 53–78, sees The Sign of the Four as highlighting the presence of the distant corners of the empire in London through its availability for consumption as spectacle and commodity.

24. A good example is McLaughlin’s contention that “the Holmes corpus … arises as a response to a new imperialist frame of mind, one becoming less confident about the spread of English, European, or Western culture from the civilized center toward the savage periphery and more anxious about a decline accelerated by the incursive flows that travel back to the metropolis through these imperial channels” (Writing the Urban Jungle, 29). For a related argument about the global trade in opiates and its connection to the imperial imaginary in The Sign of the Four, see Christopher Keep and Don Randall, “Addiction, Empire, and Narrative in Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Sign of the Four,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 32, no. 2 (Spring 1999): 207–21.

25. There are a number of differing accounts of Conan Doyle’s personal attitudes to questions of empire and imperialism and especially how his Irish background may have played into them. Wynne, for example, is adamant that the caricature of the writer as a classic late-Victorian colonialist is given the lie by this background. Arata takes the more straightforward view, claiming that despite the ambivalence evident in the stories, “in private life, Doyle passionately defended Britain’s imperial prerogatives” (Fictions of Loss, 140). Yet, as Wynne points out, Conan Doyle’s ancestors were Catholic landlords who were dispossessed under the Penal Laws, his father was committed to Irish nationalism, and Conan Doyle himself was converted by Roger Casement to the cause of the Congo and, by 1910, of Irish Home Rule (Catherine Wynne, “Philanthropies and Villainies: The Conflict of the Imperial and the Anti-Imperial in Conan Doyle,” in The Devil Himself: Villainy in Detective Fiction and Film, ed. Stacy Gillis and Philippa Gates [Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 2002], 70–71). See also McLaughlin, Writing the Urban Jungle, 46–47.

26. It is thus doubly erroneous to conclude, as Thomas does (Detective Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science, 227), that Holmes “is identified as the representative of a civilized and scientific English society against criminal contamination by the barbarity of the colonies in general and the irrational violence of America in particular. And he does so by reading fingerprints.”

27. Although he never picks up on the question of family, McLaughlin writes that “the London of Sherlock Holmes is the most dynamic frontier in the empire … within London, cultural boundaries … [and] boundaries of class, religion, sexuality, gender, and genre are continuously crossed and recrossed. The metropolis is no mere background or setting, but rather, as it was for Dickens, a condition of possibility for the form and content of the tales” (Writing the Urban Jungle, 10).

28. See, for example, Wynne’s account of The Sign of the Four and “The Orange Pips” in “Foreign Matter,” 206–7.

29. Yumna Siddiqi, Anxieties of Empire and the Fiction of Intrigue (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 72, remarks that in the Holmes stories “there is a singular absence of any direct reference to industrial wealth—we have London banking houses and merchants, and returned colonials who establish themselves on country estates. Doyle seems to acquiesce in the view that Empire, more than industry, is vital to Britain’s power and prosperity; in this story, at least, Empire provides the discursive framework for understanding social transformations.”

30. McLaughlin is right when he insists that strange division of the novel into two halves should not be viewed as a digression or a transition but as a “juxtaposition that reveals their inseparability” (Writing the Urban Jungle, 37).

31. Atkinson, The Secret Marriage, 68–69, points out that, unlike the reader, Holmes and Watson never learn the Utah backstory. His conclusion, that “the American saga relates to the London frame narrative as the unconscious relates to the conscious mind,” is relevant for our discussion of queerness and family in Holmes.

32. Using Lukács, McLaughlin offers a historical reading of the Utah interpolation (Writing the Urban Jungle, 40–42). Noting that when the story switches from London to North America, the time also moves back from 1878 to 1847, McLaughlin claims that the Utah of the story “provides a temporal and geographical escape from the present, from the modern, from civilization” even if, as the narrative unfolds, it becomes “the foul source of present conflicts.” It is my contention here, on the contrary, that there is no genuine historical sweep in the interpolation but that it is an imaginative extrapolation, projected onto the screen of a fantasy American frontier, of the problem of queerness in Holmes’s London. The designs that the Mormon elders have on the young Lucy, for example, recall the anti-exogamic “Cinderella” plots of “A Case of Identity” or “The Speckled Band.”

33. For Conan Doyle’s use of Mormons, see Lydia Alix Fillingham, “The Colorless Skein of Life: Threats to the Private Sphere in Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet,” ELH 56, no. 3 (Autumn 1989): 667–88.

34. For McLaughlin, Writing the Urban Jungle, 38, on the other hand, the “split structure [is] symptomatic of a particular moment in imperialist expansion.”

35. Tanya Agathocleous makes the interesting argument that the connection between the London and Utah halves of the story also suggest a “utopian commitment to ideals of global interconnectedness.” See “London Mysteries and International Conspiracies: James, Doyle, and the Aesthetics of Cosmopolitanism,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 26, no. 2 (June 2004): 125–148.

36. See Robb, Strangers, 267.

37. Chandler, Raymond Chandler Speaking, ed. Dorothy Gardiner and Kathrine Sorley Walker (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 70.

38. Robb, Strangers, 260. Calanchi writes [my translation]: “It should be enough that he divides his private lodgings with another man, without showing either the slightest sign of embarrassment about it or the fear of risking his respectability; and that he often makes use of a group of young boy-helpers … the “Baker Street Irregulars,” boys who may in reality—let us not forget the allusion to irregularity—suggest much more overt homoerotic relations” (“L’unica professione per un gentiluomo? Lo Sherlock Holmes fin de siècle da Baker Street all’America di frontiera,” in Maschilità decadenti: La Lunga fin de siècle, ed. Marco Pustianaz and Luisa Villa [Bergamo: Bergamo University Press, 2004], 245).

39. Arata, Fictions of Loss, 144–45, sees a link between Holmes and Wilde, but argues that while “we may plausibly read [Holmes’s] eccentricities, then, as so many rejections on Holmes’s part of bourgeois norms … to think of Holmes simply as a cross between Dorian Gray and Jacques Collin is finally to miss how his ‘deviant’ behavior merges with a social background in which … nothing is more commonplace than the unnatural.”

40. Thomas holds an opposite view, arguing that “the English and American parts of the tale oppose each other at every point” and that “the strain between the text’s two distinct parts reflects the considerable strain within the novella between the scientific rule of law in London and the forces of passion and lawlessness that govern the American West” (Detective Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science, 226–30).

41. For an account of the relationship between Holmes and Freud, see Carlo Ginzburg “Morelli, Freud, and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and the Scientific Method” in The Sign of Three (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), 81–118; or Stephen Marcus, introduction to The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, by Arthur Conan Doyle (New York: Schocken Books, 1976) x–xi.

42. There have been other interesting interpretations, psychoanalytic and otherwise, of Watson’s lyrical flights. In an analysis of some interest to the questions of queerness and family, for example, Frank, Victorian Detective Fiction, 206, reads a long description of autumn leaves as a rueful reflection on the waning of “orthodoxies that once sustained men and women in the nineteenth century.”

43. Arata, Fictions of Loss, 141, argues that the “weakly imagined” courtship between Watson and Mary is an “attempted containment” of a “tale of imperial crime.”

44. Pace the many scholars who view Holmes as an enforcer of the social order. Arata, Fictions of Loss, 143, for example, takes the Foucauldian view that “the detective functions as the very embodiment of society’s power of surveillance and discipline.”

45. In this, I disagree fundamentally with the view expressed by Kestner that The Sign of the Four is an indictment of “the grasping nature of imperialism” (Sherlock’s Men, 67) and also with that held by Wynne and others that stories such as The Sign of the Four are about “the threat from without, especially when the empire comes “home” to the metropolis” (Wynne, “Foreign Matter,” 211).

46. Said mentions in Beginnings that adjacency, rather than precedence, dynasty, or succession, is the “real relationship” in modernism, a view that seems to me to be undermined by the striking avoidance of sibling relationships in both the Recherche and Ulysses (Edward Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method [New York: Columbia University Press, 1985], 10).

47. Atkinson, The Secret Marriage, 15, points out that while it is of no apparent significance to Holmes that the two buildings involved are symbolically connected, this is not the case for the reader, or for the symbolic economy of the text itself: “Holmes typically claims that his own untainted rationality is as free from economic concerns as from social mores … [but] the whole structure of the story is economic … [it reveals that] Merryweather the banker and Wilson the pawnbroker, each oblivious to the other, are more linked than they know, as the subterranean landscape suggests.”

48. In a discussion of Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Alessandra Calanchi writes [my translation]: “It is significant that all of these novels portray a number of male characters, unmarried and childless, that they are characterized by the spontaneous creation of male couples, by the closetedness of private space … by strategies of cross-dressing and disguise … by various means of shadowing and following, by the motif of the physical wound … and even … by the frequent use of aphorisms in conversation” (“L’unica professione, 243).

49. Frank movingly links this aspect of Holmes’s narrative world to Darwin’s rueful observation that immortal life is a myth, since the sun will eventually grow cold and cause all sentient beings to perish: “In rejecting ‘the immortality of the human soul’ in a universe so conceived, Darwin resigned himself to the implications of the nebular hypothesis and the necessary ‘death of the sun’ and the planetary system that it sustains. Darwin’s is a stoicism that few, to this day, can embrace. Our human response in the future to such a prospect remains beyond our capacity to predict, for ‘the past and the present [may be] within the field of [our] enquiry, but what … [we] may do in the future is a hard question to answer’” (Victorian Detective Fiction, 207).

50. For the stories’ failure to accomplish meaningful material outcomes, see Arata, Fictions of Loss, 145.

51. For the colonial context of East End opium dens in this story, see Wynne, “Foreign Matter,” 212–13. For Wynne, the domestic interruptions that drag Watson, Isa Whitney, Holmes, and Neville St. Clair to the East End suggest that what is at issue in the story “is the way the East End asserts itself over London.” See also Marty Roth, “Victorian Highs: Detection, Drugs, and Empire,” in High Anxieties: Cultural Studies in Addiction, ed. Janet Farrell Brodie and Marc Redfield (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), esp. 86.

52. Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel, 1800–1900 (New York: Verso, 1999), 134, says that this story is the only time Holmes ever visits the East End, though Nicholas Freeman points out that there is some action in Lambeth and Camberwell in A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of the Four. See Conceiving the City: London, Literature, and Art, 1870–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 83.

1. The evidence surrounding their single famous meeting is so scant and contradictory that few commentators have had much of interest to say about it. An exception is an article by Elisabeth Ladenson, in which she explores the sexual politics of the encounter: “A Talk Consisting Solely of the World ‘No’: Joyce Meets Proust,” James Joyce Quarterly 31 (1994): 147–58.

2. Joyce wrote in his notes for Finnegans Wake in summer 1923: “Proust, analytic still life: finest prose I’d read for a long time” (“Scylla & Charybdis” section of Scribbledehobble: Ur-Workbook for “Finnegans Wake,” ed. Thomas E. Connolly [Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1961], 104). Arthur Power says that Joyce thought Proust the most important of modern French writers, but preferred Les plaisirs et les jours. See Conversations with James Joyce (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1982), 86–99.

3. For Antoine Compagnon, the formal failure of the Recherche is the key to its success: “A failure which allowed it to expand until its author’s death” (“‘Un classique moderne.’ Le Siècle de Proust,” Magazine Littéraire, Hors-Série 2 [2000]: 7, my translation).

4. Michael Groden estimates that about 35 percent of the text was added to the proofs of Ulysses; and while “Ithaca” and “Penelope” were not complete at this stage, the formal requirements of the Odyssey parallel were. See Ulysses in Progress (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977). The recently discovered Ulysses manuscripts now housed at the National Library of Ireland contain the earliest drafts for both “Ithaca” and “Penelope,” and Luca Crispi dates the NLI “Ithaca” draft from March–August 1921 and the “Penelope” draft from the early summer of 1921 (personal correspondence, 2009).

5. Albert Feuillerat Comment Proust a composé son roman (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1934).

6. See Christine Cano, Proust’s Deadline: The Temporality of Writing and Publishing (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2006).

1. Andras Ungar, Joyce’s Ulysses as National Epic: Epic Mimesis and the Political History of the Nation State (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2002), suggests that Ulysses addresses Irish political questions through family concerns. Robert Caserio, Plot, Story, and the Novel (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979), goes so far as to say that “there is nothing but family life in Ulysses” (240).

2. T. S. Eliot, “‘Ulysses,’ Order, and Myth,” in Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1975).

3. See Franco Moretti, Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms, trans. David Forgacs, Susan Fischer, and David Miller (London: Verso, 1988); or Umberto Eco, Le Poetiche di Joyce (Milan: Bompiani, 1982).

4. Frederic Jameson, “Ulysses in History,” in A Companion to James Joyce’s Ulysses, ed. Margot Norris, Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism (Boston: Bedford Books, 1998), 149–50.

5. Though perhaps not as much as it has into Joyce’s other works; it is striking how few of the essays in Valente’s seminal volume deal with Ulysses. See Joseph Valente, ed., Quare Joyce (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998).

6. For an eloquent account of the different waves of queer theory, see Valente’s “Ulysses and Queer Theory: A Continuing History,” in “Ulysses” in Critical Perspective, ed. Michael Patrick Gillespie and A. Nicholas Fargnoli (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006), 88–113.

7. Richard Brown, James Joyce and Sexuality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 84.

8. David Norris, “The ‘Unhappy Mania’ and Mr. Bloom’s Cigar: homosexuality in the Works of James Joyce,” James Joyce Quarterly 31, no. 3 (1994): 357–74. Tony Tanner notes, however, that “perversion is the usual mode of procedure” in the novel. See Adultery in the Novel: Contract and Transgression (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), 14.

9. In seeking to understand the subliminal but vital role she believes homosexuality plays in Ulysses, Colleen Lamos, in her own words, looks to the “omissions, displacements, and disavowals, through which same-sex desire is apprehended” (Deviant Modernism: Sexual and Textual Errancy in T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Marcel Proust [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998], 119). For an account of critical theories of homosexuality in Joyce, see Lamos, Deviant Modernism, 136.

10. Leo Bersani, The Culture of Redemption (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990).

11. The fullest treatment of homosexuality in Ulysses is in Lamos, Deviant Modernism, where it is associated with instability, errancy, and, especially, epistemological uncertainty.

12. There is evidence, beyond the many allusions to him in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, that Joyce had a broad and careful knowledge of Dickens, despite Stanislaus Joyce’s claim that his brother “didn’t much like” him. Jay Clayton points out, for example, that there are more allusions to Dickens in Ulysses than to Defoe and Sterne combined (“Londublin,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 28, no. 3 [Spring 1995]: 327–42).

13. In this sense, my claims here for a queer Ulysses are in keeping with a recent critical tendency to revisit the continuities rather than the ruptures between Dickens and Joyce. See, for example, Matthew Bolton, “Joycean Dickens/Dickensian Joyce,” Dickens Quarterly 23 (2006): 243–52; or Tracey Teets Schwarze, Joyce and the Victorians (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002).

14. For an account of alternative families in Balzac, see Michael Lucey, The Misfit of the Family: Balzac and the Social Forms of Sexuality (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003).

15. For fascinating information about the possible real-life model for Hunter and his many links to Bloom, see Terence Killeen, “Myths and Monuments: The Case of Alfred H. Hunter,” Dublin James Joyce Journal 1 (2008): 47–53.

16. Ann Martin, Red Riding Hood and the Wolf in Bed: Modernism’s Fairy Tales (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 62, argues that the “haunted figure of Stephen … make[s] overt Joyce’s emphasis on ‘Cinderella’ as a text that has tremendous resonance in the context of modern consumer culture.”

17. Colin MacCabe writes that Stephen’s problem is that “he cannot find a figure that can occupy the place of the father” (James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word [London: Macmillan, 1978], 120). In “Ulysses and Queer Theory,” Valente maintains that MacCabe’s work extends “the idea of perversion or non-normative sexuality beyond the psychological profiles and narrative performances of the novel’s characters and to the writing of the novel conceived along post-structuralist lines” (88–113). MacCabe’s poststructuralist perspective does not deal with narratological questions, however.

18. MacCabe, James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word, 5.

19. James Joyce, Ulysses (1922), ed. Hans Walter Gabler (London: Vintage, 1986); citations are given as chapter number and line number.

20. David Weir sees ambiguity in Mulligan’s phrase “we have grown out of Wilde and paradoxes.” Weir also writes that the implied presence of Wilde in both the Martello Tower and the National Library scenes suggests that Stephen and Mulligan are part of a gay household. See “A Womb of His Own: Joyce’s Sexual Aesthetics,” James Joyce Quarterly 31, no. 3 (Spring 1994): 207–31.

21. For an argument for actual sexual attraction between Molly and Stephen, see Marilyn French, The Book as World: James Joyce’s Ulysses ([1976] New York: Paragon House, 1993), 49.

22. Garry Leonard suggests that Stephen is looking for excuses to end the friendship with Mulligan. See “‘The Nothing Place’: Secrets and Sexual Orientation in Joyce,” in Quare Joyce, ed. Joseph Valente (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), 77–100.

23. For a fascinating psychoanalytical account of the deconstruction of the antagonistic model of the mother/son relationship in Ulysses, see Christine Froula, Modernism’s Body: Sex, Culture, and Joyce (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996).

24. For a discussion of the peculiar confluence of individualism and nationalism in Stephen Dedalus, and especially how this influences Joyce’s experiments in novelistic form, see Pericles Lewis, Modernism, Nationalism, and the Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), especially 31–48. In an analogous argument, Joe Cleary writes that “Ulysses is really a curious Irish confection in which naturalism and Revivalism copulate” (Outrageous Fortune: Capital and Culture in Modern Ireland [Dublin: Field Day Publications, 2007], 139).

25. The Forty Foot, where Buck Mulligan swims at the end of the chapter, was a “gentlemen only” bathing place until the 1980s.

26. The indispensable work on debt and debtorship in Ulysses is Mark Osteen’s extraordinarily thorough and illuminating The Economy of Ulysses: Making Both Ends Meet (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1995).

27. The gendering of this binary is one of Mulligan’s mistakes. See Sherry B. Ortner “Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?” Feminist Studies 1, no. 2 (Autumn 1972): 5–31.

28. Given the negative importance of Deasy’s philosophy, expressed as “I paid my way,” in the novel, and given Stephen’s ample reflections on why he must reject such a philosophy, I am more inclined to think that the line in question—“It is mine. I paid the rent”—is a bitter representation in Stephen’s mind of Mulligan’s general philosophy of life. Terence Killeen in Ulysses Unbound (Bray: Wordwell Books, 2004), says Stephen has paid the rent (17); Hugh Kenner believes Mulligan has paid it—see Kenner, Ulysses (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press), 55– 56n. Osteen, The Economy of Ulysses, 39–44, refutes Kenner’s position exhaustively.

29. This is also the difference between the divine and the human Jesus. The incarnate Jesus of the New Testament found the construction and maintenance of connections with others notoriously difficult, but indeed they are deep and lasting. It his absentee progenitor, the father of the Name (who in fact names him), the one with the immanent and unmotivated connection to him, who sends him to his death.

30. See Killeen, Ulysses Unbound.

31. For a full and illuminating account of money and debtorship in “Nestor,” see Osteen, The Economy of Ulysses, 49–58.

33. Which Lamos, Deviant Modernism, connects to queerness.

34. This song, indeed, could be a sort of anthem for Stephen. It tells the story of an emigrant from Tuam, Co. Galway, who leaves his parents’ house to seek his fortune. As he leaves he cuts a stick (cf. Stephen’s ashplant) “to banish ghosts and goblins.” In addition, although the protagonist ends up in Liverpool, the song, like Ulysses, never gets further than Dublin—even the last verse describing the hero’s fighting exploits after arriving in England ends, bizarrely, as follows: “Then with a loud hurray, / They joined in the affray. / We quickly cleared the way, / For the rocky road to Dublin.” For the protagonist, the labyrinthine, difficult path to his estate will begin and end in Dublin, after he has banished the ghosts and goblins en route and returns, that is to say, with a difference, not in the cyclical reproductive manner in which returns happen in Deasy’s account of the world. The song, in a way, reanswers the first question of the catechism in “Nestor”: “What city sent for him?”

35. The Linati schema is reproduced along with the Gilbert schema in Joyce, Ulysses, ed. Jeri Johnson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 734–39.

36. F. S. L. Lyons points out that almost all of the substantial ground traveled in Ulysses is covered on foot (“James Joyce’s Dublin,” Twentieth-Century Views 4 [1970]: 9).

37. It is striking, therefore, that the line of poetry that Stephen’s crunching on the shells produces not only includes the name “Madeline” but also seems to refer to Madeleine Lemaire, the Parisian hostess who was a friend of Proust and his model for Mme. Verdurin. Proust collaborated with Lemaire, a painter, for his first book, Les Plaisirs et les jours (which, according to Arthur Power, Proust preferred to the Recherche). In a study of the connections between Proust and “Proteus,” Christine Froula points out that Lemaire was a well-known figure in the Paris of the 1920s, so that the reference may not involve Proust (paper delivered at International James Joyce Symposium, Tours, France, June 2008).

38. Don Gifford with Robert J. Seidman, “Ulysses” Annotated: Notes for James Joyce’s “Ulysses” (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 66.

39. For a discussion of the term “retrospective rearrangement” in Ulysses, see Bernard Benstock, Narrative Con/texts in Ulysses (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991).

40. Mulligan, whom Stephen calls “Chrysostomos” at the opening of “Telemachus,” is referred to obliquely (and thus associated with Stephen’s mother as a putrid female body) in the lines: “In Rodot’s Yvonne and Madeleine newmake their tumbling beauties, shattering with gold teeth chaussons of pastry” (3.212–14) and “Old hag with the yellow teeth. Vieille ogresse with the dents jaunes” (3.232–3).

41. The various possibilities as to where Stephen might plausibly spend the night, based on textual evidence, are clearly laid out by John Gordon in Almosting It: Joyce’s Realism (Dublin: National Library of Ireland, 2004).

42. Lyons reminds us that in 1904, while the population of Dublin was small enough for the individual to “escape being merged in the mass,” it also had enough cultural capital and wealth to “attract ambitious young men from the provinces” (“James Joyce’s Dublin,” 9).

43. Declan Kiberd, Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Living (London: Faber & Faber, 2009), 24–25.

44. As Kiberd, Ulysses and Us, points out, the civic culture of Dublin in 1904, in other respects attractive, was also segregated along the lines of gender, with men in the streets and public houses and women often sequestered in the home.

45. Katherine Mullin suggests that the protagonist of “Eveline,” as she hesitates between life in Dublin with her father and a new life in Argentina, is paralyzed by fears of domestic violence in either one. See “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina: ‘Eveline’ and the Seductions of Emigration Propaganda,” in Semicolonial Joyce, ed. Derek Attridge and Marjorie Howes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 172–200.

46. For a feminist anthropological take on this type of gendered division of the world, see Ortner, “Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?”

47. Jean Kimball suggests that the threat to Stephen is one of “homosexuality as a life pattern.” See “Freud, Leonardo, and Joyce: The Dimensions of a Childhood Memory” James Joyce Quarterly 17 (1980): 165–82.

48. Ralph Rader suggests that the entirety of Ulysses can be read as an odyssey from homosexuality to homosociality. I will be arguing here that, quite to the contrary, the novel is an odyssey away from homosocial traps toward a more fully articulated queer version of the family. See R.W. Rader, “Mulligan and Molly: The Beginning and the End,” in Joyce in the Hibernian Metropolis, ed. Morris Beja and David Norris (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1996), 270–278.

49. Frank Budgen James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses (London: Grayson & Grayson, 1934), 146.

50. Lamos traces all of the homoerotic allusions in the relationship between Stephen and Bloom in “Signatures of the Invisible: Homosexual Secrecy and Knowledge in Ulysses,” James Joyce Quarterly 31, no. 3 (1994): 337– 55. Lamos writes that “Stephen’s panicked references to homosocial and homosexual relations have the horror of an open secret whose knowledge he admits and suppresses” (340).

51. False in that we are given frank and apparently unfettered access to Bloom’s sexual thoughts and fantasies during the day, and homoerotic desires never feature here. An argument for Bloom’s repressed homosexuality would have to be made then on the highly shaky grounds of “Circe” or else from outside the text itself, which is not our concern.

52. In his chapter on Ulysses, Nabokov suggests at some length that Bloom’s perverse sexuality is a major failing in the novel. Perhaps enviously damning Joyce with faint praise, Nabokov complains that “Joyce … intended to portray an ordinary person. It is obvious, however, that in the sexual department Bloom is, if not on the verge of insanity, at least a good clinical example of extreme sexual preoccupation and perversity … within the wide limits of Bloom’s love for the opposite sex he indulges in acts and dreams that are definitely subnormal in the zoological, evolutionary sense” (Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature [1980; New York: Harcourt, 2002], 287).

53. See Marcel Proust, Du côté de chez Swann (Paris: Gallimard, 1987), 14– 20; Remembrance of Things Past, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin (New York: Random House, 1981).

54. Jennifer Levine, “James Joyce, Tattoo Artist: Tracing the Outlines of Homo social Desire,” in Quare Joyce, ed. Joseph Valente (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), 112.

55. Daniel Schwarz says that the “blatant homoeroticism” of the tower scenes suggests “sterile” and “narcissistic” overtones (Reading Joyce’s Ulysses [Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987], 76).

56. Robert Caserio suggest that the creative potential of sterility is of enormous interest to modernism (Plot, Story, and the Novel, 236). Karen Lawrence shows how it is central to the style and meaning of “Eumaeus” (“‘Beggaring Description’: Politics and Style in Joyce’s ‘Eumaeus,’” Modern Fiction Studies 38 [1992]: 355–76).

57. Lamos takes the diametrically opposite view, considering that the parallel coupling here “undermine[s] the domestic closure of the ‘Nostos’ … thereby constituting a countercurrent to the structural movement of the plot” (Deviant Modernism, 158).

58. Some critics, partially on the basis of a typist’s error in the first edition that rendered him “W. B. Murphy,” see the character of Murphy as an allusion to Yeats. See, for example, Damian Love, “Sailing to Ithaca: Remaking Yeats in Ulysses,” The Cambridge Quarterly 36, no. 1 (2007): 1–10.

59. The fullest account of the style of chapter is Christine O’Neill, Too Fine a Point: A Stylistic Analysis of the Eumaeus Episode in James Joyce’s Ulysses (Trier: WVT, 1996).

60. Killeen, Ulysses Unbound, 204–5, makes the strongest case for this reading.

61. Lawrence, “‘Beggaring Description,’” 370.

62. Jean-Michel Rabaté notes something similar in a somewhat different context. His argument is based around the idea that the “spiritual father” Stephen is looking for is one who is not implicated in the Oedipal triangle. Since the incest prohibition will not apply to this surrogate father, sexual desire risks being a component of this relationship. See “A Clown’s Inquest Into Paternity: Fathers, Dead or Alive, in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake,” in The Fictional Father: Lacanian Readings of the Text, ed. R. C. Davis (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1981), 73–114.

63. Grace Tiffany, “Our Mutual Friend in ‘Eumaeus’: Joyce Appropriates Dickens,” Journal of Modern Literature 16, no. 4 (Spring 1990): 643–46.

64. In what turns out to be an extraordinarily rich insight, Levine uses the Italian word “smorfia” as an interpretative key for all of “Eumaeus”: “There are … three tattoos on Murphy’s chest. There is the standard seaman’s anchor and, above it, ‘the figure 16 and a young man’s sideface looking frowningly rather’ (16.675–76). It is these two images that I want to read here, by suggesting that a modest little Italian word, la smorfia, might provide us with their syntax. Its reverberations in ‘Eumaeus’ are uncanny. In the first place, the word is derived from the Italian name of the god of dreams, Morfeo, whose English name, Morpheus, is punningly confused with Murphy’s at various points throughout the episode. … But the primary meaning of smorfia … has to do with facial expressions. A smorfia is a grimace, an affected pulling of the face. … Fare una smorfia, to pull a face, pretty much describes what Murphy does to the face on his chest, manipulating its grimace into a smile. ‘—See here, he said, showing Antonio. There he is cursing the mate. And there he is now, he added, the same fellow, pulling the skin with his fingers, some special knack evidently, and he laughing at a yarn’ (16.683–85). The word’s secondary reference, originally local to the area around Naples though by 1900 common throughout Italy (and, I am suggesting here, known and exploited by Joyce), is to the ‘book of dreams’. More precisely, it designates a folk numerology that identifies dreams with the corresponding numbers in [the lottery]. … Number 16 shows the figure of the artist (pittore che dipinge): perhaps the Eumaean tattoo artist is at work?” (Levine, “James Joyce, Tattoo Artist,” 107).

The truth about the connection between the smorfia and the number sixteen is even more conducive to Levine’s theories than she hopes here. She goes on to say, in discussing the overdetermination of the number sixteen in the chapter (chapter 16 of Ulysses) that Gifford’s claim that “in European slang and numerology the number meant homosexuality has been remarkably difficult to confirm” (118). In fact, however, the smorfia is not a system in which each number corresponds to a single dream but works the other way round; each possible item of content in a dream matches a number. In the Neapolitan smorfia, sixteen is the number that corresponds with culo, the bottom (see, for example, M. Cosentino, La vera smorfia napoletana. Sogni e numeri per vincere al lotto, [Florence: Giunti Editore, 2003], 176), assuring beyond reasonable doubt that Joyce was aware of the smorfia and reinforcing the connections among homosexuality, bodily waste, and the formal elements of the chapter.

65. Critics differ on this: Ungar, for example, sees Bloom’s daughter, Milly, as a symbol of “procreative increase” and suggests that she is crucial to the novel’s meaning. Ungar crunches the numbers from the details in the text about Milly’s menarche and birthday to show that June 16, 1904, is the first day on which Milly could theoretically have given birth to a full-term child (Joyce’s Ulysses as National Epic, 76–80).

66. For a different take on the Blooms’ marriage, see Adaline Glasheen, “Calypso,” in James Joyce’s Ulysses: Critical Essays, ed. David Hayman and Clive Hart (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 51–60.

67. For an optimistic view of a reconciliation between Bloom and Molly, see Suzette Henke and Elaine Unkeless, Women in Joyce (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982).

68. The words that Karen Lawrence uses, for example, to describe the narrator of “Ithaca” could be exactly applied, without changing a word, to a nongenealogical, queer model of kinship: “The lateral imagination of the narrator is apparent, as he ranges over a set of facts, drawing connections. The most unlikely analogies are made: it seems that everything can potentially compared to anything else. … They seem more like theoretical constructs imposed than natural congruences discovered” (“‘Beggaring Description,’” 194).

69. For an account of Joyce and marriage see Brown, James Joyce and Sexuality, 12–49.

70. Brown writes that even if Molly’s adulterous adventures are not as wide-ranging as the list in “Ithaca” suggests, “Joyce made this adulterousness or pseudo-adulterousness a persistent and structurally significant element in his novel” (James Joyce and Sexuality, 21).

71. Osteen, The Economy of Ulysses, 398, points out that earlier kindlings Stephen recalls as he watches Bloom here were all “performed by actual or surrogate parents” and that the words “pyre,” “crosslaid,” and “Abram’s coal” suggest a “sacrificial consecration of … familial ties.”

72. Anticipated in “Circe”: “Leopoldi autem generatio. Moses begat Noah and Noah begat Eunuch and Eunuch begat O’Halloran and O’Halloran begat Guggenheim … and Jasperstone begat Vingteunieme and Vingteunieme begat Szombathely and Szombathely begat Virag and Virag begat Bloom et vocabitur nomen eius Emmanuel” (15.1855–69).

73. Patrick McCarthy, “Joyce’s Unreliable Catechist: Mathematics and the Narration of ‘Ithaca,’” ELH 51, no. 3 (1984): 605–18. Unlike the majority of critics who ascribe the mistakes to Joyce’s distraction and haste, McCarthy adduces some convincing and engaging explanations for the mathematical errors in “Ithaca,” including an adherence to a principle of “indeterminacy.”

74. Ungar, Joyce’s Ulysses as National Epic, 72, believes that Stephen’s targeting of Milly in this song about a “Jew’s daughter” means that he disrupts the family and has “no role” among the Blooms, but others differ on the meaning of the ballad. William Empson believes that since Stephen and Bloom are implicated in a “joking relationship,” no insult can be involved. See Empson, Using Biography (London: Chatto & Windus, 1984). Both Zack Bowen and Suzette Henke similarly play down the hostility of the moment. See Bowen, Musical Allusions in the Works of James Joyce: Early Poetry Through Ulysses (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1974); Henke, Joyce’s Moraculous Sindbook: A Study of Ulysses (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1978). Michael Seidel considers it, at worst, “accidentally … offensive” (Epic Geography: James Joyce’s Ulysses [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1976]).

75. The fact that the encounter between Bloom and Stephen replaces both the reproductive fusion of the marriage plot and the genealogical revelations of the foundling narrative may be part of the reason for another textual “tic” in “Ithaca,” that is, its constant citation of short series of consecutive numbers, e.g.: “He omitted to mention the clandestine correspondence between Martha Clifford and Henry Flower, the public altercation at, in and in the vicinity of the licensed premises of Bernard Kiernan and Co, Limited, 8, 9 and 10 Little Britain street, the erotic provocation and response thereto caused by the exhibitionism of Gertrude (Gerty), surname unknown. Positive: he included mention of a performance by Mrs Bandmann Palmer of Leah at the Gaiety Theatre, 46, 47, 48, 49 South King street, an invitation to supper at Wynn’s (Murphy’s) Hotel, 35, 36 and 37 Lower Abbey street” (17.2250–59).

76. See Maria DiBattista, “Ulysses’s Unanswered Questions,” Modernism/ Modernity 15, no. 2 (2008): 265–75.

77. It is also appropriate that his drawing belongs to poor Milly, whose destiny in the novel seems to be driven, more than anything else, by phonetic and graphic puns: first mentioned by Mulligan as being in Mullingar, if Milly, the daughter of Molly and Bloom, married Mulligan’s friend Bannon, her initials would remain the conveniently significant M.B. We ought perhaps to group her with the Hely’s sandwichmen, whom Jameson calls “emblems of textuality” (“Ulysses in History,” 136), and who also appear in this drawer which is so devoted to writing.

78. Again, the names “Milly,” “Mulligan,” and “Mullingar” vaguely suggest another, purely textual, lineage for her.

79. For discussions of this controversial roll call and what it means for our interpretation of Molly, see David Hayman, “The Empirical Molly,” in Approaches to Ulysses: Ten Essays, ed. Thomas Staley and Bernard Benstock (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1970).

80. Jameson, “Ulysses in History,” 141.

81. Paul K. Saint-Amour,” On Joycean Prophecy,” paper delivered at the twenty-first International James Joyce Symposium, Tours, June 2008.

1. Roger Shattuck writes that the two côtés of Combray are the first glimpse we have in the Recherche of its elemental opposition between the city and the country, later embodied by Paris and Combray, respectively. See Proust’s Way: A Field Guide to In Search of Lost Time (New York: Norton, 2000), 10.

2. In an illuminating and subtle psychoanalytic interpretation of the novel, Henk Hillenaar dismisses the idea that the two ways correspond to body/ desire (Swann’s) and imagination (Guermantes), pointing out that it is nonsensical to oppose desire and imagination. Hillenaar makes a fascinating case for the two ways as corresponding to paternity (Swann’s) and maternity (Guermantes). See “Guermantes et Méséglise ou le roman familial de Proust,” in Eighth International Conference on Literature and Psychoanalysis, ed. F. Pereira (Lisbon: Instituto Superior de Psicologia Aplicada, 1992), 121–29.

3. Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, vol. 3: Sodom and Gomorrah, trans. C. K. Scott-Moncrieff, Terence Kilmartin, and D. J. Enright (New York : Modern Library, 2003), 28–34; French edition: A la recherche du temps perdu, ed. Jean-Yves Tadié, vol. 3: Sodome et Gomorrhe, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1988), 25–28.

4. Marcel Proust, A la recherche du temps perdu, ed. Jean-Yves Tadié, vol. 1: Du côté de chez Swann, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1987), 5; In Search of Lost Time, vol. 1: Swann’s Way, trans. C. K. Scott-Moncrieff, Terence Kilmartin, and D. J. Enright (New York: Modern Library, 1998), 4.

5. This is Moncrieff and Kilmartin’s slightly misleading title for what in French is simply “Combray I,” but it will be convenient to use it to distinguish it from “Combray” after the madeleine.

6. James Joyce, Ulysses (1922), ed. Hans Walter Gabler (London: Vintage, 1986), 9:149–50; citations are given as chapter number and line number.

7. Matteo Residori suggests that the world of Combray as it is sketched by the narrator is less an actual portrayal of an actual society’s attitudes than an extrapolation from the intimate family relationships of childhood to an imagined “race” governed by their laws: “If the race of Combray seems extinct [to the narrator] … [it is] because what is extinct is childhood, from the point of view of which the adult world cannot but appear to be populated by race of hostile and selfish men … that the exceptionality [of the mother and grandmother] is an expression of their radical ‘anachronism’ also comes from the increasing importance assumed, as the novel goes on, by the grandmother, who is the furthest away from the present, and indeed from which she is soon completely separated by death” (“La razza estinta di Combray. Passato familiare e verità dell’arte in Proust,” Inchiesta/Letteratura 28, no. 122 [October–December 1998]: 85–90, my translation).

8. Malcolm Bowie, Proust Among the Stars (London: HaperCollins, 1998), 95–96.

9. Residori, “La razza estinta di Combray,” 88, my translation.

10. It is never clear to what extent Swann himself ever intuits the importance he has for the narrator’s life, any more than it is clear how much connection Bloom and Stephen feel to each other outside the symbolic systems of the novel. This fact is obliquely referred to when the narrator has a crush on Swann’s daughter Gilberte and reflects on how the name Swann, so magical to him, is just another name to his parents, and on how Swann himself has no idea of the fascination he holds.

11. For what is still the fullest account of the importance of habit and its interruption to the novel, see Samuel Beckett, Proust (London: Chatto & Windus, 1930).

12. In a fascinating reading of this scene, Naomi Diamant examines the Oedipal paradigm it implies. The father, Diamant says, who is compared to a painting of Abraham by Gozzoli, is performing the biblical role of Abraham as mediator between Judaism and Sodom. His dress in this scene (“[une] robe de nuit blanche sous [un]cachemire de l’Inde violet et rose”) feminizes him, underscoring his symbolic connection to the world of inversion. See “Judaism, Homosexuality, and Other Sign Systems in A la Recherche du temps perdu,” Romanic Review 82, no. 2 (1991): 179–92.

13. According to Residori, this also explains why, as the narrator rises higher and higher in the echelons of Paris society, the mother and the grandmother acquire ever more importance: “[The] disappearance [of the father] … has … a precise meaning in the symbolic economy of the story. As the member of the family who has the most contact with the social world, he is not wholly extraneous to the universal law of society in Proust. … His disappearance seems … designed to preserve the ‘purity’ of the family, in order to make the opposition between family and society as neat and diametrical as possible. And indeed, as the narrator achieves his fabulously gratuitous ascent within the côté de Guermantes, the two family members most radically irreducible to that world, the mother and the grandmother, acquire an ever-greater importance in the novel, despite their modest narrative roles and even physical absence” (Residori, “La razza estinta di Combray, 86; my translation).

14. Richard E. Goodkin, Around Proust (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991), 39–47, makes a convincing and entertaining case for reading the Jewish Swann’s love story with Odette as the Old Testament to the gentile narrator’s New Testament with Albertine.

15. As Leo Bersani, Homos (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), wrongly, in my view, suggests Ulysses is.

16. Some characters, such as Saint-Loup, inhabit both worlds; he is an invert who yet has a biological daughter. By the end of the novel, biological reproduction has been incorporated into Sodom, rather than vice-versa. Hillenaar suggests that Robert de Saint-Loup is the figure in the novel who, through his complicated family life, breaks down key oppositions in the novel: bourgeoisie/aristocracy, Swann’s way/Guermantes way, heterosexuality/homosexuality (“Un amour de Proust,” in Marcel Proust aujourd’hui, ed. Sjef Houppermans [Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003], 72). Joseph Litvak, “Strange Gourmet: Taste, Waste, Proust,” in Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction, ed. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997), 84, calls the Guermantes “homosexualized heterosexuality.”

17. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies (Chapel Hill, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993), 63.

18. Swann’s Judaism, his reception among the gentile aristocracy, and his adamant Dreyfusism also serve as symbolic links with homosexuality. See, especially, Jonathan Freedman, “Coming Out of the Jewish Closet with Marcel Proust,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 7, no. 4 (2001): 521–51; and Erin Carlston, “Secret Dossiers: Sexuality, Race, and Treason in Proust and the Dreyfus Affair,” MFS: Modern Fiction Studies 48, no. 4 (2002): 937–68.

19. Becoming a narrator, Goodkin says, involves resisting the “forward impulse of the parental axis,” which Proust achieves by identifying and exploiting an alternative avuncular heritage (Around Proust, 35).

21. Shattuck, Proust’s Way, 29, implies, mistakenly in my view, that the “traintrain” is of a piece with the repetitive rituals of family life.

22. Litvak writes that “a case could be made that, at the level of fantasy, the aristocratic salon figures generally in Proust as an ‘alternative family’” (“Strange Gourmet,” 84).

23. I agree to an extent with Jarrod Hayes when he suggests that “the paradise gained from taking tea might, in fact, be Sodom” (“Proust in the Tearoom,” PMLA 110, no. 5 [1995]: 993). Hayes goes on to persuasively link the narrator’s lament, supposedly for the lost world of childhood that “les vrais paradis sont les paradis qu’on a perdus” to the novel’s depiction of Sodom and Gomorrah as lost civilizations whose people are now scattered and hidden around the world (1002–3).

24. Beckett writes that “to Swann may be related every element of the Proustian experience and consequently its climax in revelation … Swann is the cornerstone of the entire structure [of the novel], and the central figure of the narrator’s childhood” (Proust, 34).

25. See, for example, ibid.

26. For the foundational account of Swann as a model for the narrator and of the narrative status of “Un amour de Swann” see Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1983), 250–51.

27. Proust, A la recherche du temps perdu, ed. Jean-Yves Tadié, vol. 3: La prisonnière, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris, Gallimard, 1988), 765–66; In Search of Lost Time, vol. 5: The Captive and The Fugitive, trans. C. K. Scott-Moncrieff, Terence Kilmartin, and D. J. Enright (New York: Modern Library 2003), 348, translation modified.

28. And perhaps even on the English word “son.”

29. The reasons the narrator gives are his own impatience, memories of the time he spied on the lesbians at Montjouvain, and a desire to behave like a soldier. Lucey shows in a series of elegant close readings how the narrator’s actions and the language of the passage serve to associate him with Charlus and Jupien. See Never Say I: Sexuality and the First Person in Colette, Gide, and Proust (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006), 225–27.

30. It may be worth noting that the basement in question was recently occupied by a cabinet maker, “ébéniste,” which Moncrieff translates as a “joiner.”

31. Gomorrah is in some ways even more retrospective, as the long speculations about Albertine’s past indicate. But, as Elisabeth Ladenson brilliantly shows, the treatment of the two homosexual “civilisations” is not symmetrical. See Proust’s Lesbianism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999).

32. Ladenson notes that in contrast to his male homosexuals, Proust’s Gomorrheans are the novel’s “sole example of reciprocated desire.” See Proust’s Lesbianism, 28–57. Bersani writes that Sodome et Gomorrhe is “haunted by the idea of gay grouping.” For Bersani, even if the narrator is “quite nasty” about gay collectives, their depiction in the Recherche nonetheless points towards an alternative model of community. See Homos, 148–51.

33. In a way, a far more fully elaborated version of the lineage Ulysses gives Milly to her father via Buck Mulligan and Stephen Dedalus.

34. Proust, Le Temps retrouvé, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1988), 4.606; Time Regained, trans. Scott-Moncrieff, D. J. Enright, Terence Kilmartin, and Andreas Mayor (New York: Modern Library, 1999), 502.

36. Ladenson, whose refutation of the “transposition theory” is more subtle and convincing than Sedgwick’s, points out that the theory was “at once sanctioned and denied by Proust himself” (Proust’s Lesbianism, 6). Ladenson shows how Proust’s writing about lesbianism began as a convenient stand-in for male homosexuality but developed into a genuine fascination for lesbianism itself as a quite distinct model of love and erotic connections. For a history of the transposition theory itself, see Proust’s Lesbianism, 13–18; for the evolution of Proust’s own creative attitudes toward Gomorrah, see 81–108.