Abstract
A, ls Leopold Bloom saunters down Molesworth Street watching the blind stripling he has just helped cross the intersection, he thinks: Wonder would he feel it if something was removed. Feel a gap. Queer idea of he must have, tapping his way round the stones. Could he walk in a beeline if he hadn't that cane?2 The figure ofthe blind man tapping his way around the city streets had a personal relevance for James Joyce. His exile and eye troubles made the darkness of the blind stripling immediate enough, and in this specific moment in Ulysses, he alludes to the paradox of physical absence and imaginative, geographical proximity. The theme of finding one's way home with minimal guidance occurs even before the navigational scaffolding was imported from the Homeric myth. Early in A Portrait ofthe Artist as a Young Man, the adolescent Stephen Dedalus is initiated into the mysterious geography of after the Dedalus family's move to Blackrock: Dublin was a new and complex sensation.... In the beginning he contented himself with circling timidly round the neighboring square or, at most, going half way down one of the side streets: but when he had made a skeleton map of the city in his mind he followed boldly one of its central lines until he reached the customhouse.3 To familiarize himself with the spatial layout of Dublin, Stephen produces a mental map so that home is always the fixed point of reference. Moments of
Published Version
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