Joyce’s Iritis and the Irritated Text: Dis-lexic Ulysses

Ulysses was written and proofread when James Joyce’s vision was seriously blurred and impaired by iritis. The illness required him to use a magnifying glass to enlarge words, separating them out of context and distorting the simple letters in them. This book considers the effects of Joyce’s iritis on the text of
Ulysses . Gottfried examines
Ulysses
much as Joyce must have tried to see it, in close readings of many small portions of the text, and with a quizzical eye. He locates the particular density and opacity of
Ulysses
in two sites: within the iritis in Joyce’s eyes and within the body of the text with its irritated confusion of letters.
No reader’s eye can be trusted in seeing
Ulysses

, Gottfried claims. Instead, the reader is disoriented and infected with a particular kind of
Joycean dis-lexia , so that
a variety of instabilities arise from the reader’s unclear view and reading of the novel .