At several points in the novel, men reach out to Stephen in
efforts to guide him—often literally, with a physical touch.
In his obvious brilliance and obvious lostness Stephen
attracts paternal feelings, and in this epic of the human body
that need for human connection often registers in touch, just
as it does in Stephen's need for a heterosexual relationship.
But not all of these overtures are welcome.
In Proteus, Stephen imagines meeting a woman who
can rescue him from his loneliness: "Touch me.
Soft eyes. Soft soft soft hand. I am lonely here. O, touch me
soon, now. What is that word known to all men? I am quiet here
alone. Sad too. Touch, touch me." When Nora
Barnacle rescued James Joyce on the same Sandymount Strand,
she touched him. Several
men indulge that impulse, although not sexually.
Mulligan purports to offer Stephen intimate friendship, an
intention which is borne out by his locking arms with Stephen
in Telemachus and holding on to him for a prolonged
time. We hear that "Buck Mulligan suddenly linked his
arm in Stephen's and walked with him round the tower."
Fully a page later (after twelve paragraphs), "Stephen
freed his arm quietly." The verb "freed," and
Stephen's memory of Cranly
while Mulligan is holding his arm—"Cranly's arm. His
arm"—suggest an aversive response. Stephen's
reasons for recoiling from the touch are many. He distrusts
Mulligan's efforts to become a mentor: "I'm the only one that
knows what you are. Why don't you trust me more?" He also
seems to feel that Mulligan's impulse to take charge of his
life conceals a predatory sexuality. In Scylla and
Charybdis, after Mulligan rhapsodizes about "the charge
of pederasty brought against the bard," he thinks, "Catamite."
In Nestor the old headmaster Mr. Deasy never
touches his employee (although he does come running after him
down the front path), but he brims with presumptuous advice
that Stephen clearly has no intention of following. The
pattern is repeated in Aeolus when the newspaper
editor Myles Crawford lays “a nervous hand on
Stephen’s shoulder”—nervous because he wants to
recruit him to write for the paper. Like Mulligan, Crawford
presumes to understand the reserved young writer: “You
can do it. I see it in your face.” But his presumption prompts
a hostile response from Stephen, who links Crawford with
Father Dolan, the demented Jesuit disciplinarian who punished
him unjustly in A Portrait: “See it in your face.
See it in your eye. Lazy idle little schemer.”
By contrast, two men’s touches do not provoke Stephen’s
hostility. One comes from Almidano Artifoni, his Italian
teacher, in Wandering Rocks. Artifoni, like Mulligan
and Crawford, presumes to understand Stephen in this scene: he
is wasting his singing talent, he says, when he could be
earning some money from it. Stephen listens sympathetically to
his advice, and is rewarded with a handshake: "His
heavy hand took Stephen's firmly. Human eyes. They gazed
curiously an instant and turned quickly towards a Dalkey
tram."
In Eumaeus, Leopold Bloom, who has the same advice
to offer about Stephen's talent as a singer, invites the
battered young man to lean on him during their walk to Bloom's
house. “— Yes, Stephen said uncertainly, because he
thought he felt a strange kind of flesh of a different man
approach him, sinewless and wobbly and all that."
