“‘Love’s Poison Mystery’: Food, Sex, and the New Journalist Sex Scandal in Ulysses’ Lestrygonians“

Throughout Ulysses, but most pointedly in Lestrygonians, James Joyce employs images of food and consumption to figure the New Journalism’s occlusion of labor and workers through its fixation on the scandal as an extraordinary, reified product.  In Lestrygonians in particular, Joyce repeatedly employs terms and images that connect newly alluring forms of consumption associated with mass-circulation newspapers and periodicals to modes of social power and disempowerment they have brought into being. And thus, ironically, it is Lestrygonians, with its high-resolution focus on the politics of consumption, more than any other Ulysses chapter, that most insistently calls attention to the forms of labor underlying the seemingly autonomous and hence magically desirable word/thing the modern newspaper scandal embodies.