‘Joyce’s Organ Works – Making Scents of Ulysses’

James Joyce’s literary masterpiece IS to be sniffed at. Despite its status as the ‘Cinderella sense,’ smell is in fact the most evocative. And Joyce is one of the few authors to give it its due: Joyce picks his nose – and runs with it… this talk kicks up a stink!

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Dr. Steve Carey is, like Joyce, an ex-Catholic eldest son of a father from Dublin and a mother from the west of Ireland. He trained to become a priest, completed a D. Phil. at Oxford under Richard Ellmann, became a magazine editor and publisher, and is now a Clinical Hypnotherapist and runs a school teaching people to become Hypnotherapists.

‘Led by the Nose: the Uses of Smell in Ulysses’

Joyce demonstrates the ‘meticulosity of the insane’ in documenting smell in Ulysses, a fact noted by only two scholars. As well as doing with smell what contemporary naturalistic writers (mainly continental) were doing, odours (sweet and astringent) take Joyce deeply into place and memory, and into discussion about the body and what was previously unspeakable. Most interestingly, it takes Joyce into the territory newly colonised by late nineteenth-century sexology, and musty body smells become a strangely perverse bedfellow on Bloom’s return to his marital bed.

Associate Professor Frances Devlin-Glass was among the first cohorts of students to study Ulysses at University of Queensland, and has taught Ulysses to generations of students and adult learners since the early 1980s. She was a founder of Bloomsday in Melbourne in 1994, and has had a leading role in almost every script produced for Bloomsday in Melbourne, an avocation she finds an invigorating way of continuing to investigate Joyce’s works. She also writes scholarly articles on Joyce.