The second chapter, “Paris Recognized,” shows that Joyce’s discoveries in Paris shape his subsequent understanding of Dublin life. The chapter traces a series of meetings between Stephen Dedalus and Emma Clery in Stephen Hero and Portrait, culminating in an encounter in the colonnade of the museum library that undoes the transactional relations that mar their earlier encounters. In tracing their relations, the chapter uncovers Joyce’s development of a desublimated and unconscious aesthetic practice. Even though Stephen rehearses Joyce’s earlier aesthetic theory, in the scene in the colonnade he is an artist in a way that has been overlooked. Joyce draws on the synesthesia of Rimbaud’s “Voyelles” to present Stephen and Emma as engaged in a sensory exchange that defies calculation; in their encounter, the Thomistic integritas, consonantia, claritas of the artwork are replaced by a transient expression of physically digested material

“Paris Re-envisioned” explores what Joyce called the “exploding visions” of the “Circe” episode, composed after his return to Paris in 1920. While the episode has usually been read as staging Bloom’s repressed desires, “Paris Re-envisioned” argues that its visionary form presents the fantastical development of thought in Nighttown, a heightened and totalized version of the city under capitalism. As he presents the ensnaring of human productive powers in structures of profit., Joyce adapts elements from nineteenth-century visionary texts: the play-script form of Flaubert’s La Tentation de Saint Antoine, the hallucinatory paralogic of the commercial Paris of Nerval’s Les Nuits d’Octobre and Aurelie, où La Rêve et la vie, and the mode of visionary farce of Rimbaud’s Une Saison en enfer. The chapter shows that the possibility of political and social transformation is tied, in Nighttown, to a domination of nature, manifested in a male use of female bodies, but that Bloom’s sexual desires deviate into nonprocreative, nonheterogenital activities. In an exchange with a Nymph, who is a comic embodiment of the disinterested, autonomous artwork, Bloom defends a transient, relational, and sensual exploration of the “various joys we each enjoy.”