Step 1. The proliferatious text

James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ is a vast system of interlocking words and meanings, huge tracts of text consisting of sentences cut back to phrases, fragments of speech, words truncated into bits and glued together to make new portmanteau words, fleeting quotes, even sound effects, thousands of which recur over and again with subtle variations, rephrasings, reappearing hundreds of pages apart, often creating impenetrably difficult passages. If you don’t quite believe me, here’s the opening of chapter 11 (the Sirens chapter):

Bronze by gold heard the hoofirons, steelyringing.
Imperthnthn thnthnthn.
Chips, picking chips off rocky thumbnail, chips.
Horrid! And gold flushed more.
A husky fifenote blew.
Blew. Blue bloom is on the.
Goldpinnacled hair.
A jumping rose on satiny breast of satin, rose of Castile.
Trilling, trilling: Idolores.
Peep! Who’s in the… peepofgold?
Tink cried to bronze in pity.
And a call, pure, long and throbbing. Longindying call.
Decoy. Soft word. But look: the bright stars fade. Notes chirruping answer.
O rose! Castile. The morn is breaking.
Jingle jingle jaunted jingling.
Coin rang. Clock clacked.
Avowal. Sonnez. I could. Rebound of garter. Not leave thee. Smack. La cloche! Thigh smack. Avowal. Warm. Sweetheart, goodbye!
Jingle. Bloo.

You need to read the commentaries to understand that this opening passage is a kind of ‘overture’ or statement of themes, like a trailer for a movie, bringing together fragments which, when we read the main body of the chapter, we will encounter again only explained at slightly more comprehensible length.

This vast matrix, this treasure house of glittering fragments sets up tens of thousands of correspondences and contrasts, within itself and beyond itself, generating new types of meaning in all kinds of non-traditional ways.

Arguably, no final ‘meaning’ could ever be found for ‘Ulysses’ because it not only contains so many ‘meanings’ (at the obvious level of, say, theme and character) but because the huge interplay of broken words and phrases is remade every time a new reader reads it or an old reader reads it again. Although it’s a static text (although even this isn’t true, because there were thousands of textual errors in the original printing which, moreover, were exacerbated by the attempts of Joyce himself and subsequent scholars to fix them, generally introducing new ones) ‘Ulysses’ contains so many sentences made of fragments which don’t make any sense themselves but only in interplay with other, related fragments, that making sense of all these fragments in any one reading is impossible for one human being.

And the next time you (or anyone else) rereads it, you’re likely to notice a different range of fragments and allusions, thus creating an entirely new experience of the book. In this very real sense, the text is endless.

Step 2. The exegesis industry

Since its publication 124 years ago (1922) ‘Ulysses’ has gathered a small industry of commentators and exegetes (where exegesis means ‘critical explanation or interpretation of a text, especially of scripture’). There are no end of essays, PhD dissertations, academic papers, conferences, books, presentations, seminars, workshops and whatnot all adding innumerable new layers of interpretation and analysis to the original text every year.

In a very real sense (to coin a cliché again) there is no end to the Joyce industry because there will be no end to the millions of students and tens of thousands of academics writing papers about Joyce all year, every year, as long as there are literature courses, at universities all around the world.

So 1) the book itself was already endless in the ways I’ve suggested, but 2) its endlessness has been endlessly complexified by the endless reinterpretations offered by an endlessly expanding interpretation industry.

Step 3. The internet

Obviously the advent of the internet 30 years ago exacerbated all this even further, in the sense that it made many of these academic papers, seminars, PowerPoints, PDFs and whatnot publicly accessible in a way they hadn’t been before, thus making countless interpretations reinterpretable by a wider-than-ever-before audience of lay readers.

But it also introduced a whole new set of channels for readers to express their readings and misreadings through – on websites professional and amateur, in blogs (like this one), alongside the proliferation of streamed conferences and workshops and seminars and so on. A whole new layer of endless interpretation was added to the two existing ones.

Step 4. Social media

And then around 2009 along came social media, which allowed people much more easily to share their short Facebook and Twitter-sized opinions about any aspect of the book, opinions large of microscopic relating to their reading or reading of the many biographies or commentaries or guided tour round Joyce’s Dublin, or anything even remotely related, which all added to the vast cosmic cloud of meanings and thoughts and opinions and versions of this multitudinous text.

Step 5. Artificial intelligence

And now we have the arrival of artificial intelligence. To be precise (and to quote Wikipedia):

The AI boom started with the initial development of key architectures and algorithms such as the transformer architecture in 2017, leading to the scaling and development of large language models exhibiting human-like traits of knowledge, attention, and creativity. The new AI era began in 2020, with the public release of a scaled large language model (LLM) GPT-3, the predecessor of ChatGPT.

And:

ChatGPT was launched on 30 November 2022, marking a pivotal moment in artificial intelligence’s public adoption. Within days of its release it went viral, gaining over 100 million users in two months and becoming the fastest-growing consumer software application in history.

Current estimates are that some 2 billion people round the world have used AI at least once, with as many as 600 million people using it every day (I know I do).

So, how does this affect the reading of ‘Ulysses’. Sorry to be predictable, but it quite clearly is going to add yet another layer of complexification to interpretations of the never-ending book. To be more precise, two fairly obvious points:

1. Unstoppable proliferation

An AI like Chat writes new interpretations of the book every time it is asked a question about it. I would be amazed if students of Joyce aren’t asking it questions all day long (I know I am), so we can be fairly confident that new interpretations of Joyce (sometimes small scale, sometimes large scale) are being produced every day, every hour and every minute. The volume of new sentences being generated by AI about ‘Ulysses’ is probably incalculable. All this is fed back into the vast cyberscape via all the channels I’ve listed above, from student essays to amateur observations on social media, and this becomes part of the resource which AI subsequently bases its answers on.

2. Hallucinations

The key thing about AIs, as far as I’m concerned, is they make stuff up, all the time, about everything. As a civil servant I’ve used the carefully vetted, government-approved AI, Assist, and a security-cleared version of CoPilot, and have been genuinely taken aback by how much they get wrong and how often. We are, in my opinion, entering an age characterised by unmanageable amounts of digital slop, with vast tsunamis of hallucinated misinformation already washing over the worlds of discourse.

When it comes to the endless text of ‘Ulysses’, then, not only is AI producing vast amounts of summaries and explanations, but an unknowable amount of these will be rubbish – but will nonetheless go to form part of the evidence base from which the next generations of AI will be trained, and so on.

It’s hard to know whether Joyce would be weeping in his grave or laughing his head off.

Step 6. Enter Jacques Derrida

It’s a long time since I tried and failed to read the key works of the great French philosopher and celebrity thinker Jacques Derrida (1930 to 2004). I’ve easily understood the various summaries of his thought but found the books themselves very hard work, not least because the early ones, at least, are 1) running commentaries on other philosophers which you therefore need to be very familiar with to understand how he’s interpreting them; and 2) invoke the world of his post-structuralist peers (Lacan, Barthes, Cixous et al) who you also need to be very familiar with in order to fully follow, or half follow, or pretend to follow, the way he’s riffing off their ideas.

But I have always understood the basic idea of the school of thought he invented, which is generally called deconstruction or deconstructionism, to mean that the meaning of a word or phrase is always fugitive because it can only be generated by reference to other words and phrases, which themselves cannot be understood without reference to other words or phrases, and so on indefinitely.

Literally, indefinitely. The quest for a final definitive meaning can never be achieved in language because the mythical Final Word or phrase which anchors everything else in the system doesn’t exist. There is no centre. Or to put it another way, there is no outside. There is no world outside the text which offers a complete foundation and anchor point. There is no transcendent source of authority. From which it follows that no system of meaning can be stable or complete. All meaning is provisional and can at any moment be subverted by new eddies washing in from other parts of the universe of meaning.

(For me personally, this worldview maps easily onto my existing reading of David Hume, a ferociously sceptical British figure from outside Derrida’s continental culture; and with Ludwig Wittgenstein’s later idea of language games – both of which are intuitively easier to process than Derrida’s playfully impenetrable French.)

But back to Derrida and Joyce. Having followed my argument this far it occurred to me that not only Joyce’s original text, but all the proliferations it has been, and is still being, subjected to, bear out Derrida’s idea of the endless proliferation of deferred meaning. So I did what we all do nowadays and asked Chat GPT.

I asked: ‘Does James Joyce’s Ulysses embody Jacques Derrida’s idea of deconstruction?’ and within a few seconds it replied:

Yes, James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ is frequently interpreted as an embodiment of Jacques Derrida’s ideas of deconstruction, to such an extent that Derrida himself suggested Joyce prefigured his theories. The novel is considered a prime example of dissemination, a key Derridean concept whereby language breaks free from a single, authorized meaning and plays uncontrollably.

Here is how Ulysses embodies deconstruction:

Différance and Interpretation: The ‘Proteus’ episode is often cited as a prefiguration of différance (the deferral and difference of meaning). The chapter emphasizes metamorphosis in which symbols, thoughts and language are in constant flux, preventing a stable, present meaning.

Destabilizing the Signified: ‘Ulysses’ challenges Western dichotomies (self/other, presence/absence, speech/writing) by placing words and sounds above fixed meaning. The text acts as a ‘decomposing form’, where language breaks down into its constituent units, similar to the digestive processes often mentioned in the book itself. [The ‘Lestrygonians’ chapter, in particular, is set at lunchtime and focuses on food.]

‘Il n’y a pas de hors-texte‘: This is a famous quote of Derrida’s, meaning that all reality is mediated through interpretation, context and language (through a ‘fabric of signs’) and that we cannot access an objective, uninterpreted reality independent of these structures. With regard to ‘Ulysses’, although the novel references a real place (Dublin) in mind-bogglingly accurate detail, along with quite a few real-life characters of its time, most of the actual text of the novel functions as a self-referential system where meaning is generated, not by any reference to an external reality, but through internal networks of words and allusions. In this way it forces the reader to engage with the text as a text rather than a representation of life.

Undecidability and “Yes”: In 1984 Derrida was invited to deliver the opening address at the
Ninth International James Joyce Symposium in Frankfurt and produced a long (two-and-a-half hours) rambling address titled ‘Ulysses Gramophone’. It makes many points but a recurring one is the importance of the ‘yeses’ uttered by Molly Bloom in her famous final monologue, as affirmations that embrace the undecidability of language, which acts as both a totalising generator of what we take to be ‘meaning’ but which in the long text which precedes her climactic speech, has also proven that full meaning is impossible to achieve; making language a controlling but also liberating force at the same time.

The ‘Gay Betrayer’: In a typically smartarse move, Derrida concludes that to be ‘faithful’ to ‘Ulysses’ is to constantly betray it (obviously himself referencing the novel’s central theme of marital fidelity and infidelity), as the text itself undermines its own structure and authorial intent.

Personally, I would disagree with that last point: I don’t think the text undermines its own structure because that suggests the text is staying roughly the same ‘place’, that the undermining is going on in the same space, just digging away at its own foundations. Whereas in my visualisation the text of ‘Ulysses’ amplifies itself, continually spawning concatenations of extra meanings completely out of Joyce’s control, out of anybody’s control, until the text and all its meanings are large enough to be seen from space, until it reaches out beyond this puny planet and colonises space.

Credit

‘Ulysses’ by James Joyce was published by Shakespeare and Company in 1922.

Related links

• Ulysses on Planet Gutenberg

Joyce reviews

• Dubliners (1914)
• Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)
• Ulysses by James Joyce: introduction
• Ulysses by James Joyce: Wandering Rocks
• Ulysses by James Joyce: Cyclops
• Ulysses by James Joyce: Nausicaa
• Ulysses by James Joyce: Oxen of the Sun
• Ulysses by James Joyce: Circe
• Ulysses by James Joyce: Eumaeus
• Ulysses by James Joyce: Ithaca
• Ulysses by James Joyce: Penelope