This article contains “spoilers” for future Ulysses text nerds. So beware.
Late last year I finally finished “reading” (half reading, half listening) a giant book by Alex Ross from 2020 on the cultural influence of Richard Wagner from the 19th Century until now. Mostly what I got out of that book was a feeling of “Are the artist fans of Richard Wagner OK?” … because boy they all seemed like neurotic oversexed sociopaths.
Anyway, somewhere in that book is a section on references to Wagner in the novels of James Joyce in general and I guess Ulysses in particular because somehow the idea got planted in my head that I should try to read this book.
It turns out that Ulysses is a great book for a nerd with a low key obsession for the study of historical variations in artistic works (discographies, for example). This is because no one can actually agree on what the right text for the novel is. And that is because Joyce himself kept changing the book even as it was published in small pieces and multiple editions over time.
When I found out that there was a critical edition of the novel from 1984 that is also essentially a strangely encoded version control history of the text I was all in.
The “end user” version of that critical edition is the 1986 Ulysses: The Corrected Text by Gabler, et. al. And this version of the book, at least in the U.S., contains my favorite textual variation so far. The 17th episode of the novel (“Ithaca”) is supposed to end with a question “Where?” followed by a large filled in circular dot as the answer to the question on a line by itself. Like this:
Where?
⚫️
This is referred to as the “Ithaca dot” and is intermittently missing in various printed editions of the book. Just to give you idea of the level of Ulysses nerds, I found at least one 15 page paper in an academic journal about this dot. That’s almost as extreme as all those old computer science papers about goto statements.
For more background, here is an excerpt from the most recent encyclopedia of Ulysses annotations about this dot:
Here the “17.2332” refers to the number of the line of text in chapter 17 where the dot should appear in the Gabler text that I talked about above.
Except the joke is on all of us because the copy of the so-called “corrected text” that I bought is missing this dot at this position, even though there is a short section about it in the introduction and even though the critical edition that the book is based on is not missing it. Disappoint.
I have heard that the UK printing of the Gabler “reading” text has the dot. But I’m not quite over the edge enough to try and go get that … unless I happen to be in the UK for some other reason in the future.
Of course these days one can find various electronic versions of the text and put the dot in manually if it’s missing. But it’s not quite the same.
So, having spent the last month or three working through the book I have two short thoughts about it.
First, even without all of the apparently infinite levels of meta-discourse about the text, the book itself is pretty cool. It has various overwrought and difficult passages, but I think that aspect of it is somewhat over-emphasized, especially in the early chapters. It’s also an often hilarious book and it’s worth reading at least the first half just for the funny bits (and if you get through half you might as well finish it).
I mean, even the first sentence is a low level chuckle:
Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him on the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned:
Second, the apparently infinite levels of meta-commentary bring the book to a higher level of interest for me. I have told a few people that this novel is the closest that fiction has ever come to being like reading the source code to a large application program. If you want to mess around with it there are puzzles inside puzzles inside puzzles. But, you can also just let that wash over you and ignore it and just enjoy everything at the surface level.
To conclude: if you ever wondered about reading Ulysses I recommend you try. It’s easy to find a free version of the text to start with, and then you can decide how far down the possibly infinite pit of obsession you want to fall. It’s a great ride.