ridiculed, travestied, and betrayed, but ultimately received, understood,
and acknowledged.
The style of Joyce’s novel, with its access from the very first scene to
Stephen’s own thoughts, and then to Bloom’s, and finally to Molly’s,
implies that no communication, no means of meaning, succeeds so well as
that of the artistic imagination. When he said “Madame Bovary, c’est moi,”
Gustave Flaubert was teaching Joyce to disregard and ultimately to refute
the supposed inscrutability and reputed inaccessibility of the Other. The
lines may be down between husband and wife, they may be tottering between
father and daughter, but between the author’s spirit and that of his
characters, le courant passe, the current flows without impedance.
Any signal, like a Homeric hero, is threatened with ruin by the alluring
sirens of noise. Any piece of information, or any spirit afloat in our
culture, that is, faces an Odyssean battle in order to make it through.
Consider the obeisance of publisher to legal power that used to appear at
this novel’s front gate, for instance. This NOVEL had to undergo an odyssey
before coming home to our minds. The law tried to stop it, pirates tried to
loot it, but the text, like its characters, came through relatively
unscathed.
Cybernetic messages and the obstacles to their correct transmission present
one of the manifold yet parallel plots in ULYSSES — with our own
successful comprehension of the novel furnishing the happy ending to a
cybernetic allegory in which character, action, and text all come through,
finally, loud and clear. The book, that is, enacted a Joycean design over
which Joyce himself could have had little control, for the book itself
recapitulated the Odyssean journey across perilous seas. Pirates, monstrous
one-eyed censors, Procrustean editors kept mangling a Protean text. And yet
here it is, home free, safely harbored in our minds and in our hearts.
Thank you very much.