Ulysses
by James Joyce
1922
The Seductions of “Ulysses”
February 7, 2022
The Twitter account UlyssesReader is what programmers call a “corpus-fed bot.” The corpus on which it feeds is James Joyce’s modernist epic, “Ulysses,” which was published a hundred years ago this month. For nine years, UlyssesReader has consumed the novel’s inner parts with relish, only to spit them out at a rate of one tweet every ten minutes. The novel’s eighteen episodes, each contrived according to an elaborate scheme of correspondences—Homeric parallels, hours of the day, organs of the body—are torn asunder. Characters are dismembered into bellies, breasts, and bottoms. When UlyssesReader reaches the end, it presents the novel’s historic signature, “Trieste-Zurich-Paris 1914-1921,” intact, like a bone fished out of the throat. Then it begins again, arranging, in its mechanical way, the tale of a young Dubliner named Stephen Dedalus and an older one named Leopold Bloom, brought together in a hospital, a brothel, a cabmen’s shelter, and, finally, the kitchen of Bloom’s home—on June 16, 1904, “an unusually fatiguing day, a chapter of accidents.”