Rereading Ulysses: Indeterminacy, Error, and Fixing the Past

Why and how do people reread Ulysses? The answer to the first interrogative is relatively easy to speculate about: The book is presumably reread for personal enjoyment and/or for an improved understanding of its multiple complexities. The answer to the second question is more tentative: Readers approach the text, I would guess, with greater caution—on account of those complexities—and with a sharp memory, in order to look at the ways different parts of it interact with others in sometimes confusing ways. Multiple rereadings, oddly enough, often produce "overreadings" of Ulysses. By "overreadings" I refer not only to the strange symbols some of us find, which no one else finds plausible, but also to the process of filling in various textual indeterminacies without acknowledging readerly inference.

A ready example of this second type of overreading can be found in a secondary source that I find for the most part helpful and even recommend that my undergraduate students buy: namely, Harry Blamires' The New Bloomsday Book, which according to its subtitle was "revised" in 1988. Blamires writes in his "Note on the Second Edition," "Apart from making adjustments to accommodate the changes embodied in the corrected text of Ulysses, I have not found it necessary to tamper much with the substance of The Bloomsday Book, but a few corrections and brief additions have been made."¹ For pedagogical reasons, one additional correction I wish he had made is in his problematic paraphrase of a very brief section of "Lestrygonians," a paraphrase that almost inevitably shapes first-time readers' sense of the Blooms' relationship. Joyce writes, "I was happier then. Or was that I? Or am I now I? Twentyeight I was. She twentythree. When we left Lombard street west something changed. Could never like it again after Rudy" (8.608-10). Blamires writes of this excerpt the following:

Looking back, [Bloom] builds up his biography for us more clearly. He was twenty-eight and Molly twenty-three when they left Lombard StreetWest and the change came. Molly ended their full marital relationship with the plea that she "could never like it again" after their son Rudy's death.

(64)

Thus Blamires effectively blames Molly for the initial downslide of the relationship. He also unhelpfully introduces Boylan in "Calypso" as "Molly's lover" (23), as opposed to "Molly's-potential-or-possible-lover-to-be"—an admittedly awkward but more accurate label. And given what we find out in "Penelope," the word "lover" becomes a questionable designation in itself, regardless of how one opts to read Molly's sexual liaison. Does a "lover" slap his partner on the ass as a parting gesture after sexual gratification? Molly uses the designation herself—"its all very well a husband but you cant fool a lover" (18.354-5)—but Joyce shows that for his characters, as well as for his audience, accurate reading is indeed a very tricky business.

Rereading Ulysses with a general knowledge of the text as a whole enables people to sense that Blamires' claim is not very persuasive. The most problematic phrase to reread in the preceding passage is "Could never like it again after Rudy" (8.610). The phrase contains no clear subject, and in its full context has three possible candidates: "she," "I," or "we"—that is, Molly, Bloom, or the Blooms as a couple. And what is the unspecified "it"? Sex? That does not make sense if Molly is the posited subject of the sentence and (eventually) has a so-called "lover." Marital sex? That would possibly make sense if Bloom is the subject of the sentence: We are later, or course, informed that "complete carnal intercourse, with ejaculation of semen within the natural female organ" (17.2278-9) has not taken place in over ten years, prior to the birth and death of Rudy. This interpretation shifts the blame for the sexual frustrations in the marital relationship to Bloom.

But rereading that one little sentence in the context of the entire text does not necessarily fix the missing subject as "I" and the indeterminate object as marital sex with...