Ulysses: a first reading, and the apparatus built around it

The masters session

Ulysses — Which Dimension Next

Extended masters session · three rounds · adversarial Eight masters. Ten candidate dimensions. One vote table. No consensus.

Session note — two adaptations, declared

Scope. The extended-masters-session skill is written for architectural decisions on Vera — Okan's own manuscript, content not yet written. This session applies it to a third-party finished text and to a research-selection question: given that character, place and time are done, what should be analysed next. The eight lenses transfer because each is a reading lens before it is a writing lens. But the usual outputs — writing-room contract, voice-and-body version bump, architecture log — do not apply. This session produces a ranked field and nothing binding.

Structure. Read "the extended three masters" as the eight extended masters, three rounds — Phase 1 of the canonical 3+3+3, masters-only. The three designed-fresh reader-personas are not convened. They can be, later, if a shortlist needs a reader-response rather than a critic-analysis; on a dimension-selection question they would mostly be guessing.

The masters are constructed critical lenses named for the writers whose sensibilities they abstract. They are not those writers' opinions.

ROUND 1 — Eight openings

Each master names one dimension and attacks one other.

VIAN — Songbook.

Every song in the book. Who sings it, what the words are, what the words are doing against the scene. Simon sings an aria about a lost love while the man whose wife is being taken sits in the next room eating liver. That is the whole method in one bar. Dollard sings The Croppy Boy — a boy betrayed by a false priest — to a room of men who will betray each other by closing time.

The songs are not decoration. They are the emotional shorthand of a city too embarrassed to say anything directly, and they carry the irony the prose refuses to state.

And whoever proposes the Homeric concordance first: no. It is the piety. Every undergraduate has built that table. Cut.

CORTÁZAR — The Object Museum.

Thirty things move through the day. A cake of lemon soap. A shrivelled potato. A throwaway handbill. A key not carried. An ashplant. A card in a hatband. A pork kidney. A tin of potted meat that follows Bloom through the book like a small obscene joke.

Track each one hour by hour, hand to hand, pocket to pocket.

Here is why it beats every dimension on this list: it changes the reader. Once you have seen the soap move, you cannot un-see it, and on the second reading you are no longer a spectator — you are an accomplice, watching for it. A map of characters tells you what the book contains. A map of objects makes you complicit in how it works.

And Saramago's ledger — careful. Ithaca is already an accounting. Bloom's budget is itemised down to the penny as a joke about the impossibility of accounting for a life. Build the ledger straight and you re-perform the parody without the parody.

SARAMAGO (orchestrator) — The Ledger.

Cortázar is clever, and being clever is how you avoid the question, which is: who paid for this day.

Every transaction. Stephen earns three pounds twelve and by midnight it is gone, and where did it go, and who drank it. Bloom counts what a funeral costs a widow with no money. Dignam's insurance is a legal problem discussed in a pub. Dilly buys a French primer with coins her sisters needed for food while her father, who has money for whiskey, tells her to stand up straight. A one-legged sailor is thrown a coin from a window by a woman who is about to receive a lover.

Money in this book is not background. It is the mechanism by which the city decides who is allowed dignity. And it is countable, which means it can be shown rather than argued.

Dick will now propose that we study the schemas. We will not study the schemas.

DICK — The Apparatus.

We will study the schemas.

Joyce wrote two of them — Linati in 1920, Gilbert in 1930 — and they disagree. Organs differ. Techniques differ. He handed them to critics privately, over dinner, and they became the grid through which a century read the book. Every episode title we have been using all week comes from a document Joyce never printed and later contradicted.

Who put this here? Ask it seriously. We have spent three documents building maps of a book, using a key the author leaked to his own reviewers, and nobody has asked whether the key fits the lock. The most interesting thing about Ulysses may be that it comes with its own installed reading, and we have been obediently running it.

The dimension is: the apparatus of interpretation itself. Where the two schemas conflict, what the conflicts reveal, and what the book looks like with the grid switched off.

ATWOOD — The Women's Dublin.

What does she eat in the morning. Where does she get money. Can she leave the room.

Look at what has been built so far. A map with two coloured threads across a city — and both threads are men. Molly appears as an arm at a window. That is not a flaw in the map; the map is accurate. It is a fact about the book, and it has not yet been made into a subject.

So: the female cast, and for each one — income, mobility, and interiority. Molly has the last forty pages and cannot leave the bed. Milly has been sent away and exists as a letter. Dilly is starving in public. Gerty is lame and knows exactly what she is doing on that beach and gets one chapter in a borrowed magazine voice. The barmaids are ornamental to the men and bored to each other. The milkwoman does not recognise her own language.

The book is famous for one woman's interior monologue. It is worth asking why the other fifteen women get surfaces.

And Vian — a catalogue of what men sang in bars. Every singer in your songbook is a man.

PLATH — The Body's Accounts.

Everything that enters and leaves a body in nineteen hours.

Kidney, gorgonzola, burgundy, cocoa. Urine — twice, and once as two men standing in a garden under the stars, which is the most beautiful sentence in the book and is about urinating. Faeces on the first morning, with a newspaper. Semen on a beach. Blood, when Molly's period arrives at the exact moment she is reckoning with her afternoon. Milk, delivered by an old woman at the start. A birth upstairs at Holles Street. A corpse going into the ground at Glasnevin. Breath, in the lungs of an episode made of wind.

One day, one city, and the entire physical transit of being alive.

Dick wants to study the footnotes. The book has a body and he wants its bibliography.

GALEANO — The Governed City.

Do not tell me the population of Dublin. Tell me that a viceroy drove through it that afternoon and the book records, name by name, who saluted and who did not.

The dimension is the apparatus of rule, entered through detail. Dublin Castle and its detective division. The Dublin Metropolitan Police. The barracks that made a red-light district profitable and tolerated. The two soldiers who knock a poet down for an insult he did not make. The informer who may be pouring the coffee. The Irish language spoken to a woman who does not recognise it, in her own country, by an Englishman collecting her folklore. A priest walking north-east thinking benign thoughts about the poor for four seconds. Foot-and-mouth disease, which is a national income problem, carried across the city in the pocket of a man who has just been told a joke about Jews.

Colonisation in this book is never announced. It arrives as the price of things and the angle of a salute.

And Vian's syllabus of eighteen techniques — that is a course description, not a subject.

PAMUK — The Object Museum (seconding Cortázar, for a different reason).

I disagree with Cortázar about why, which matters.

He wants the objects because they make a game for the reader. I want them because they are the only honest way left to write about this city. The place documents are built and they are good, and they carry the standing risk of all place-writing: that Dublin becomes scenery, and the reader tours it. Guidebook prose with better sentences.

The cure is the object. You do not render a city by describing it. You render it by describing one thing inside it so precisely that the city arrives behind the thing. Joyce knew this — that is why we know the exact contents of a kitchen dresser on Eccles Street, and why a bar of soap has a stanza. The soap is Dublin in 1904: imported, scented, bought on credit at a chemist that still stands, carried all day in the wrong pocket by a man who keeps meaning to pay for it.

And the Homeric table: Vian is right for the wrong reason. It is not that it is pious. It is that it turns the book into a destination with a plaque on it.

ROUND 2 — Designed disagreement

Saramago poses three questions. Chorus is refused.

Q1 — Should the next dimension be one that can be counted, or one that must be read?

The three finished documents are all countable: a cast list, a map, a clock. Countable dimensions produce tables and visualisations, which suits a website. Readable dimensions produce essays, which suit a presentation. Is the project now over-fitted to counting?

GALEANO. The countable dimensions are where the politics hides, and that is not a coincidence. Nobody argues with a price. If you write an essay saying Dublin was governed, a reader may disagree. If you list what a funeral cost a widow with no income, there is nothing to disagree with. Count.

PLATH. Then count the body. It is the most countable thing here and the least counted, because people find it embarrassing and reach for the symbolism instead. Every one of my items has a page reference. None of them is a metaphor.

ATWOOD. Counting is fine. Counting is how I would answer my own question — income, mobility, interiority, three columns, fifteen women. The danger is not counting. The danger is counting only what the men do, which is what has happened three times now.

CORTÁZAR. You are all describing inventories. An inventory is not a dimension, it is a spreadsheet with ambition. The question is not can it be counted but does the count change the reader. Mine does. A list of prices does not make me see differently; a list of objects makes me watch the soap.

SARAMAGO. It changes what you see when a woman sells her hair. But go on.

VIAN. The songs are countable and readable at once, which is why they win. You can list them. You cannot list what happens when a betrayal song plays over a betrayal.

DICK. You are all counting inside a grid you did not build. That is my whole point and everyone has walked past it.

PAMUK. Count few things closely. Thirty objects, each followed properly, will teach more than three hundred data points. Depth is the discipline; breadth is the temptation.

Q2 — What is missing from the three documents already built?

ATWOOD. Women. Not as a complaint — as a structural fact the maps made visible and did not name. Two threads across a city and both of them male; a woman rendered as an arm.

GALEANO. The poor. The map has Davy Byrne's and the National Library on it. It does not have a tenement. A third of that city lived several to a room and the itinerary passes through their streets without stopping, because the book's protagonists do not stop either. That is the book's blind spot and the map has inherited it faithfully.

PLATH. The body, obviously. You have mapped where the men walked and not what happened inside them while they walked.

DICK. Doubt. Three documents, no page anywhere asking whether the frame is correct. There is an "open questions" section listing Molly's age. That is proofreading, not doubt.

SARAMAGO. Dick's objection is the only one that indicts the method rather than the coverage. Note it. It is also the one nobody wants to act on, because acting on it means the fourth document is about the first three.

VIAN. Sound. Those documents are silent. A book with a fugue in it.

CORTÁZAR. And motion between things — the maps show where people are, never what travels. Objects travel. Rumours travel. A tip on a horse travels through six men and becomes a grudge.

PAMUK. Texture. What Dublin smelled like, cost, felt like underfoot. The city document has population figures and no bread.

Q3 — Is the Homeric concordance the obvious next document, or the trap?

Okan has named this as the next one. The panel was asked directly.

VIAN. Trap. It is the most-trodden path in the whole of Joyce criticism. You would spend two weeks building a worse version of a table that exists in a hundred books, and you would learn nothing about why the book is good — only about how it is arranged.

PAMUK. Trap, differently. A concordance turns a living city into a monument with correspondences on a plaque. Column A: Homer. Column B: Joyce. Nothing in between but the reader's satisfaction at the tidiness.

CORTÁZAR. Both wrong, but only just. The concordance of correspondences is dead. The concordance of failures is alive. Where does the parallel break? Odysseus kills the suitors; Bloom gets into bed the wrong way round and asks for breakfast. Odysseus is recognised by his scar; Bloom is recognised by nobody, and the one unidentified man in the book stays unidentified forever. Penelope holds out for twenty years; Molly does not hold out for one afternoon — and the book says yes to her anyway.

Map only the places where Homer is refused, and you have a real document. Map the matches, and you have homework.

SARAMAGO. Then let me defend it once, since nobody else will, and then let it go. The Homeric frame is the book's political claim, and it is a large one: that an advertisement canvasser of Hungarian-Jewish descent, cuckolded, laughed at in a pub and carrying a potato in his pocket, is Ulysses. Not like Ulysses. Is. Every ordinary person is the subject of an epic, and Europe had spent three thousand years insisting otherwise.

That is worth saying. But it takes one sentence, and Okan has already written it. It does not take a document.

DICK. And the correspondences we would be mapping come from the schemas. We would be building a table out of a key that contradicts itself. At least build the key first.

ATWOOD. I note that the Homeric frame is the reason Molly is discussed as Penelope rather than as a thirty-three-year-old soprano with no money of her own.

GALEANO. Enough. It is a bibliography of resemblances.

PLATH. Do it last, if at all. Nothing in it will make anyone feel the book.

ROUND 3 — The vote

Each master casts one primary (3), one second (2), and one veto (−2). Vetoes are binding on the score and are the point of the exercise.

Master Primary (3) Second (2) Veto (−2)
Vian Songbook Eighteen Styles Homeric Concordance
Cortázar Object Museum Homeric — failures only The Ledger
Saramago The Ledger Governed City The Apparatus
Dick The Apparatus Object Museum Eighteen Styles
Atwood Women's Dublin The Ledger Songbook
Plath Body's Accounts Women's Dublin The Apparatus
Galeano Governed City The Dead The Apparatus
Pamuk Object Museum Women's Dublin Homeric Concordance

The ranked field

# Dimension Score What it is
1 The Object Museum 8 ~30 objects tracked hour by hour, hand to hand: the soap, the potato, the throwaway, the key, the ashplant, the potted meat, the card in the hatband
2 The Women's Dublin 7 The fifteen-plus female characters, each given three columns — income, mobility, interiority — and the question of why one gets a monologue and the rest get surfaces
3 The Governed City 5 The apparatus of rule entered through detail: Castle, police, barracks, informers, the language question, who salutes the viceroy and who does not
4 The Ledger 3 Every transaction in the day — wages, debts, prices, rounds bought, coins thrown — and what the city charges for dignity
5 The Body's Accounts 3 Everything entering and leaving a body in nineteen hours: food, drink, urine, faeces, semen, blood, milk, breath, a birth, a corpse
6 The Dead 2 A census of the deceased and the mode of each return — memory, rumour, newspaper, vision, corpse. The book has more dead than living
7 The Songbook 1 Every song, aria, ballad and hymn; who sings it, the actual words, and what they do against the scene
8 The Eighteen Styles 0 Each episode's technique, what it costs the reader, and the prose-history sequence of Oxen
9 The Homeric Concordance −2 Odyssey → Ulysses, book by book. Two vetoes. Survives only in Cortázar's inverted form: map the failures
10 The Apparatus −3 Linati vs Gilbert, where the schemas contradict, and the book with the grid switched off. Dick's primary and the panel's most-hated item

Ties. The Ledger and the Body's Accounts are level at 3 by different routes — the Ledger drew broad support and one veto; the Body drew narrow, intense support and no opposition at all. It is the only dimension in the field nobody voted against.

Withdrawn with dignity. The Multilingual City (Irish, Latin, Hebrew, Italian, Hungarian — who speaks what to whom) and Parallax (the book's own word for seeing the same thing from two positions) were raised and folded into other candidates rather than put to the vote. Both are live if Okan wants them.

Standouts preserved

Saramago closes

The panel has voted for objects, which are things you can hold, and against schemas, which are things somebody told you.

But I notice what happened in the second round and I do not think anyone else did. Asked what was missing, four of us named a person who is absent from the maps — the women, the poor, the body, the dead — and only one of us named a thing. Then we voted for the thing.

So here is the question the project has not answered.

The three documents so far are about a book. The object, the map, the clock — they describe Ulysses. Not one of them describes what happened to the man who read it, in ten days in July, between one working life and the next. There is a document in that too, and it is the only one nobody else could write.

Which is the analysis, and which is the alibi?

Session closed. Nothing here is binding. The author ratifies.