"Ulysses" By Numbers by Eric Bulson (review)

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Reviewed by:

• "Ulysses" By Numbers by Eric Bulson
• William S. Brockman (bio)

"ULYSSES" BY NUMBERS, by Eric Bulson. New York: Columbia University Press, 2020. xx + 273 pp. $110.00 cloth.

If you thought you had Joyce's number, you should reconsider. "Ulysses" by Numbers is a quantitative exploration: "Counting Ulysses is a way to read it" (33). Eric Bulson asserts that computation is not the only way, but an opportunity, a perspective, a means of applying quantitative measures to the text, to the paratext, to the physical book, to the sales records, in order to tease out historical and critical insights. What he sometimes refers to as a "computational" approach is distinct from distant reading and its aggregation of texts and characteristics. Computation and close reading are not opposed, he argues; rather, "computation is already close reading" (8); the book sets out to eke out numbers to be found both in and external to the text.

Chapters lead off by posing questions with seemingly obvious answers that lead into quantitative examinations. The question of "[w]ho wrote Ulysses?" (39) leads from a brief survey of computer-assisted style analyses that might be applied to the book to devoting further (and more fruitful) attention to the paragraphs of Ulysses. Bulson's simple count of paragraphs per episode fails to establish much, but the quantitative approach makes more sense when applied to the progressive stages of the English language as represented in "Oxen of the Sun." His scrutiny of the widely variable characteristics of Joyce's paragraphs and the question of how to define a Ulysses paragraph is unique and insightful. Bulson notes that Joyce's substantial revisions to the text through the proof stages of the publishing process rarely involved changes to or additions of paragraphs: the paragraph was a critical structural unit throughout the compositional stages of Ulysses. Paragraphs, especially the longer ones, are structural elements of time in Ulysses: "the longer paragraph functions more like a pocket of time, a place in which the seconds and minutes can expand or slow down" (59). Here, as in many other parts of the book, Bulson is at his best when he uses the quantification of Ulysses as a springboard to dive into qualitative aspects of the book.

"Why is Joyce's Ulysses as long as it is?" leads to a proliferation of word counts that examines the initial constraints put on the earlier episodes as Joyce was composing contributions to the Little Review (68). This leads to an observation of the way in which the "Hades" episode enables the book to break away from a rough equivalent of word count and lapsed time: an extended section of text can take up [End Page 151] virtually no plot time. Counting different words and unique words within each episode shows the way in which the later episodes, particularly beginning with "Cyclops," were more expansive in their vocabulary.

"How many characters are there in Ulysses?" (101) begs the question of how one counts characters—speaking roles? mentions? allusions? With an illustration of Joyce's manuscript list of characters (a two-page document held at the British Library—102-03), one can see how this system begins to frazzle when one considers characters without active roles but who are only referred to. Bulson's proposed classification of four character levels, ranging from the three "major major" characters (Stephen, Leopold, and Molly) to "minor minor" characters (non-speaking unnamed entities appearing in only a single episode—109), helps to organize the masses. A diagrammatic representation of the "character network of all episodes of Ulysses" (111) attempts to cram onto two-thirds of a page a jungle of names and lines and dots, but the minute printing serves only to point out the function of the multitude of the book's characters in representing the fictional consciousness of the city. Bulson makes much of the 106 characters in "Wandering Rocks," wanting the number to have been one hundred, "God's number," (122) but intriguingly using this as a comparison of quantitative versus qualitative methods. While tabulating the number of characters in Ulysses, he notes that the interior monologue enabled not only "sense impressions and memories of fictional...