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.