Joyce’s Reader

This chapter tracks how the form and content of Ulysses demands we move through and beyond the text. Bringing together many aspects of earlier chapters, it begins with one sentence of ‘Calypso’ – before developing a questioning of how authority functions within the role of the author, reader, and critic, and how the intertextuality and styles of Ulysses provoke such questions. Looking at how we read Ulysses and, by focusing then on the narrative of ‘Wandering Rocks’, the effects of the novel’s ‘difficulties’, this chapter asks what we mean by and what we can do with a Barthesian dead author, a deified genius author, and our own authority as readers of texts. It thus brings readings of Ulysses to bear upon readings of how authority is formed in Joycean criticism, playfully testing a tenuous comparative reading of Ulysses with Stella Gibbons’ 1932 novel Cold Comfort Farm and Tom Stoppard’s 1993 play Arcadia: how do we authorise such a link? This chapter shows how a freedom of author-less reading and a god-like genius author co-exist within the text we create while reading Ulysses – and how we might derive authority from this fecund instability.