Introduction: Why Ulysses Resists Order
Ulysses is not organised as a linear accumulation of meaning. It is organised as a system of episodes whose internal logics do not commute. The order in which perspectives are taken matters. No traversal yields a final synthesis. Meaning is generated locally and perspectivally, not globally or hierarchically.
This is not a flaw. It is the point.
1. Episodes as Local Rule-Systems
Each episode of Ulysses operates under a distinct regime:
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stylistic constraints
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grammatical transformations
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genre conventions
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mythic overlays
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perceptual filters
These regimes are not decorative. They are constitutive. They determine what counts as:
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an event,
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a thought,
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a character,
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a relation.
Crucially, the episode does not represent a stable underlying reality differently. It actualises a different reality, perspectivally cut according to its own constraints.
In relational terms: each episode is a coherent instance drawn from a shared potential — but there is no privileged instance that governs the rest.
2. Non-Commutativity Explained (Without Formalism)
To say the episodes “do not commute” is simply to say this:
reading Episode A and then Episode B is not equivalent to reading Episode B and then Episode A.
Not psychologically. Ontologically.
Each episode:
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reconfigures what counts as salient,
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alters the relational field,
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conditions how subsequent episodes can be construed.
No episode is neutral. Each one reconditions the system for what follows — without integrating cleanly with what came before.
This is why Ulysses resists summary. The system does not converge.
3. Why the Homeric Schema Doesn’t Close the System
The Homeric parallels are often treated as a unifying key. They are not.
They function as:
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an additional constraint layer,
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another perspectival cut,
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one more organising fiction among many.
They do not restore commutativity. They intensify non-commutativity by overlaying mythic structure onto already divergent local regimes.
The result is not synthesis, but productive interference.
4. Characters as Perspectival Functions
Leopold Bloom, Stephen Dedalus, and Molly Bloom are often treated as continuous entities. But across episodes, their ontological status shifts:
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Bloom is at times an interior consciousness, at times an object in others’ perception, at times a symbolic operator.
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Stephen oscillates between philosophical voice, parodic construct, and mythic placeholder.
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Molly’s monologue is not a “culmination” but a radical reconfiguration of what counts as language and thought.
They persist not as stable identities, but as relational trajectories across incompatible construal regimes.
Identity, here, is not a substance. It is a pattern across non-commuting cuts.
5. Meaning as Traversal, Not Possession
Because the episodes do not commute:
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there is no final interpretive position,
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no meta-episode that explains the rest,
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no “correct” synthesis.
Meaning in Ulysses emerges through traversal:
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by moving through episodes,
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by tolerating incompatibility,
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by resisting premature closure.
The reader is not assembling a puzzle. The reader is inhabiting a system whose openness is constitutive.
6. Why Ulysses Is Not Difficult — But Demanding
Ulysses is often described as difficult. A more precise description would be: ethically demanding.
It demands that the reader:
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relinquish the expectation of totality,
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accept perspectival authority without dominance,
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endure incoherence without collapse.
In return, it offers something rarer:
an experience of meaning that remains alive because it never finalises itself.
Conclusion: Ulysses as Ontological Training
Seen through this lens, Ulysses is not an extreme novel; it is a clarifying one.
It makes explicit what is often hidden:
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that meaning is perspectival,
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that coherence is local,
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that closure is optional — and often dishonest.
To read it well is not to master it, but to move with it — episode by episode, cut by cut — knowing that the order matters, and that no final turn of the kaleidoscope will be the last.
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