Ulysses by Numbers by Bulson Eric

Author:Bulson, Eric
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: LIT024050, Literary Criticism/Modern/20th Century, LIT006000, Literary Criticism/Semiotics & Theory
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2020-11-03T00:00:00+00:00

II

Joyce’s knowledge about the readers of Ulysses, both present and absent, was unique during these months. He knew who and where they were in a way he never would again. But that is one of the reasons why that final sign-off on the last page of his novel is so significant. In the most basic terms, he provided the coordinates of his own location during and after the composition of the novel. By doing so he had also, quite literally, provided an address to the reader, one that we can imagine as a response to the ones he kept finding on the subscription forms from those same individuals who promised to “pay on receipt of notice announcing that the volume has appeared.”41 And while it is an address that may be less shocking, say, than Jane Eyre’s (Reader, I married him!), it still provides a jarring exit from the fictional world set in Dublin some eighteen years earlier. Reader, I am here, in Paris, now! is the message inscribed on that last page, and it works precisely by asking each member of his audience to consider another question: And where are you? The answers will change as the generations do but never the question. This exchange between sender and receiver is part of the pact that all readers make with Ulysses. To arrive at the end of the novel means to confront where you are but always with the knowledge of where Ulysses once was.

Using the address notebooks and lists she first compiled in 1921, Beach was one of the first to try and reconstruct where it all happened. Her answer: “all over the globe.”42 First, there was the “list of Egoist readers” in England (probably including the 150 orders from Weaver’s abandoned first edition), followed by a “good many French subscribers” mostly in Paris. In addition, there were American subscribers, including the “Little Review crowd” (saving her “a great deal of postage by coming over to Paris and subscribing in person”) and last but not least were the more exotic ones from “far-off places like Sarawak, the Straits Settlements, China, Borneo, etc.” It’s no surprise to find the Egoist readers, French subscribers, and the Little Review crowd in the mix, but in Beach’s account the news about Ulysses spread far beyond her “little bookshop” and who knows, really, how many destinations that “etc.” covers.43

Looking back on it all from the distance of more than three decades, Beach remembers Ulysses as an instantaneous global success, a novel that conquered the world in one thousand copies almost as soon as it appeared. The problem with this version of events, however, is that it’s wildly untrue. Not just the timing, as I mentioned before, but also the spacing. Indeed, a majority of the copies arrived in France, England, and the United States (over the course of the next ten months), but if we follow the paper trail there were no subscribers from the “far-off places” of China, Borneo, Sarawak, and the Straits Settlements.

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