Ulysses by Numbers, by Eric Bulson

BY

NUMBERS

ERIC BULSON

1ntroduction Ulysses by Numbers

All is from Number. Number is the source of all things. —Ezra Pound, Guide to Kulchur

I

Numbers are all over Ulysses: on the inside, the outside, and everywhere in between.1 They appear as roman or arabic numerals; they are spelled out as words; or they are quantities that can be added, subtracted, multiplied, or divided. You can hear the numbers in the rhythm of certain lines, see them in the patterns generated by recurring words or phrases, and feel them in the bulkiness of the book itself.2 Choosing to take notice of these numbers, whatever their frequency, form, or feeling, does not mean that you’re letting yourself get distracted from what really counts. To the contrary: numbers are not just another set of convenient correspondences scattered across the pages of Ulysses. Numbers are Ulysses. They structure, organize, and give this novel shape; they set the pace of the plot and regulate the rhythm of the city, the movement of its inhabitants, and the size of the crowd; they organize our experience with lines, paragraphs, and pages, as well as the cast of characters and the passage of seconds, minutes, and hours. So crucial are numbers to Ulysses that this novel is unthinkable without them.

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Yes, unthinkable. Readers, of course, want the words when they pick up a copy, and who can blame them? But consider the simple fact that Joyce needed numbers to write Ulysses. More than an assemblage of carefully curated words, his novel is also an elaborate structure, and the process of transforming a narrative about a single day in Dublin into an object that could be distributed to others involved coming up with ways to organize all that material into paragraphs, pages, and episodes with hundreds of characters circulating in between. Readers have tended to avoid the numbers because the critical tradition treats them only as empirical facts or mystical symbols. The truth is in between: the numbers are both/and, empirical and mystical, and scrutinizing the friction that exists between these interpretations is, you might say, a way to ground numerical intuition and reenchant quantitative thinking.

In the numbers there is a productive tension between part and whole, particular and the general, detail and totality, and it was something Joyce needed to bring the disparate elements of his modern epic together. The same is true for readers if they have any interest in accessing the novel’s genetic code. By getting the sequences identified, we come to learn about the structure and design of Ulysses; but, more importantly, we come to discover how much the qualitative experience has a quantitative dimension.

You probably never thought too hard about how many characters or words there are in an episode, but computational reading asks you to consider the many aspects of Ulysses so easily missed: Why does Stephen Dedalus think in blocks of sixty paragraphs when he’s walking down Sandymount Strand? Why does the average length of episodes spike with the sixth one and then double with those that follow? When exactly did the writing happen? Exact numbers can be generated for all of these questions, but they are not the answer—at least not entirely. They turn our attention back to the pages of the novel, asking us to consider, in turn, how creation has a computational component. All works of art have to begin and end somewhere, and it’s not just the assembly of the various parts that makes them come to life for the author: it is the act of reading.

Reading by numbers is not a practice that many literary critics take too seriously. And it probably doesn’t help that the phrase evokes memories of the mass-marketed painting kits, which began appearing in the 1950s—the founder, Dan Robbins, capitalizing on an idea he claimed

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to have borrowed from Leonardo Da Vinci. The first official patent for painting by numbers dates back to 1923, a year after Ulysses appeared, and it describes a process of using an outlined image with a numerically organized color scheme that could be filled in by any aspiring artist.3 “Every Man a Rembrandt,� was the slogan. With Ulysses, that canvas is already filled in with words, but to take the analogy one step further, the outline, or form, is still there in, around, and behind them. With his eighteen episodes, each one lasting one hour or thereabouts, over the course of a single day, Joyce was writing by numbers to keep all the parts together, but he also encouraged friends and admirers to read by them precisely so they could follow along. Every Man a Joyce, it seems, for those who are keen to know how he pulled it off.

What follows is an attempt to use numbers as a primary means for interpretation and is focused on three things: Ulysses as a novel, computation as a method, and close reading as a critical practice. Most of us would feel comfortable identifying what Ulysses is and what it’s about, but complications would arise and divisions ensue once we tried to explain just what it is and how it developed over time. There are lots of answers out there already, but instead of providing one more biographical, historical, social, psychological, linguistic, or genetic spin, using the content of the words or their variation as a starting point, I treat this novel as a quantifiable object that can be measured, and I do so precisely so that we can address a whole range of related questions involving its scope, scale, size, design, and proportion. Some of the numbers were put there deliberately, the result of individual choices and practical material constraints, but so many others are there, if not by always by chance, then certainly by preconscious forces that are not attributable to a single will, the rules of genre, or the conditions of literary production or reception.

But if the numbers are, indeed, there, we still need to locate them.

Computation is not something that most literary critics find particularly valuable and, if anything, there is widespread suspicion that a borrowed method, more at home in the physical and natural sciences, is anathema to the close reading of literary works and the careful elaboration of their historical, social, and cultural contexts. This perspective, though certainly understandable given the complex formation of the disciplines over the centuries, is becoming increasingly strained both because of technological discoveries shaping the digitization, storage, transmission, and search of

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literary texts but also because of the wider availability and potential affordances of computational tools and resources used for text analysis, data mining, network analysis, mapping, and timelines.

Right now the divide between the computational and noncomputational is clear: you do it or you don’t. It is a fraught relationship, the antagonisms increased by anxiety about the future of the discipline. It can seem cataclysmic at times; the history of criticism has been filled with such conflicts, though under different names and as a result of specific historical pressures. The difference now is that there have never been tools powerful enough to make that exploration of quantitative questions about literature as expansive or accessible. A century ago, all of the computation was done by hand, sometimes taking years to collect the data and perform calculations, but now it is not only more efficient than ever but also there are tools that facilitate the visualization so critical to the analysis.

I am by no means recommending we read all literary texts by numbers.

I am suggesting, however, that we continue to think about this computational turn less as an ominous threat to the very foundations of literary criticism, something that will destroy the integrity of all humanistic endeavors, and more as an opportunity to reflect on what it can do to the way we engage with the texts we already love. Numbers certainly won’t kill the reading experience, and, following Thomas Kuhn, it’s worth pointing out that they don’t actually mean anything on their own: interpretation and context count in the analysis.4 That’s obvious: just counting the number of coffee cups in your cabinet or books on your shelf does not actually make them mean anything. It’s only when you figure out what question guides the interpretation of the number that you might actually arrive at a productive place for thinking about what your coffee cups or books say about where they are, who they are for, what they are made of, and why you might have so many or so few.

It’s no different with Ulysses. Once you begin to see the numbers, then you are in a position to consider how it is a work of art, something made by a human being at a moment in history that continues to recede into the past. We’ll never get back to 1922, but by taking the measurements now, we are able to assemble a set of facts about its dimensions that can then be used to consider the singularity of Ulysses and help explain how it ended up one way and not another. Which brings me to the close reading. This critical activity has a long and varied past, at least a century old, and one

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that has seen, in more recent decades, the rise of competing methods that are keen to question and perhaps upend its dominance. The truth is that close reading is here to stay, and, if anything, the so-called distant, surface, and postcritical approaches will only serve a supplemental role in the discipline. But if our desire for closeness with the words of literary texts remains stable, we do not have to imagine that encounter between reader and word in the same way. Close reading might be more or less the same in theory, but in practice, other media are helping transform what and how literary works are being read. To read closely with numbers, using computational tools and digital formats, enhances the interpretation since it begins with and works through basic facts. Of course, none of it will matter much if the motivation for collection and interpretation is not subordinated to a bigger idea, working for and against the various theories already in circulation but also with the goal of determining what new ones can be considered and, whenever possible, proven or discredited.

Which raises a few pointed questions: Is computation really so diametrically opposed to close reading? Is it a method that only takes us further away from the thingness of the literary object, stripping it away from any historical context or aesthetic essence? Indeed, these are big questions deserving of much more space than I can devote to them here.

But for now, I raise them to make a point that I will develop throughout this book: computation is already close reading; close reading is already computational. Whatever individual readers choose to focus on when they read closely, it is a process that involves identifying the small details, assembling the presence of patterns whenever possible, and then addressing their significance to the work as a whole. Close readers might not calculate an exact number for the quantity of details they assemble, but in their approach lies the tacit acknowledgment that they are countable: computation becomes a precondition for closeness.

One year before the publication of I. A. Richards’s Principles of Literary Criticism, a book largely responsible for codifying close reading as a disciplinary practice, T. S. Eliot had this to say: “Comparison and analysis . . . are the chief tools of the critic. It is obvious indeed that they are tools, to be handled with care, and not employed into an enquiry into the number of times giraffes appeared in the English novel. They are not used with conspicuous success by many contemporary writers. You must know what to compare and what to analyse.”5 What Eliot sees at this moment is the

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danger of imagining close reading only as computation. Though counting giraffes in a novel might sound frivolous enough when done for its own sake, he does not dismiss the possibility that facts, numerical and otherwise, can be useful for literary interpretation. The number of giraffes can provide a starting point for analysis and comparison of the text, and in this way, Eliot, like Kuhn with his history of measurement in the physical sciences, emphasizes that computation needs context, and it is the act of close reading that brings the disparate facts to bear on much larger questions about how the universe and the book as universe work.

II

A novel and its numbers: a novel as its numbers. And why not, if, as Pound puts it, “number is the source of all things.” It was the Pythagoreans who first started suggesting that an elaborate system of numerical resemblances exist between nature and the cosmos. The Pythagoreans believed that numbers not only possessed attributes (reason, opinion, harmony, and justice) but also, Aristotle writes, “since it seemed clear that all other things have their whole nature modelled upon numbers, and that numbers are the ultimate things in the whole physical universe, they assumed the elements of numbers to be the elements of everything, and the whole universe to be a proportion or number.”6 A lot happens to get numbers from the cosmos of the fifth century BCE to the computer of the mid-twentieth CE, but the basic idea that a number is something to be seen, heard, and read remains to this day. And that’s just one part of the equation. We also need to remember that at one point in human history, numbers were only spoken words; the rhythm of a nursery rhyme an example of the unity between the two (Eenie meenie minie mo; One two, buckle my shoe; and so on). For Friedrich Kittler, the complete separation of number and numeral occurred with writing, and it remained that way until Alan Turing imagined a universal computing machine that could process an infinite set of coded instructions made of ones and zeroes.7 The novel is not a computer built to generate calculations or solve complex equations. It is a precoded machine, part of a much more expansive “media history of numbers,” as Kittler once called it, that can help us

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understand how literature can be computable and cosmic, practical and mystical, lettered and numbered all at once.8 Though filled with words, novels also carry numbers (sometimes in the form of letters), and no matter how elaborate or incomplete the fictional worlds inside them, these numbers are there behind the arrangement. Stuart Gilbert was the first reader to apply this idea to Ulysses. In his 1930 study, he treated the novel as a sequence of thematic variables that could be put into an equation to help decode “the structure of the book as a whole.” “Ulysses is like that of all epic narratives, episodic,” he explains on the first page. “There are three main divisions, subdivided into chapters or, rather, episodes.” The meaning contained within these subdivided episodes, he continues, is “implicit in the techniques . . . in nuances of language, in the thousand and one correspondences and allusions with which the book is studded.”9 As much as Gilbert’s numbering here and elsewhere included passing statements about the structure, the network of allusions, and events and timeframes of the plot (“Mr. Bloom’s day begins, like Stephen’s, at 8 a.m., when he is preparing his wife’s morning tea at their house, No. 7, Eccles Street”), all of it was backed up by a schema that Joyce passed on to him, one identifying the Homeric title and character but also the hour, organ of the body, art, color, symbol, and narrative technic.10 For John Kidd fifty years later, this schema was evidence enough that a more elaborate numerical pattern lay in waiting. In his preface to an abandoned Dublin edition from the 1990s, he wrote: “It should surprise no one that Joyce, who assigned a reigning color and organ of the body to each chapter of Ulysses, and constructed a huge scaffolding of Homeric correspondences, would count letters, words, sentences, paragraphs, and pages.”11 Kidd never ended up publishing the results of his theory, and his plan to recuperate the original layout was abandoned. But if Gilbert’s publication of that schema made it impossible for readers to ignore the extent of Homer’s presence after the 1930s, the reverse was happening to the numbers since each resetting of the novel, beginning with the fourth impression in 1926, effectively erased any patterns encoded in the lines, pages, and paragraphs of the original.12 Facsimile editions are now widely available in print and digital formats, but that impulse to go a-counting has not gained traction in the meantime.

The practice of reading Ulysses by numbers that was recommended by Gilbert, promised by Kidd, and mastered by Hugh Kenner is not new of

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course. Numbers have long played a role in the production and reception of literary works and have been part of a numerological tradition prizing their allegorical and symbolic value for millennia.13 Take Dante’s intense admiration for nine as one powerful example. Looking back on the meaning of events in his life, as he does in Vita Nuova, he discovers the number everywhere. He is nine years old when first setting eyes upon the nineyear-old Beatrice, his intercessor, and though Florence is a small town, he only sees her again nine years later, long enough to change the direction of his life, before she dies on the “ninth day of the month.”14 According to Dante, the nine heavens counted by Ptolemy were in perfect alignment on the day of her earthly birth making her a miracle. And here is his proof: “the number three is the root of nine, for without any other number, multiplied by itself it gives nine, as we plainly see that three times three is nine.

Therefore, if three is the sole factor of nine and the sole factor of miracles is three, that is, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, who are three in One, then this lady is accompanied by the number nine so that it may be understood that she was a nine, or a miracle, whose root, namely of the miracle, is the miraculous Trinity itself.”

Dismiss it, call it nonsense, refuse to buy into the logic, and still, for Dante, this number is a fact, not just a figure: Beatrice, the embodied number, nine, is a miracle.15 Literary history is filled with all kinds of numerological puzzles, some more elaborate than others, and they can be found in works by Homer, Catullus, Vergil, Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, and Pope.16 R. G. Peterson, in fact, has identified four distinct phases in the history of literary numerology—Alexandrians (ancient world), Aristotelians and Thomists (Middle Ages), Platonists and Pythagoreans (Renaissance), and Palladians (eighteenth century)17—but he acknowledges, as do several others, that there was a rapid decline at the end of the eighteenth century, inspired by a rationalism and empiricism suspicious of the mystical charge numbers can carry. But if listeners and readers have been trained at different moments over the millennia to recognize the presence of numbers in different literary works, it was not a skill that carried over into the discipline of literary criticism until the middle decades of the twentieth century when numerological criticism was in its heyday and led to the uncovering of a wide range of symmetrical constructions with the critics Alastair Fowler, A. Kent Hieatt, and Marie-Sofie Røstvig leading

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the charge.18 Not only did they take the numbers seriously, but their intensely close readings of some major, mostly English poets, revealed that it was irresponsible to ignore them any longer. The motivation to write by numbers may change over time, along with the audience’s ability to decode them, but R. G. Peterson is right to suggest that the literary use of measurement and the desire for symmetry is bound up with “deep human feelings about number, centers, circles, and limits—from the writer, like the early Greek philosopher, responding to the immediate circumstances of nature.”19 In the 1960s, at a moment when numerologically minded critics were searching for symmetry, others were looking ahead to a future of machine-assisted reading. This newly emerging field of so-called humanities computing was planning to use computers to uncover patterns, symmetries, structures, and correspondences of several works at once. A few attempts were made to apply computers to the study of style, but the most successful results were confined to the compilation of concordances and word lists. Computers, in other words, were saving time through their capacity to compute, but they were not going to revolutionize the interpretation of literature or modify anyone’s perspective on literary history.

Fast forward to the early 2000s and Franco Moretti’s ambitious call for distant reading. By that time, humanities computing had already begun to evolve into a mode of computational criticism interested in conducting quantitative experiments on corpora that contained thousands of works with the goal of going even bigger. Operationalizing was fast becoming a new keyword for quantitative literary analysis, and it described the process by which concepts could be transformed into a series of operations that allow us to measure objects.20 To know the concept required having the measurement to test it, and it could involve the sentence or paragraph but also work across genres and archives.

Living in a quant-obsessed computer age, it’s tempting to think that numerology belongs somewhere in the cabinet of literary-critical curiosities: fun to show off now and again but nothing to take too seriously.

And it’s no surprise to discover that the Digital Humanities community pretends it never existed. That is a mistake because it would require ignoring a legitimate practice in a shared literary critical history and also one that we need nowadays to remind us that numbers have a qualitative

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dimension. To confront a number and to decipher what it means is not, strictly speaking, a quantitative exercise. There are values, some of them empirical, but history has taught us that they can have a mystical or aesthetic connotation.

Yet instead of seeing these two critical traditions as somehow opposed to each other, it can be more productive to consider what they share. For starters, numbers. Numerology is, in effect, a mode of computational reading adapted from a much earlier tradition of biblical exegesis that not only recodes words, lines, pages, and paragraphs as discrete and sequential units but also involves counting them to discover sequences, ordinal and cardinal positions, and sums. In addition, the numerological approach believes that the meaning of a text cannot be found only in what the words or the structures that contain them say. The numbers, both alone and together, can speak. The possibility of a message hidden within them requires that someone is there who can identify, decode, and interpret.

That same impulse drives computational literary analysis (CLA). In the most basic terms, CLA counts literary texts. The major difference involves the fact that these texts are digitized, which means they can be coded by an extensible markup language (XML) and fed into different processing programs. Like numerology, CLA believes literary works are not made of words alone or, to put it another way, that the words in literature mean more than they say. And whether analyzing syntax, genre, style, or narrators, a computational approach treats literature as data for all kinds of formal and statistical analysis. I am not arguing here about the validity of numerology, and I have no interest in trying to convince anyone that CLA is really numerology in a digital age. Rather, I want to reorient how we understand the relationship between the two precisely because Ulysses is a novel that holds them both in suspension—the symbolic and the empirical, the qualitative and the quantitative, the abstract and the concrete, the mystical and the rational. The numbers of Ulysses are never just numerological or computational: they are both. And that is precisely the reason that the numerological and the computational can inform each other whenever reading by numbers is at stake.

Take “number 7 Eccles Street” by way of an example.21 It’s the address of Leopold and Molly Bloom, but does that exact number really matter? What if it were 6, 14, or, why not, 9? For the numerologist, that

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number 7 might correspond with the days of creation and rest, but so what? How far does this connection take us in our interpretation of a fictional day in Dublin? A computational reading, on the other hand, would instead see that seven as a quantitative fact. Molly and Leopold live in the seventh unit located on Eccles Street, a real street in Dublin.

And that’s of potential interest for someone interested in the historical or topographical dimension of the novel, who might want to know that there was actually a 7 on that street in June 1904. But why argue over the validity of one or the other when they’re both correct? Seven is a number in a novel, and it can have a qualitative and quantitative dimension.

So even if it is charged with symbolic meaning, this digit also serves a quantitative function that contributes to the realism.

Ulysses may seem like a strange choice for anyone going in search of numbers. For one thing, it is a modernist novel, which means it belongs to an ironic moment in literary history that largely lacked any patience for sacred correspondences even if they came from an author who had renounced Catholicism but whose numerical sensibility kept his appreciation for its rituals and symbols. But Ulysses is also a novel, belonging to a genre without a particularly strong numerological tradition. A lack of rigorous rules for formal composition may be one reason, but Alastair Fowler has argued that prose is also to blame since it teaches readers “to move relatively quickly along the semantic line.”22 If readers of verse are conditioned to meditate on words and lines in search of mathematical patterns, novel readers can be found speeding along into nothingness. Perhaps that’s a fitting end, given György Lukács’s definition of the novel as the “epic of a world that has been abandoned by God.” But if God is absent from Ulysses, critics such as Ernst Robert Curtius have claimed that number has a “form-bestowing factor in the divine work of creation” making Dante’s Commedia an obvious precursor, with Kidd arguing that the “numeric patterns” make Ulysses as “consummately ordered” as Spenser and Dante.23 All of this numerical ordering makes Ulysses seem like a literary relic from a bygone age. Some of his contemporaries may have been steeped in the mysticism of Eastern religions, but Joyce builds primarily on Greek, Christian, and Hebrew models with a specific literary lineage. Dante’s influence looms large, but that’s also part of an intertextual strategy for advertising his own oversized ambition. To write by numbers by 1922 was one way to insert yourself into an established tradition. Numbers, then,

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were not simply ornaments or offhand allusions. They could be adapted to set the foundation for a fictional work and insert the novelist into a preexisting literary-historical chronology.

III

“A man can learn more music by working on a Bach fugue until he can take it apart and put it together, than by playing through ten dozen heterogeneous albums.”24 That was Pound’s recommendation, and it served as a warning to others that vast reading does not automatically lead one to knowledge. You first have to decide which examples to choose and how best to read what’s already available.25 Here’s the reason for my choice: Ulysses is a “morphological nightmare” (Franco Moretti) and a “memorable catastrophe” (Virginia Woolf ) in the history of the novel.26 Nothing quite like it existed before 1922, and its arrival in the world marked both a beginning and an end in literary history. So radical were Joyce’s experiments with language, literary form, character, and narration that it forced generations of readers, writers, and critics to wonder not only what literature can be but also what it may end up becoming.

But can these numbers from Ulysses, and Ulysses alone, really teach us anything if we don’t also draw comparisons from a more expansive sample? Such a reduction in scale may be a way to learn about one nightmarish novel in literary history, but it is not how things tend to get done in quantitative fields in the natural and social sciences or in an emerging humanist one that includes CLA.27 Working with a variety of computational tools, CLA emphasizes that big data can be drawn from corpora (often digitized and available in online archives) and then run through different statistical models before the empirical results can be visualized and interpreted.

Reading at such a scale is done in the hopes of trying to answer some of the foundational questions in the field of literary criticism (What is a poem?

Who reads novels? What is the life cycle of genres?), and any data point in the sample is meaningful insofar as it fits within the clearly defined parameters of the specific quantitative measurement whether it involves a search for hidden haikus, the number of topics per paragraph, gender imbalances, or the semantic uniformity of characters.28

Ulysses has been read obsessively for a century. What if instead of focusing on the words to understand the structure, design, and history of Joyce’s masterpiece, we turn our attention to the numbers? Taking a computational approach, Ulysses by Numbers lets us see the novel’s basic building blocks in a significantly new light and demonstrates how reading by numbers helps us rediscover a novel we thought we already knew.

“Numbers in literature often have magical or secret meanings, but this remarkable book also shows us other, quite startling modes of literary counting, giving us the pleasure we find only in the best critical readings: we are surprised and we wonder what to do with our surprise.”

—MICHAEL WOOD, author of Literature and the Taste of Knowledge “Ulysses by Numbers is a winningly idiosyncratic piece of literary criticism. Eric Bulson has delivered a timely, restlessly inventive book that challenges the increasingly hostile polarization within literary studies about the use of quantitative evidence. It is a provocative call for and demonstration of a delirious, even enchanted kind of quantitative reading.”

—NICHOLAS DAMES, author of The Physiology of the Novel: Reading, Neural Science, and the Form of Victorian Fiction “Ulysses by Numbers is an intricate, dazzling account of how numbers mattered to Joyce. Written with engaging lucidity and wit, this highly original book explores the numerical unconsciousness of Ulysses through close analyses of style, characters, word counts, readerships, and compositional history. Bulson’s work is a permanent contribution to Joyce studies and essential reading both for Joyceans and for modernists more broadly.”

—KATHERINE MULLIN, author of James Joyce, Sexuality, and Social Purity ERIC BULSON is Andrew W. Mellon All-Claremont Chair in the Humanities at Claremont Graduate University. He is the author of Little Magazine, World Form (Columbia, 2016); Novels, Maps, Modernity: The Spatial Imagination, 1850–2000 (2007); and The Cambridge Introduction to James Joyce (2006).

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